"The Calling"

Between 1968 and 1970, I wrote a weekly column for a Toronto newspaper, penning columns on any topic that fluttered into my consciousness.  For the past coming-up-on six years, I have been writing a series of five-days-a-week blog posts on the same subject – whatever comes to my mind. 

It seems like I have come “full circle.”  A quibbling difference being that working on the newspaper, I was paid virtually nothing, and today I get nothing at all.  But that’s really just bookkeeping.  And an unfortunate allocation of rewards.

In between these identical undertakings, I wrote for television, where I was compensated so munificently over the years that when it was determined that I was no longer work-worthy, I had enough stashed away to negotiate the transition. 

I then – after a few years of brooding – returned, via the Internet, to my original activity – writing anything I wanted.

Which, as today’s post will argue, is my true and actual “Calling.”

I don’t know if you do this, but sometimes I look at people I know, and it occurs to me that they are in the wrong line of work.  They may not have missed by a lot.  If, for example, career tracks were laid out in a bowling alley, they could have chosen (or fallen into) “Lane Seven”, when, it seems to me, they’d have bowled substantially more successfully in “Lane Five.”  (That’s not a precise comparison, but it is my first “bowling alley” analogy, and, if I say so myself, it is not entirely off the mark.)

Considering one person of my acquaintance, with their encyclopedic knowledge of the entertainment industry, they might well have found more satisfaction, money and acclaim as a chronicler than they did as a participant in the entertainment industry itself.  (Although you would have to ask them if they’d have been comfortable the trade-off.) 

The distinction is minor – we are not talking “mine worker” versus “opera singer” – but I believe it’s significant.  The outcome, this thesis suggests, may have been more rewarding had they adhered to a métier more suitable to their natural proclivities.

I am thinking about this, because once in a while, while reading Ken Levine’s insightful blog about show business, I will find Ken waxing nostalgically about the foxhole camaraderie of the situation comedy “Rewrite Room.” 

When I read that, two thoughts come to mind: One, Ken was exactly in the right place for him.  And two,

I wasn’t.

It is not that I was entirely miscast for the role; this is more of a “Lane Seven” – “Lane Six” situation.  I was actually pretty close.  For which I am eminently grateful to whoever it was who provided me the opportunity.  (I am thinking here about God or some agnostic counterpart rather than Ed. Weinberger who gave me my first sitcom writing job.)

I did all right in television.  But while I was there, I experienced the gnawing anxiety that I was not exactly in the right place.

You know how Lou Grant hated spunk? 

I am not a big fan of camaraderie. 

(That was one of my bigger problems with camp.  I would have greatly preferred my own cabin.)

It is not human contact, per se, that I am discomfited by.  I am not Howie Mandel.  The real problem is working together as a team.

You’re in a room, your stated goal – to rewrite the script in a positive direction, and you are required to complete that task – be it easy or excruciatingly difficult – in that single evening (often extending well into the following A.M.), and you cannot go home until you do.

If I wrote that description correctly, you will now be feeling the same “butterflies” that I am currently experiencing myself.  They’re retroactive.  But they’re “butterflies.”

“Rewrite Night”, by its nature, is a collective undertaking.  Writers – sometimes up to a dozen of them – sit around a table, pitching “story fixes”, clarifications, cuts for time and funnier jokes.  The show runner is “The Decider” in this situation.  Though hopefully there’s a consensus, they have the last word on what makes it into the script.

But what if you don’t agree? 

You’re panning for gold.  You slosh away the sand and the sediment, and suddenly, there’s this sparkling nugget gleaming up from the effluvium.  You say to the prospector next to you, “Is this gold?” They say, “It sure is!”  Sometimes adding the words, “By crackie!” for emphasis.  (After which they knock you down and start panning where you were panning.)

Setting aside “Iron Pyrites” (known on The Lone Ranger and elsewhere as “Fool’s Gold”), gold is gold.  Precious metal ascertainment is not a matter of opinion.  There’s a standard concerning its assessment, triggering universal agreement.  There is no,

“I struck it rich!”

“No you didn’t.”

about it.  Either you struck it, or you didn’t.

Not so with comedy. 

Comedy, like ice cream, comes in various flavors.  Some, like the “Big Three” – chocolate, vanilla and strawberry – are considerably more popular.  As with the most popular ice cream flavors, a “Big Three” comedy pitch – a gratuitous sex joke, a joke at another character’s expense, a joke that, although funny, undercuts character or the integrity of the story – would invariably garner a big laugh in the “Rewrite Room”, guaranteeing its inclusion in the script. 

But what if your comedy is of the “Maple Walnut” variety?  Still an ice cream flavor – nobody’s pitching “bark” here, which is a tree covering, not an ice cream flavor – but it is barely in the “Top Ten.” 

What if you are blessed with a distinctly “Maple Walnut”-like mentality?  You think in an indisputably “Maple Walnutty” kind of way.  They “get” you, but they don’t exactly love you.  More importantly, you get them, but you are not at all convinced that “popular” equals “good.”

There is a disagreement about the pitch.  Suddenly, it’s not “camaraderie” anymore.  It’s “Maple Walnut” against the world!

If you take the thing personally.  Which, perhaps, I may have in those cases, a little too much.

The mature understanding is that the “Rewrite Room”, if judiciously assembled, includes numerous flavors, each making its own unique and valuable contribution.  A “fruit salad” of ice cream flavors, if you will allow me to mix naturally grown produce with something confected in a dairy.

Looking back, it appeared like I was expending enormous amounts of energy trying to convince others that “Maple Walnut” was, in reality, the “One True Flavor.”  (While subduing inner doubts that “Maple Walnut” belonged in the “Rewrite Room” at all.)  Fearing all the time they might agree with what I was concerned with in the foregoing parentheses and summarily dismiss me from the business.  (Which, though advancing years played a part in the process, they eventually did.)

In school, I was never graded highly on “Plays Well With Others.”  My real “Calling” is writing alone, where the “Final Word” is my own, and myself and the arbiter are rarely in dispute. 

It’s not a question that it’s easier.  It’s what I was actually meant to do.

When I made a big pest of myself on “Rewrite Night”?  It was not the other writers I was upset with.  I was upset about missing my “Calling.”

If only by one lane.

"It's Not Them, It's Me - Part Two"

There’s a “Part Two”?

I know, I’m a little surprised about that myself.  But there was something about yesterday’s post that felt naggingly incomplete.  Or, more precisely, not entirely honest, at least, from a “full disclosure” standpoint.  What I wrote was honest, as far as it went.  Unfortunately in hindsight, it went dissatisfyingly less far than it could have.

So on we go.

I mentioned yesterday my discomfort about making things up – otherwise known as fiction writing – because of an innate fear of getting caught.  (And subsequently punished.  Which was in brackets yesterday as well.)

To a person lumbered with a guilt-ridden, “Good Boy” mentality, “making stuff up” feels like a precarious First Cousin to lying.  And guilt-ridden “Good Boys” never lie.  (And when we do, we feel terrible about it.)  Therefore, equating fiction writing with lying – you don’t lie, and you don’t write fiction.

But that’s only part of the story.

It is my opinion that, as capable and professional of a writer as I am, I would nonetheless have a divil of a time making the fiction I wrote hit with the wallop and intensity of the genuine article – a story that actually happened. 

I have an advantage in this regard.  I do not make have to make that stuff feel real.  It already is.  And I believe there is something compellingly resonating about that.  For example, the endings to true stories, though possibly a letdown from a dramatic standpoint, in my view, trade reliable contrivance for identifiable believability.

The door slam of a luxury car.  That’s the sound of a real story hitting its target.

Great fiction, it goes without saying – so why am I saying it? – can connect with the reader as well.  I am pretty sure, however, that my fiction would instead make people go, “I’m sorry.  I’m not buying this.”

And I’d fail.

Once again, however, there is more.

When I wrote yesterday that I feared writing fiction because I would be punished, the Italics Man in my head said,

For doing what?  Making stuff up?

It was at that point, I now confess, that I veered self-protectingly towards the superficial, Mr. Italics Man, for once, letting me off the hook. 

I’d be punished for crappy writing?  So what?  So I’m unpersuasive at making the imagined believable.  That’s no big tragedy.  I’m unpersuasive at a lot of things.  (Which explains why I have never won an argument.  And steered assiduously clear of the practice of law.)

The more serious problem about fiction is what it is, and what it reveals

About the writer. 

“You wrote that!  Those vile opinions and behavioral disgustingnesses came out of your brain?  We had no idea you were that kind of person.  You seem so normal.”

                             

I have no idea how fiction writers get beyond stuff like that.

It’s fiction, Earlo.  A person writes murder mysteries.  That doesn’t make them a murderer.

I know, Italics Man, or even a potential one.  Though if they came to the house, I would still maintain myself watchfully between them and the sharp knife drawer.

I have heard actors who claim to be shy and yet they do not appear to be when they’re acting.  They appear to be naked, or abusive or homicidal and irredeemably racist.  They insist that’s not them; its “the character.”  And yet, they apparently found it within themselves to quite credibly pull that character off.

The connection is even less deniable for writers.  Actors just do what’s in the script.  The heinousness is not their own; they are simply delivering the mail.  But working back to the source, there was a writer out there imagining that putrescence. 

What’s their excuse?

Call it flights of fancy.  Call it “letting my imagination run wild.”  Understood.  But they’re your flights of fancy and it’s your imagination running wild.  In a particularly “Holy Mackerel!” direction!

Not everyone – even with the permission to do so – has it within them to make that stuff up.

And even if we do, a lot of us think twice about doing so.

Preferring, instead, the insulating protection of “It’s not me; it actually happened.” 

Available only in the comforting cocoon of literary non-fiction. 

"It's No Them, It's Me"

When I was writing for television, particularly when I was writing episodes rather than running a show, I would never force myself to write when I wasn’t feeling well. 

Writers are like delicate machines – Maseratis of the Keyboard, we like to believe – and there is the fear that any imbalance or imperfection in the system will reflect itself in the outcome, feeling blah leading to “blah” writing. 

(When you’re running a show, or on facing an un-movable deadline, such indulgences are not possible, and you do the best you can, sometimes discovering that being sick made you concentrate harder and you actually did better work.  Isn’t that interesting?  I’ve seen the same thing happen with athletes who play out of their minds under the burden of a really bad flu.  I love comparing writers with athletes, although this time, I am not entirely full of baloney. )

I am currently a number of blog posts ahead, which I like to be, not for the “breathing room”, but because when I go away, I have residual blog post material to regale you with while I am otherwise engaged.  Still, aside from not wanting to eat up the “ahead” material, as an habitual practice, I require myself to write something for this venue five days a week, sick or not, unless it’s heart surgery and the recovery therefrom, a circumstance under which all bets are – hopefully temporarily – off.

The result is – and you can take this to the bank – a daily as-truthful-as-I-can-deliver-it version of the story I am trying to tell – or retrieve from the enveloping mists of time.  I also require myself to be on my best possible behavior, maintaining a “Company’s coming” mentality, insuring what I am exposing to public view at least minimally “presentable.”

You may have noticed that I have ceased and desisted from writing about politics.  The reason for that is is that I am too depressed by the current situation, and have no desire to disseminate the gloom.  In addition, despite my unceasing need for blog-writing material, there are still areas of opinion and experience I have circumvented because they make me look worse than the “worse” I actually allow you to see.  If you can believe that.  And, assuming you harbor certain darker views and secrets of your own, you can.

In terms of content… it’s funny.  When I think about what I do – and have always done – for my work, I say to others – and to myself –

“I make stuff up.”

The thing is, 

I don’t.

The thing more truthfully is,

I can’t.

I tell my stories as best as I can remember them.  I may – though never deliberately – get my facts wrong, I may exaggerate slightly for effect, I may inflate the seriousness of circumstances for (hopefully) comedic effect.  But I have never told a story I portray as “This happened”, when it actually, in fact, did not.

I am simply not that kind of writer.

I once said – possibly to someone else, though it may have just been to myself – that I do not believe in “make believe.”  I probably do, when others write it.  But I do not believe I can pull “make believe” off myself.

Meaning,

I cannot produce a piece of writing which, even though readers know it’s fiction from the get-go, they are still caught up in its elements as if what I was writing about were actually transpiring events.  I am in awe of those who can pull that feat of literary hypnotism off.  Which is not the same as saying I read them.  I generally don’t, preferring instead, to read history, which is based on researched facts, albeit subjectively selected and assembled ones.

I recently read about a journalist-turned-fiction-writer who found it difficult to abandon their “Just the facts” newspaper training and engage in flights of fictional, literary fancy.  But little by little, they reported, they unshackled themselves from such content limitations and by their third novel, they had a bear rampaging through the streets of downtown Chicago. 

There is no previous training that conditions me against venturing beyond the boundaries of factual constriction and making the imagined seem credible.  (And let me make it clear that I do not claim any moral superiority over writers who do.)  For me, it is simply a matter of temperament. 

I cannot make stuff up.

Why?

Because I’m afraid I’ll get caught.  (And subsequently punished.)

Getting caught (and subsequently punished) for doing what?  Making stuff up?  That’s what writers are supposed to do.  And by the way, you made up everything you wrote for television.

Except for (a seven-episode and then cancelled series I created called) Family Man, all of whose stories actually happened to me in real life.

That was seven scripts.  You wrote or co-wrote ninety or so other scripts that were all made up, weren’t they?  So what the heck are you talking about?

I don’t know.  Maybe blog writing is different.  All I know is that’s exactly the way I feel.  I cannot make anything up.

You clazy, Man!

Perhaps so, Italics Man.

Perhaps so.