On Writing

My area prostrema has confused its own organ for the stomach, and as a result my gray matter has an unyielding -- nay, I say autonomic -- need to vomit... somewhere. I'm letting this blog post catch the ejected contents, which I anticipate will be quite messy. Stand back. You've been warned.

Harlan Ellison, that lovable old miserable crank

I've written since I can remember. As a child, writing was not just a task to be completed but something that was done. I never questioned an adult who said "Write three paragraphs about Harriet Tubman." I might have just as easily done so on my own volition. To me the act has always been rudimentary behavior.

As children, The Arts (whatever that means) are often the first cut made to education budgets. They are institutionally optional. Writing should be considered one of The Arts, but it typically takes shelter underneath the roof of English and, comparable to paints or textbooks, writing is relatively cheap to teach. The Arts aren't institutionally optional because they are unimportant, they are institutionally optional (mostly) because they are expensive and vulnerable.

But writing is cheap to teach. And as children, we enter into a social contract where for 13 years we write for free. All of us. In school we've all written volumes of words -- novels worth, maybe? -- for nothing, and it starts before many of us can even ride a bike. More importantly, before we are capable for forming expectations.

The quality of the bulk of that writing is suspect at best; we're made to do it so we can learn how to do it. And we must learn how to do it so we can continue to do it for free. We write to our parents, we write emails and memos for work. We fill-out applications and answer questions for doctors, bankers, and governments. All this writing requires a skill, and those more skilled in the act benefit from their proficiency. The act is seldom monetized.

In fact, in college, we pay people to make us write for free. Hundreds of pages of papers!

Writing. It's cheap, it's free, it's expected.

This is the mountain one must climb every time one wishes to convince another that you should be paid to write. The institutional cheapness of the written word.

I only recently began to think seriously about this.

As I said, writing was always rudimentary to me. As I got older, I got a vague sense that I might be good at it. I got a considerably stronger sense that I liked to do it. The Dream All Men Have is to get paid to do something you like. But I never really envisioned how to get there. I just figured I'd write things, then one day someone would decide they'd like to own those words. Then I'd have a giant house with a yard and three German shepherds.

No one in school ever told me I should expect to be paid for writing as an adult. (And why should I believe them? I was doing it for them for free!)

Somewhere a few paragraphs ago, you the reader probably sniffed hypocrisy. To date this blog has 1,410 posts (including archives of college paper articles) for which I've never been paid. All those words that I have given away, including most all of my best stuff. Nobody made me do it. I did it with glee. Glee, and a sense of obligation to the world for which I cannot pinpoint the origin.

I sympathize now more than I used to with the old newspaper men who, five or so years ago, became increasingly outraged at what the blogosphere was doing to their well-oiled, institutionalized racket.

The turd is out of the ass though, and there is no shoving that mother back up in there. Most of the living writers I admire (William Gibson, Warren Ellis, Nick Hornby, Chuck Klosterman, John August, Andrew Sullivan -- and yes, Kevin Bronson) have varying degrees online presence free of charge to their readers. I get the sense you cannot be "A Writer" without a free and open online portal to your mind. To a modern American, that is the definition of a writer. A word celebrity. Perhaps the notion isn't new at all. Books have always been free at the library. (There's that institutional cheapness of the written word again.)

When my only publishing credits were the Ball State Daily News and my own blog, blogging everything seemed like an obvious and easy way to get noticed. Finally, I feel past that point. So what I've wrestled with the last couple months is this: what should I be paid for, and what should I give away?

Press releases, website copy... those are easy. (Show me the $) But what about my in-depth (i.e. more than 140 characters) critical thoughts on music? Do they have monetary value? Am I devaluing myself every time I review a show? As I write this very blog post I am asking myself "Couldn't you save it unpublished, edit it, reshape it, tighten it, and get it published somewhere? There's some alright ideas in here..."

Set aside for a moment that nobody is entitled to be paid to do what they love. Granted. I also loathe the "woe is the writer's life!" moanings that self-righteous writers (usually ditzy flakes and Boomers) have a tendency to utter. There's no romance to what I'm saying, just thinking out loud.

The saying "Information wants to be free" is absolutely true. That's like saying "Money wants to be transacted". That's what it is for. Information wants to be known and consumed with the least impediment, always and forever. So the question for everyone in this game is this: "How can you control the information so it flows through you and out to someone else in a way that benefit$ you the most?"

(This, by the way, is something the megamedia conglomerates understand very well. I used to be a piracy champion. I still kind of am because Viacom is a non-person with the rights of a person, and that is evil. And I promise you, the money they think they're losing from YouTube is not coming out of the writers' pockets -- those guys aren't getting half their checks anyway.)

When CGT gets its Wordpress makeover, it's going to be geared a bit more like the homepages of published writers. I was paid to cover Coachella for BuzzBands and that opened my eyes a bit. I won't write for other sites for free anymore, save for the occasional favor for close friends. I won't do "paid per click" articles on fitness and beauty for SEO-spiders, either.

The content on CGT, when the site morphs, is going to be more direct and succinct. (Every link that used to go on Collected Thoughts can be its own bite-sized post.) I think I'll still review records and shows on here, especially the upstart locals. I made the switch to only review things I really believed in because it was a good way to cut my commitment to the site. These days I don't think of the CGT record reviews as critical reviews (which I should be paid for) so much as recommendations, and content recommendations fall under what I'm starting to think as "things writers should give away to promote themselves".

I'm going to be writing more about "content producers and artists working for free," because it's something I'm starting to feel strongly about. I'm working on something from the perspective of the photographer. And, ironically, I'll probably publish it for free. (Unless someone wants to pay to run it...)