Working for a living

Originally published March 7, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1216

While Harlan Ellison was busy putting fans in their place, I was busy being put in mine.

Harlan started quite a stir during his opinion piece on the Sci-Fi Channels Sci-Fi Buzz. Ellison stated that writers “owe” fans nothing beyond their best endeavors at plying their craft. Writers who receive wide fan support do not owe the fans any sense of gratitude for “putting” the writers where they are; the writers owe their relative success entirely to their own efforts.

Although many fans understood what Ellison was saying, others angrily accused Ellison of not giving a damn about the fans, of not showing proper deference or allegiance to those who had been loyal to his efforts. I think a few folks also managed to place him at the grassy knoll when JFK went down.

(On a roll, Harlan also went on Politically Incorrect and—in a performance that had friends of his screaming at the screen, “You have a heart condition, for crying out loud, calm down!” —had to have his teeth pried out of the throat of Starr Jones, an ultra-conservative legal commentator who was endeavoring to defend the 1950s practice of turning rat and knuckling under to the communist witch-hunt mentality. It wasn’t the most offbeat PI confrontation of the year—that would be Chevy Chase going mental on Steven Bochco—but it was way up there. Boy, I’d love to go on that show.)

Meantime, in less rarefied atmospheres, I was interested in seeing the John Travolta film Michael. Newspaper ads indicated that members of the Writers Guild of America (which I happen to be) would be admitted free to any showing upon presentation of their WGA card. This is not an uncommon practice, particularly as Oscar nomination time approaches.

It’s a perk, I admit it. C’mon—someone offers you a chance to see a free movie that’s gotten good notices, are you going to turn it down? Besides, I’d been working fairly non-stop on several tight deadlines, including a series of Star Trek novels. I figured I was entitled to a break.

So I went to my local theater. I deliberately chose a performance that I knew would be lightly attended, because the last time I’d used my WGA card (at another theater) it had taken a minute or two as I signed off on a form, and I didn’t want to hold up other folks. With no one in line behind me, I dutifully presented my WGA card and said I wanted a ticket for Michael.

The ticket seller stared at me. “What’s this?” she asked.

“It’s my WGA card.”

“What’s the WGA?”

I tapped the card. “Writers Guild of America. I’m a writer.”

“Why are you giving me this?”

“Well,” I said patiently, “ the newspaper ad says that WGA members are admitted free to any showing of Michael.”

“What newspaper?”

My spider-sense was tingling. “Newsday,” I said.

She stared at me. “I don’t know anything about it.” And she stood there.

Apparently she belonged to that subset of individuals who believe that, if they don’t know about something, it doesn’t exist. Me, I was kicking myself that I hadn’t brought a copy of the paper with me. It hadn’t occurred to me. I mean, you bring a newspaper to the bathroom, or to a doctor’s waiting room, or something like that. Who brings a newspaper to the movies?

“There was an ad for Michael in the paper, and it said that WGA members would be admitted free to any performance upon presentation of their card. Does anyone here have a paper?”

“Hold on,” she said, and picked up a phone. She got the manager on the phone and started muttering a summation of what I’d said, with attendant skepticism in her tone. I sensed that people had wandered in behind me. I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. I hadn’t wanted to make a big deal about this. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t afford to plunk down for a ticket. They’d made an offer and all I wanted to do was take advantage of it.

She turned to me, phone still to her ear, and said, “The manager doesn’t know anything about it.”

“Does the manager have a newspaper?”

“I don’t know.”

At which point, my attitude was, The hell with it, I’ll just pay for it. Nothing in my life comes easily anyway; might as well pay my way.

And then the guy behind me, a beefy guy who looked to be in about his mid-50s, started saying loudly to the cashier—in that way someone has when they’re more interested in showing how tough they are than actually conveying information—“Think you could make some time for a paying customer?”

Chucking a thumb at my fan, I said to the ticket seller, “Could you sell him a ticket, please?”

But she was too engrossed in listening to the manager apparently reiterating his or her cluelessness. She listened to the phone a moment more, than said to me, “What are you, again?”

It’s not everyone who can take a simple trip to the movies and turn it into an exercise in self-humiliation, but I often manage to succeed in endeavors where lesser mortals might fail. “I am a writer,” I said, adding silently, of stuff.

“He says he’s a writer,” said the ticket seller, and then turned back to me and said, “My manager doesn’t know anything about writers getting—”

“Fine, I’ll buy a ticket,” I said, yanking out my wallet and just wanting to be done with it.

And as I was saying that, my fan from behind—apparently not hearing my stated intention to purchase admission—said loudly to the ticket seller, “C’mon, lady, make some time for somebody who works for a living.”

Works for a living.

I thought about the deadlines I struggled to meet, the days making time for my kids and the nights spent working until 3 a.m. The finishing up of 20 pages of scripting, getting caught up, only to see the fax machine suddenly start pumping through another ten pages, pushing me behind again. The deadlines for the novels, the weekly grind of the column, the exhaustion, the constant struggle of staring at the computer screen day after day, and y’know, every time I turn on the computer, the screen’s always blank. It has yet to come glowing to life with a story already existing there. I thought about the weeks, months I’d spent away from home working on Space Cases, getting to the studio by 8 a.m., leaving at 8 p.m., working at night—either script rewrites or comic book work—until I fell over and then getting up the next day and doing it all over again.

And I grabbed the ticket out of the ticket seller’s hand and rounded on the guy, and snapped, “I work sixteen hour days, hotshot. What’s your work schedule like?”

He glowered at me, his wife next to him. Probably he would have loved to start something, but with his wife standing right there, I guess he felt hesitant. He said nothing. I stood there for a moment, and then turned on my heel and headed to the theater.

And I sat and watched the film, smoldering through much of it, and thinking that it was pretty much okay except that it would have been a better film if they’d gotten Samuel L. Jackson for the William Hurt part, because Hurt was supposed to play a cynic, but he’s too bland to be a good cynic.

I’ll tell you, though…

You go to conventions, and people line up for your autograph, or gather to hear you speak, and laugh at your jokes, and praise your work. It insulates you and even makes you think that perhaps that’s how the entire world views you.

I’ve written before, though, that the general public tends to think of writers in a less-than-lofty capacity, except perhaps for marquee names like Grisham or King. But I’ve never quite had it laid out for me quite as starkly as this: Make some time for somebody who works for a living.

Writers are always being judged. One would think that it goes with the territory, but to my way of thinking, the only thing that goes with the territory is having one’s work being judged. But sometimes that’s almost beside the point. It is writers themselves who are always being held up for scrutiny. If fans don’t like the writer’s latest offering, then the writer supposedly doesn’t care or just hacked it out. Or—here’s my favorite—a writer takes on a job “just because he wants to make money.” And in doing so, the writer is somehow diminished or a lesser being, having sacrificed a sacred trust or spit upon expectations. Hell, remember when Dave Sim had to tell everyone he was giving the money for writing an issue of Spawn to charity because fans were screaming he’d “sold out”?

What an insane, unfair attitude that is for readers to have. If I said that the majority of people in this country take a job, first and foremost, to pay bills, I think I’d be on solid ground. If you stood at a construction site and said disdainfully to a bricklayer, “You only took this job to feed your family; you are therefore a sell-out,” the bricklayer would bounce a brick off your skull.

Writers are constantly being crucified on the cross of others’ expectations. There are the people who hold writers to their own interpretation of the artistic ideal, which apparently includes the notion that filthy considerations such as money or worrying about paying bills should never enter into the writer’s personal radar. At the same time, there are others (such as my fan) who feel that writers are dilettantes, dabblers, engaging in an endeavor that has no relevance to the real world. That writers just sit around making stuff up and people are actually dumb enough to give them money for it.

The writer and his audience: an ongoing love/hate relationship. A delicate balance. On the one hand there is the writer, working to gain the reader’s trust in that constantly dicey proposition called “suspension of disbelief.” And on the other, there is the reader who basically says, “I have given you that trust; that obligates you to me.” It’s a mercurial thing, though, that trust. All trust is. For all that the writer elevates himself or is elevated by the readers, ultimately we’re all just magicians pulling tricks out of our hats. Dancers tapping as fast as we can, sweat pouring down our brows until such time that we fail to entertain, at which point the audience will turn away, toss us aside, forgotten. There are periods where a writer can do no wrong—and then, just as quickly, suddenly he feels as if he can do no right.

What is the writer’s job? To engage the reader. What is the writer’s obligation? To survive. It’s no more and no less involved than that.

But hey—it beats working for a living.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. He just looked at the ad for Adventures in the DC Universe. Is it his imagination, or is this the first time that Captain Marvel has looked “right” in years?)