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.”
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.
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.
ReplyDeleteAs 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.