"...the mavens of Sloth..."

[Terrance]

it was due to a puritan deprecation of all fiction-making, all art, as
potentially impious if not blasphemous. god was the only maker. then
again,  the whole ethos of America served to stress the importance of
actual DOING -- pioneering, clearing, settling, building, inventing,
mastering. the vast  and growing new nation required men of action.
writers themselves often felt a deep ambivalence, if not actual guilt,
about writing. 

if pure fiction making is a sin, a deadly sin, what is left to the
writer to do? 
Be a  scrivener? 
A scrivener who refuses to do? 
A politics of silence or sloth?