Sunday, November 03, 2013

WRITER DIES OF EXPOSURE!

WRITER’S LIFEGUARD -  Jules Older writes from San Francisco:

WRITER DIES OF EXPOSURE!

Yep, that's your obit. That's how you're remembered. That's what they carved on your gravestone.

Well, not the last, because in the paupers’ graveyard where you've been unceremoniously dumped, graves don't have stones, much less epitaphs.

What “Writer dies of exposure!” signifies is that you've signed yet another contract, agreed to make one more speech, played one more gig or made one more film “for the exposure. We got no budget, but you'll get plenty of exposure.”

How many time you gonna fall for that?
  
Yes, I know we’re on one of my perennial subjects. I gave a short talk on it just last week in San Francisco. I offered it as a discourse on theology.

In the talk to a writer’s group, I said, “Conrad Black is a multi-millionaire press baron who swanned around London in his Rolls, took the company jet to Bora Bora for holidays, was worth an estimated $300 million, yet paid his writers shit. He went to jail for swindling his investors. Note: not his writers, his investors.”

Then, I asked the theological question: “Do I think Black is going to hell for mistreating his minions?”
My answer: “No. I think we’re going to hell for stealing money from our families to buy Connie another Rolls. Nobody, including Black, holds a gun to our head and says, ‘Sign or die.’
“But sign we do. And that's why we’re going to roast in the fiery furnace for all of eternity. You might bear that in mind before you sign that next crummy contract… I do.”
 So, having said my piece, I felt a bit more at peace, a little less perturbed… until Lifeguard Charlie Leocha sent me an article by Tim Kreider from the Sunday New York Times. Here's how it opens…
 NOT long ago, I received, in a single week, three (3) invitations to write an original piece for publication or give a prepared speech in exchange for no ($0.00) money. As with stinkbugs, it’s not any one instance of this request but their sheer number and relentlessness that make them so tiresome. It also makes composing a polite response a heroic exercise in restraint.

Kreider explains:

This is partly a side effect of our information economy, in which “paying for things” is a quaint, discredited old 20th-century custom, like calling people after having sex with them.
And he places writing for exposure in context:

I spent 20 years and wrote thousands of pages learning the trivial craft of putting sentences together. My parents blew tens of thousands of 1980s dollars on tuition at a prestigious institution to train me for this job. They also put my sister the pulmonologist through medical school, and as far as I know nobody ever asks her to perform a quick lobectomy — doesn’t have to be anything fancy, maybe just in her spare time, whatever she can do would be great — because it’ll help get her name out there.

Read it all — I urge you — here


And before you sign yet another contract “for the exposure,” remember this: On planet Earth, people die of exposure. In hell, they roast for it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What a grouch! Why am I neither impressed nor convinced by those who complain of the burdens of fame? If he can’t manage to turn his modest fame into money, he’s not trying hard enough. His real problem is that his ‘parents blew thousands of dollars at a prestigious institution to train him,’ when the entire craft of writing is contained between the covers of a small volume by Strunk & White. If he writes well at 40 I guarantee he wrote better than his contemporaries at 10. Because it’s a gift. And it’s one that is worth very little when not the recipient is not also cursed with a weird, disruptive and frequently embarrassing imagination.
As for money, well, ars causa artis. We do it because we have to, because we want to mean more than the sum of our respiratory residues. I would love my book to be a best seller but that part is so damn hard I am often tempted to just put it on the shelf as an inheritance for my kids and move on the next one. But only a fool would blame the world for not buying his wares. Damn it, it’s their money.