DEEP THOUGHTS (AND SHALLOW ONES) FROM A WRITER-PRODUCER-POET-COLUMNIST WHO'S STILL TRYING TO FIGURE THINGS OUT
Literally 1000s of good writers are already hard at work in contemporary publishing, film, TV, and other media. 1000s more are trying to join them
That means that to break in you need to be more than good. You need to be better.
Surprise the gatekeepers by creating something so powerful they can’t say “NO!” to you anymore.
Keep writing!
LYMI
LB
Stephan Pastis, the cleverest newspaper comic strip creator of our time, hits it right on the head once again.
If you’re not familiar with Pearls Before Swine, the best place to see more, learn more, maybe even cry more is HERE
My recent post about Alan Moore reminded me that way back in the mid-60s, when I came to L.A. to try my hand at conquering the written word, I wrote porn novels and short stories and even edited various slick publications of the same wondrous genre – pseudonymously, of course. That phase of my career didn’t last very long, fortunately, and it was onward and upward in the loveliness of showbiz within the blink of an aspiring eye.
Many years later, in the early 90s, I retired from showbiz and moved to Santa Fe, NM, where I donated all of my papers to the local college, including the porn because I am, if nothing else, a completist. A few years later, the college threw out all the material I’d given them. I assumed it was because of the porn, but the head of the Visual Arts Department confided in me that it was because the school didn’t want to be “tainted” by TV.
The second-best agent I ever had, the late, great Leonard Hanser, liked to say, “Ain’t life unfair!” as a statement instead of a question. Of course, life’s unfair, but my journey through this world has shown me again and again that a sort of bizarre (and often stupefyingly unfair) irony is the real name of the game.
…And here’s why, from Sam Leith’s recent article in The Guardian about his retirement from writing comic books to concentrate on writing fiction:
“I’m really enjoying just writing prose fiction,” he [Moore] says. “Because, in some ways, to me, that seems the purest medium. You’ve got 26 characters, and a peppering of punctuation. With that, you can describe the entire conceivable universe.”
And, of course, there’s this one:
I’m definitely done with comics…I haven’t written one for getting on for five years. I will always love and adore the comics medium but the comics industry and all of the stuff attached to it just became unbearable.
What I see here in this piece is the true yin and yang of the professional writer. We loves us the words, but the people who pay us for them are a whole ‘nuther matter.
