The Why is How
The letters arrived with regularity, usually in my Facebook “other” folder, generally from people I had never met or, had I met, felt nothing for. “How’d you start writing for VICE?” they asked. “I’ve always wanted to be a writer and I have a really great idea for an article about [something of little import that has already been expounded upon one metric fuck ton of times]. Can you connect me to your editor?”
How’d I start writing for VICE? I met a guy at a shitty open mic who eventually became an editor there and asked if I wanted to contribute. All the pornographic review websites I spent years freelancing for had shuttered, and I was tired of getting $30 a piece compiling listicles about “seriously epic celebrity photobombs” for children, so I said yes. I didn’t even particularly like writing for VICE, but it paid the bills when it eventually paid, usually three to six months after I invoiced.
“I can hardly help myself,” I wanted to tell these people. “How could I possibly help you?” Instead, I told them the way to be a writer was to, y’know, write, the same way being a plumber requires, y’know, plumbing. This answer rarely satisfied them, as they weren’t asking me how to write in general, they were asking me how to write for a corporation that had commodified cool and therefore extended a certain amount of “gonzo” cache to their contributors. Fixating on victory before you’ve even put your pawn on the playing field, though, is like pimping out the cart before you’ve broken in the horse. Even if you somehow win (and it’s doubtful you will, because the only skill you have is self delusion), the conquest will be capricious.
Because if you’re engaging in creativity for the wrong reasons, the resulting work will invariably reflect it. Ever notice how the musical output of people who clearly only got into rock n’ roll for free jeans or Spotify brand partnerships or to fuck biological children (or women who present as biological children) sucks infinitely harder than the output of those who picked up a guitar simply because it was the only outlet they had? It’s the same reason why content created by anyone who doesn’t need to produce it routinely sucks, be they born rich or view creation solely as a conduit to becoming rich.
Side Note: Just because you’re born wealthy doesn’t mean your output will invariably be awful; the punk as fuck work of Jessica Mitford is proof of this. If you’ve never read her, I highly recommend it — my friend Katie recently turned me onto her oeuvre and I was aghast it hadn’t come onto my radar by then. She’s biting, she’s petty, she’s anti-capitalistic because she’s the self-aware byproduct of old money and thus has nothing to lose in telling the truth. Her book “The American Way of Death Revisited” is a gift.
Side Note to the Side Note: While it makes complete sense that the progeny of inherited wealth would tell the truth, as they don’t have to engage in the terrified dance of peasants who have a great deal to monetarily lose in honesty, most do not. Most, actually, choose the opposite. This is because they have engaged in art for reasons independent of the creation thereof — in order to have autonomy over their family name, to prove they have independent worth, et al. They concoct crap, hire a PR firm to promote it, and reap dividends, transforming their old money into new. But, I ask them, do you not realize the entire reason you’re able to engage in unfettered creativity is because you can afford to fail? You can actually do good with money, you know (MacKenzie Bezos announcing that she gave away four billion dollars of her ex-husband’s fortune over four months via a Medium post is one of the greatest negs of all time — I bow down).
Yes, you don’t have to be poor to produce, but I think of the work that has affected me most and by and large it is the lamentations of those who have less: Henry Miller, early David Sedaris, Dorothy Parker, more recently Myriam Gurba and Halle Butler. If your resources are limited, the more your words have worth; if you possess nothing, you’ve nothing to lose. I understand that I may be in the minority. But I am nevertheless a devoted demo.
Your access to validated methods of composition dispersion, be they a book deal or a $0.02 per word contract with a corporation valued in the billions of dollars, is irrelevant. Ownership of a Moleskin does not make you a writer. If you need to create, you do so in spite of your limitations. A friend of mine, a musician, insists on figuring out how to make the shittiest presets on a shitty keyboard sound interesting because he can’t afford a Moog and likes a challenge. Lust for coveted gear is a constant in indie rock, propelling the sale of vintage synths to dudes who think sounding like DEVO will somehow make them DEVO. But DEVO scraped together the cash in the ‘70s to buy a Minimoog because, to them, it was the sound of devolution. They were mutants in fucking Ohio — cache was far from their minds, only necessity. Would you rather hear a venture capitalist shred on a $10,000 vintage Fender Stratocaster or an actual human being play in Drop D on a Squire?
The question isn’t what you want to write, but why you want to write. What makes your opinion, your experience, worth someone taking time out of their miserable, soul-crushing day to read it and feel less alone? That is, to me, the point of writing — making someone feel less alone.
That being said, telling your audience what you think they want to hear is a prison of your own making. You must only write what you feel has worth and birth it into a cruel and unforgiving world, the same world in which you were pushed out of your mom’s pussy (or, in my case, slashed from her abdomen).
If what you want to say is the extent to which you disagree with something someone else has said or done, know that you have entered a feedback loop. Reaction based writing, while prevalent in today’s clickbait-propelled media climate, reads like a fucking book report. And if your entire oeuvre is reaction based, what does that say about you personally? Your whole identity is predicated on your rejoinder to someone else’s work; as such, you’re no better than a rock critic (a terrifying proposition).
Which is not to say your work can’t act as a response to what you hate; just be obtuse about it. Obtuseness is timelessness, because history is cyclical. The same things that annoy people now will always annoy them, as everything anyone could possibly do has already been done before and original thought was last truly experienced by cave people.
The cliché is to write what you know, but that doesn’t inherently mean you have to write about yourself. Fall down rabbit holes, submerge yourself in subcultures and — god forbid — TALK to the kind of humans you want to write about. So much of modern fiction is penned by people who clearly have no functional knowledge of the misfits they’re inhabiting, in much the same way television shows about comedians always appear to be written by people who have only read about comedy and not actually experienced it.
And, now that we’re on the subject of TV, let me say this: TV writing is, above all else, a product, therefore I hesitate to call it art (one could even hesitate to call modern art art, as capitalism has rendered it mostly a trend-centric grift in which the the people with power aren’t the artists themselves but Boomer art dealers who wear eyeglasses with “challenging” shapes). People constantly declare that we are currently living in the “renaissance” of TV — just because there is more of something, however, does not a renaissance make. No one says we’re living in the “renaissance” of climate change or the “renaissance” of homelessness. TV has, simply, become the most producible and therefore prevalent form of moving content because there are more streaming platforms now than there were paying subscribers to Quibi.
In this environment, anyone with a modicum of literacy is expected to pen a pilot. But it’s not enough to write the pilot, you must also think of where it will go — the story arc, future episodes, etc. This is because it is the jumping off point to a collection of commodities and not an independent entity. The pressure of this can be so daunting it prevents you from even starting. But does anyone ever psych themselves out of writing a short story by finding it impossible to decide what the characters’ long term “motivation'' is? No, a short story exists as its own unit; the reader decides, if they've become invested enough in the tale, where they think the characters will go given the information you have handed them.
And besides, the likelihood of you selling your pilot is virtually nil; the only way to get a series is by writing on other peoples’. Your pilot is simply your calling card, a foot in the door. A friend of mine who was fortunate enough to get a sitcom deal once informed me that most scripts from potential staff writers he received were unreadable — just write something decent, he advised, something worthwhile, and your work will stand out. That being said, acknowledging your limitations is important. While writing is undoubtedly a skill, like lovemaking or taxidermy, some people simply can’t write in someone else’s voice, which is what TV writing requires.
Another friend recently asked for assistance in writing her first pilot (she, like me, is a comedian — when you are a comedian, writing at least one pilot is the law). Knowing her sensibility, I sent her one of Charlie Kaufman’s early, unproduced television scripts. Just because it was unproduced didn’t mean it was bad — in fact, it’s one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. (“Either very funny or completely insane” reads the handwritten note from a producer on the first page of the PDF.)
Kaufman, of course, is a man who realized he had to bow out of television writing because he was incapable of writing in a voice that was not his own. Nevertheless he still wrote, albeit on his own terms.
Because if you have something to say, and there is a legitimate reason to say it, there is someone who will listen to and appreciate it. Of this I am certain.