Just got back from a group workshop meeting for 2nd Story. If you’re not familiar, 2nd Story is a theater collective I’ve been working with that produces readings at wine bars around Chicago. The process is what sets it apart from other reading series: 2nd Story pull actors and directors from the theater world to workshop pieces of short narrative nonfiction with writers, to craft the stories and their performances into something that people at a wine bar will actually want to engage with while imbibing.

It’s challenging for me: frustrating, rewarding. All of my prior performance experience comes from playing in bands, where the only verbal interaction with the audience was short quips in-between songs. While performing the songs, the guitar served as a crutch separating myself from the audience, and I was performing practiced, relatively polished songs with a group of other people. We were delivering loud, complete products with clearly delineated beginnings and ends, barreling over chatter and indifference with unnecessarily loud amps.

Performing a ten-minute short story, alone on a stage with a spotlight on you, there’s none of that contract that separates band from audience; instead, you’re having an intimate experience with an audience that demands you respect the give and take of the room. You need to be agile and comfortable enough with to riff off the audience and the unexpected, to feel the ebbs and flows of the room in the moment. A band has to consider this, but is far less agile: once you’re locked into a song, you’re committed to finishing that song, and there’s little course-correction to be made.

If they’re not going your way, you steamroll your way through it. In a reading, it’s a much more delicate give and take with the audience. This is terrifying. From the writing standpoint, it’s also challenging: I’m still finding my voice for narrative nonfiction, a far different form from feature articles or half-baked culture punditry or satirical riffs or fantastic/satirical short fiction, all forms I’m a lot more familiar and comfortable with. Certain skills can be transposed, but there are a whole load of new ones to develop. Particularly, writing for a live audience, not readers.

It’s tough and scary and frustrating, but worthwhile. I also suspect that a lot of what I’m getting from this can be used to inform my other writing. Seems like in the current new media/publishing climate, honing your writing so it can hold the attention of a groups of drunks in bars, well, that’s a skill that would serve me well to consider when writing for the web audience.

Anyway, this is already TL;DR, but a few notes from today’s meeting about writing with performing in mind, that I found particularly useful:

Have an hypothetical, ideal audience member in your mind that you are specifically speaking to—I know this is a writing trick—to have a hypothetical reader you’re writing for. It’s one that I’ve deployed in the past. I hadn’t thought about doing something similar when performing for an audience.

Not every response to an unexpected audience action needs to be a witty zinger. A genuine response is just as valid and effective.

Live in the scene - create eye contact with the character you’re speaking to, when speaking those lines - have first scene and last scene memorized - memorize first sentence of each paragraph

Trust your instinctual reaction to the stimuli around you. Unless of course, your immediate instinctual reaction is, as it is for me: “FLEE!”

Crossposted from my Tumblr, Eventual Ghost

It’s seductive to anyone who writes for cash money in what may be the worst economic and cultural climate to do so since the Dark Ages (at least for the majority of writers not on the Conde Nast gravy train). With my bank account is often teetering precariously above overdraft gulch, I completely understand the argument for earning a few bucks in PayPal tender by slamming out a how-to-pimp-your-Firefox tutorial.

I totally get it. When times are tight, even pennies on the dollar for a skill seem worth it. But in the long run, you're essentially selling old books and CD's to record or book stores to get you through the rest of the week, while selling off your primary skill in favor of a degraded market value.

There's no shame in doing menial or distasteful or annoying work when you're broke--waiting tables at a TGI Friday’s, ripping out weeds, writing SQL queries, sucking cock for real money. Shit, I taught myself HTML between spraying shoes at a bowling alley at the age of 25. But when your time is limited--as it is for everyone--you've got to ask whether it's worth your time. Is it worth the hour you'll spend writing SEO-optimized text about banal subjects in the most bloodless manner possible for a theoretical payday of pennies? For some people it may be.

I'm the king of menial jobs, or odd jobs, or whatever have you. I've certainly done plenty of labor for less than my time is worth that has been soul-destroying, frustrating, or somewhat distasteful. But many of the lamest of these jobs--bartending for no hourly wage, and approximately $3/hr in tips, for example--have offered some sort of perk or perks that has made it worth the time. Potential additional odd jobs, free beer, networking opportunities—all possible perks to ameliorate the inequitable time/money ratio.

Staring at these writing mills, I gotta ask: what are the perks of writing for potential nickels on the web, if any? Is there more long-term value in writing what you want for free?

I have a personal rubric by which I measure a writing job's: every week, I write show previews for the Santa Cruz Weekly, $15 for 150 words a piece. It's not always the most inspiring work, writing six vaguely-positive sentences about Slightly Stoopid, but I find that it's more than worth my time. If it takes me approximately an hour and a half a week to write four previews, at $60 a week, for $240 a month in guaranteed money, and from time to time I can have fun with the form, well shit, seems like a pretty good deal to me. Some Ivy League douche who moonlights for the New Yorker might find this distasteful, call it hack work, but in comparison to other things I’ve been paid to do for nominal amounts—spray out bowling shoes, scoop bum shit off the floor of a public restroom--it seems like a pretty good deal. There are plenty of perks: the ability to occasionally let loose on a band that really deserves it (see: any Jared Leto musical project,) an ongoing open dialog with my editors, and the ability to pay a couple bills at the end of the month that I’d otherwise be selling books to pay.

Some of these benefits are tangible, others are intangible, but in aggregate, the writing job is worth my time.

Recently, I signed up for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, more out of curiosity than as an actual money-making proposition. The prospect of making a few bucks to do menial tasks mindlessly on my laptop while watching boring nature documentaries sounded decent, so, why not? I’ve been on it for a couple of weeks, and I can see it being a great way to make some extra beer or coffee money when times are tight and work isn’t coming in as quickly as you’d like. But it is far from a substitute for real work—it’s the digital equivalent to filling envelopes in your free time. A few cents a job to idly Google song lyrics while watching TV is a fair deal to me.

And that’s what comprises a ton of the work on Mechanical Turk: idly Googling information, and copying and pasting it into a text box. Sounds great, so long as you confine yourself to that sort of busy work. As a freelance writer’s market, it’s shit (to be charitable) or profoundly depressing (to be honest.) If you search for top-paying jobs on the site, a lot of writing jobs appear. On Mechanical Turk, a $1 job is relatively lucrative. Writing jobs on the site will earn you a whopping $1-$3 usually involve writing 6-800 words, potential rewrites included.

An argument could be made that $1 for 600 words is what the Internet market will bear, and perhaps that’s true, but if so, then it’s time to find another line of work. Writing 600 words of copy about a subject that you have no passion for or interest in, for $1, is never worth your time. It’s insulting. It’s demeaning. There’s more dignity in turning tricks on the street or spraying disinfectant into sweaty bowling shoes than selling off your writing talents for such a paltry sum. It's never worth writing for nickels, even in this fearless new Internet economy.

Bloody Mary Morning (mp3)

My friend Leland, a will-be-well-known author who has written three novels and counting, travels around the world for work, and treats his time in the air as time to write, time to think. I envy that amount of dedicated writing time, but fundamentally hate flying: I find it terrifying—yes, I know all of the typical arguments about the safety of flying vs driving, biking, etc, but those things are on the ground, somewhere human beings are meant to be, not thousands of feet in the air, where birds and the spacemen are meant to be. For instance, here is something meant to be in the air:

Here is something meant to stay on the ground:

Rationalists ask me, what is so awful about flying? Some death-defying lunatics actually enjoy it, with no reservations. First off, there’s the sheer impossibility of it (your book-physics be damned,) but there’s more at play than that. For me there’s a certain amount of claustrophobia (thanks for that particular neurosis, mom!) involved. But more specifically, at least in my case, it is the lack of agency. Sure, I’m more likely to die behind the wheel of a car, but it’s me behind that wheel.

Bullshit, some have said in response to these arguments—being behind that wheel provides only an illusion of agency.

Which is an absurd response: it’s a rational response to an irrational fear. Rational responses have no place here—if they did, I’d have already been convinced by the fact that the human race has flown in planes for a century now, to generally positive results. Gung-ho rationalists who make such arguments treat irrational fears as if they’re noble savages to be defeated by good olde European steel. So by sheer dint of extrapolation, we can see that these rationalists are as terribly small-minded as European Colonialists, and their unimaginative arguments in favor of measured reason should be censured as such.

Despite all this, I have come to appreciate flying to a limited degree, fortunately in time for this trip to Australia and back. Living on the opposite side of the country than your family and friends, you’ve got to find something to like in it.

My old boss and misanthropic spirit animal Rob Miller wrote in an old issue of Punk Planet about his flight regimen: Xanax, Ambien, and approximately 3-5 alcoholic beverages. For me, it’s similar, though my doctor is not as forthcoming with the good drugs as his, apparently. In lieu of good drugs, I have to provide myself with a ridiculous number of diversions, not unlike a parent with a child. I’ve got my netbook with a backup battery, a couple of books (currently reading: White Teeth by Zadie Smith and Black Swan Green by the unimpeachable David Mitchell), a literal stack of magazines—Time, Newsweek, the New Yorker, National Geographic, Seed, the Atlantic, and BBC Knowledge, and an iPod Touch loaded up with about a hundred hours of TV documentaries and podcasts.

Carrying all of this content around can be a pain in the ass (first Facebook commenter to suggest a Kindle gets a virtual kick in the nads!), but giving myself this many options helps allay the sensation of physical claustrophobia. I rarely use these diversions—or tire of them quickly, within the first hour of the flight—but having access to a limited set of them at least offers some relief. To quell the remaining anxiety, a few Bloody Marys help, as they did for Willie.

Once bored by the static buffet of diversions, flying becomes a great opportunity to be confined to one place and write. As I flew back from Sydney—14 hours across the ocean, four hours in SFO, another 4 hours to Chicago—I hit up Qantas’ complementary drink service liberally and went to work, locked in a hermetically sealed writing chamber with few outside distractions, save for the half hour of turbulence that was so horrifying that half the people in the cabin were screaming for at least 15 minutes of it (not I, what with the British stiff upper lip genes that I inherited and all that, you know.)

No endless tabs of distraction in Google Chrome, and a limited field of movement—time to be productive. I made it through three blog posts—I often write these a while before posting, so I can sit on them and think about what inflammatory statements I really want to stand behind—a couple of show previews, and, most productively, six scenes in a play that I’m working on. Since I know absolutely nothing about writing plays, even less than than I know about any other form of writing,  I would distract myself at some point for a couple of endless jaunts through playwriting blogs in most circumstances. Isolated a few thousand feet above the ground, without that apparent luxury, I just downed a few drinks, put the headphones on, and began writing.

The only place that I can enjoy this sort of focused work time is on a plane, unfortunately. While I imagine I could replicate the conditions, it would take a level of self-discipline that I rarely have.

The takeaway, in red text a la the new Newsweek, for readers who dislike reading more than 30 words of anything: flying is a terrible, terrifying act of tempting the fates, an act of man’s hubris as he mocks the gods with his makeshift flying machine fashioned from blood, toil and steel. Still, if you get suitably drunk while in the air, it can be a great opportunity to get some writing done without Internet and other distractions of the landlocked world.