Where The Rubber Meets The Road

Got another form rejection letter today.

It’s a good thing I’m a comic; rejection is like my oldest friend. In comedy, rejection is visceral and immediate. It come in the form of silence, or uncomfortable huh-huh-ing, or a gasp (usually when your over-the-top joke gets taken a little too seriously – one of the pitfalls of being so good at the deadpan). Sometimes, you’ll get that sweet, stinging slap of a boo. That always makes me smile. Not to sound too full of myself, but the ‘boo’ doesn’t happen to me very often. When I get one, it’s almost like a rare kind of applause break; I know I’ve really earned the audience’s reaction.

In writing, rejection is the distant and uninformative judgment of people you’ll never meet. Not that they are to be counted cold for the form rejection; at least they replied. The wall-of-silence rejection is the one that gets under your skin. Even then, I don’t blame the agents. They don’t mean it personally; they’re not even saying your work isn’t any good. It’s just not right for that particular agent.

However, the unfortunate truth is that the wall-of-silence and form rejections lack one thing the visceral, immediate reaction of a comedy crowd does not: Something to learn from. The worst part is, there’s no way around it. Literary Agents are deluged with submissions on a daily basis. They’d starve trying to explain why they rejected everyone’s work. So, they don’t. And the writer is forced to shrug and move on.

Mind you, if you’ve gone through a hundred queries and never received so much as a nibble, perhaps you might want to reconsider what you’re doing. Of course, there’s no way – easy or otherwise – to pinpoint the specific problem. Oh, you can pore through a slew of blogs and a near-infinite number of essays on the topic(s) of manuscript submission/querying, but once you eliminate the ten to twenty common sense, glaring errors, it’s a complete guessing game.

I haven’t reached the oh-crap-I-must-be-doing-something-seriously-wrong point. I haven’t submitted enough. For now, I’m in shrug-and-move-on mode. Which, at this point, is defined as “burying myself in a new project until I get picked up, or until everyone on my current list rejects me, whereupon I go to my next-in-line crop of agencies, and repeat the process”.
Meanwhile, NoMeansNo’s Tired Of Waiting is on infinite loop in the iPod™ of my mind.

Looking forward to the next, fleeting glimmer of hope known as the unopened query response letter/email.

My wife recently reminded me of an old saying. Of course, she was using it quite literally, as we have had a recent and massive immigration of household pests. And no, I’m not talking about a grade-school sleepover.

However, it reminded me of a conversation I’d had once, when I was yet a bachelor.
The problem with dating while being on the road – particularly as a comic (or musician) – is that 95% of the people that you meet are in their early twenties. Which would be fine if I was also of an age, but being on average ten years older… well. The age disparity is almost always accompanied by one of experience, and that disparity is the relationship killer. Anyway, after a time, I grew – shall we say – less than perfectly gentlemanly. Often as not, my sarcasm and blunt manner would send an otherwise interested young lady a-runnin’.

The aforementioned conversation was with another comic, who was commenting on my demeanor and it’s counterproductive nature. What he said (and the saying my wife had used) was, “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

To which I replied, “But I’m not looking for a fly. I’m looking for a grown-ass woman.”

Fortunately, I found one.

I know, it’s a blogging no-no to leave gaps this wide between posts. Well, tough shit. And I mean that in the nicest possible way, for all three people who read this (crossposted – not even on the site itself).

It’s not that I haven’t been writing; it’s just that I haven’t been writing here.

My love of the written word, of reading, writing, and of storytelling goes back a long way. Probably because writing is the ultimate way to monopolize the conversation. Blogging (for me) is simply a way to keep flexing that muscle, even if I don’t have anything interesting to say. And let’s face it; that’s a lot of the time. If I was that pithy and intriguing, I’d be getting paid for this because people were reading it, and advertisers would want to sell to those people. (You may now remove tongue from cheek.)

Occasionally, I feel like I do have something to say, and being the selfish bastard that I am for the purposes of this sentence, I keep those to myself. Not by choice, of course.

I write fiction, because (to paraphrase that legendary asshole, Harlan Ellison) I can’t not write fiction. And over the years, I have reached the stage wherein I, the unpublished writer, look aghast at what passes for popular literature and say, “I can do better than that.”
I may not be the next Shakespeare, the next Mark Twain, or even the next William Gibson, but can write circles around William Shatner’s ghost writer. For that matter, if the dumpster-full of formulaic vampire chick-porn authors are anything to go by, I should already be in Stephen King territory (speaking of formulaic…).

Arrogant? Yes. But true. It’s bad out there, kids.

For the past few weeks, I have been touching up a trilogy I’m currently in the middle of. Times have been a-changin’ faster than I can crank out this story, considering that the whole enchilada, in toto, will weigh in around a half a million words, about three-fifths of which has already been committed. That’s one and a half novels in the can.
Of course, I still have to get somebody to read the damn thing(s). And by “somebody”, I mean someone who doesn’t finish the first book and say, “It’s really good. You should get it published.” An agent, for instance.

If there’s anything comedy has taught me, it that getting a decent agent is almost 75% luck. If you’re not picky or smart, getting an agent isn’t actually all that hard. I’ve had offers as a comic, and turned them all down.
Why? Because not a one of them could open a door that I could not have opened by myself. Also, at least one of them was a predator. Which you also get in the literary world. For every earnest, honest, hard-working agent, there are a hundred earnest, dishonest, hard-working agents looking to bleed as many people of a few bucks as they can before everyone catches on.

Not to mention the sad, equally predatory, and ruinous world of “vanity” (or self) publishing. Sure, if you’re a minor celebrity who can’t be taken seriously by the literary world because you were once the annoying kid on a hit television show, and you have a flair for the thing (*cough*wilwheaton*cough*), you could do well by self-publishing. But for the rest of us, it’s just a pathetic exercise in self-delusion. Your book will go nowhere. Actually, even if it were published by a reputable publishing house, the odds are still good that your book is going nowhere.
And currently, neither is mine.

Thus, I have been sequestered; hunkered down with my laptop, sifting through hundreds of thousands of words in order to make sure my protagonist has heard of Wi Fi, and doesn’t make Clara Peller references. Occasionally, I find a typo, and it really pisses me off. Every second I spend reviewing material is a second I’m not creating new material. Unfortunately, it is the artist’s curse that they eventually become sick unto death of their creation, be it jokes, stories, songs, paintings, ad infinitum.

But however much I become frustrated or bored with the tedium, it pales in comparison to how much I dislike what comes next. Because if not for my crippling lack of acumen when it comes to self-promotion, I’d have more than a just handful of people noticing when I haven’t posted, and more than a handful of dubious credits to my name. And that translates all-too-well to pimping my book, or prostituting myself to that end, or some other mixed metaphor. Put simply, I suck hard at drawing the right kind of attention to myself.
But draw I must.
Otherwise, I’m might as well be blogging with myself.
Until I go blind.

When you start out doing comedy, it’s all new material. Every joke, every carefully chosen word, every gesture and inflection – it’s all up for grabs.

When you’ve been at it long enough, you eventually reach the place where you reside onstage. It is your home; it is where you come from. It is the you that gets translated to roomfuls (or less) of strangers, and everything you say and do comes from that place – a unified, single source from which your material flows.

But the jokes themselves don’t always start that way.

I used to have a friend with whom I would write jokes, and – being that we were in our comedic infancy – the material we came up with was interchangeable. That is, either of us could bring it up to the stage and have similar success with it. But as time wore on, and we developed our own distinct voices, moved into those places onstage wherein we would reside, it became impossible to write together in any equitable sense, because the flavor of the material was suited to one or the other. Sometimes I would write a joke, like it, want to bring it to the stage, but then realize that it was speaking in my friend’s voice. There was no way around it; that joke – regardless of who wrote it – belonged to him.

And to this day, I have discarded jokes that were otherwise stage-worthy because they simply did not come from that place. Audiences may not know the why or how of it, but they can tell. Imagine Richard Pryor smashing a watermelon with a sledgehammer, and you have a rough idea of stylistic incompatibility.

I have a wry and clever side to my wit, and sadly, I can almost never use it onstage. Onstage, I am largely very sarcastic and almost brutal toward the things I mock So, the audience just doesn’t respond when I start using witty word-play or pointed satire. The change is too marked, too abrupt for them to adjust. George Carlin got away with it, because, well, he was George Carlin. And I am not.

The point, of course, is that a comic must be ever vigilant if she/he wants to avoid sinking their set because they just plain fell in love with something they wrote. I have been guilty of exactly that: bringing the show to a screeching halt with a witticism that absolutely didn’t belong, and all because I couldn’t bring myself to to let it go.

Recently, I played my home club in Madison, Wisconsin (which – I once told The Captial Times – is the only place they get my Noam Chomsky jokes), and brought with me a good five minutes of new material. Believe is or not, that’s a fairly large chunk to insert into a set. About half dealt with religions, and the other half dealt with ethnicity. Of the entire five minutes (to be brutally honest), about one and a half minute was worth saving. The rest just went off the reservation (har dee har).
It’s frustrating, because there was nothing especially wrong with the odd three and a half; it just didn’t mesh. All the wordsmithing and brainstorming didn’t make it work the first time, and is unlikely to redeem the material. So, I have to let it go. Out with the wrong, in with the right.

It’s a survival trait.

I avoid comedy competitions like they’re the Dave Matthews Band. A long time ago, I was in one. Actually, two. No, this isn’t the beginning of a bitter rant by another self-proclaimed hard-done-by comic who “got the shaft” in a competition he lost.

I won. Technically.

It was after the competition that I was approached by one of the judges who anointed me. In an ill-advised moment of candid disclosure, he told me that the judges had already made up their minds who the winner was before the competition began.
“Sure, once in a dozen shows one of those other guys might have got the better of you, but we all knew you were the one,” he told me.
“Not much of a competition, then, is it?” I replied, my pale victory fading even into nothingness.
He shook his head with a patronizing smile. “This is how they all are. You’d better get used to it.”

And he was right. Sort of. The fact of the matter is that I did win. That is, I had the best series of sets and more consistently hit my groove – when it counted. Run that competition a hundred times, and you’d get hundred different outcomes. I flatter myself that I’d still have won most of them, but it would never be the same results – every contestant placing in the same order – twice.
The “sort of” would be best illustrated by the only other competition I was ever in. Despite grave reservations, I decided to participate because the carrot they were dangling was just too big. Literally, as it happened, because the carrot was big enough to drag some heavy-hitters out of the circuit to join the fun. At the time, I was barely a pro. I featured (I was the middle guy) regularly, but headlined nowhere. The comics who descended upon the competition were solid pros – folks who commanded rooms from coast to coast.
Mixed into the pool of hopeful talent were others at my level and below. One of them was a very funny and offbeat guy who was a comics’ favorite. Of course, that didn’t exactly translate to being a crowd favorite. In my humble opinion, he was simply wasting his time working in the midwest. He belonged in Los Angeles. He had that weird, character-driven energy that made people like Jim Carrey superstars in television and movies, but comparative flops in stand-up comedy.
That’s where the carrot came in. One of the judges – the only one that mattered – was an agent for HBO, and was there to scout for The Comedy Festival (formerly the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival). And our weird, offbeat, character of a local was the fair-haired boy. The chosen one. Just like I was.
Except that he came in second. Unfortunately for the powers that be, who were ready and willing to crown our boy, one of the heavy hitters hit too damn heavy to deny. Which was odd, since almost every competition is obviously rigged. And yet, those who rig them seem to think it’s still a secret.
Yes, they’re all rigged. And yes, there’s still a chance – an infinitesimal chance – that someone bucks the system. But, no, it won’t happen at any level wherein you’ll ever make a difference in your career.

Last Comic Standing was a perfect example. Ostensibly a show that allows anyone (okay, professional comics) to break into the industry (movies and television), it was little more than promotional tool for those already inside the industry. If you weren’t already signed to a development deal, then you were there to be lampooned and humiliated by wannabe Simon Cowells. Members only – no visitors allowed.

So, I hold any comedy competition, those who participate in them, and especially those who put them on in contempt. Including myself.
Oh, and the second competition? I came in fourth. That fourth felt a hell of a lot better than my previous “win.”