Of course, in many ordinary cases of professionalization, becoming more specialized wouldn't seem to be that much of a problem, spiritual or otherwise. Sure, you can't write a compelling memoir, but you'll have a prodigious near-miraculous backhand. In the case of the fiction-writer, however, becoming professionalized threatens to take you away from the lived experience of humanity whose careful observation is the very raw material you use to write fiction in the first place. Unfortunately, if you want to be an ambitious fiction-writer, the academy is one of the safer routes to continued survival, if not necessarily flourishing. You might find yourself in a sort of academic prison, yes, but as D. T. Max quotes Wallace telling Steven Moore, "The thing I like about my own prison... is I have tenure in my prison. "