Freeloading Gluttons for Punishment …
… Or why writers write for free

I’ve been matchmaking pen with paper since I was knee high to a cactus, and for almost as long I’ve been whoring myself out as a working writer in Los Angeles.
My brethren at the WGA should whip me with a No. 2 pencil, or perhaps, in Web 2.0 world, inflict upon me a cerebral hemorrhage with a computer keyboard upside my noggin. The lost income I’ve suffered since college, when I left the confines of academia and a promising albeit minimum-wage paying career as a sports reporter for the hand-to-mouth existence of an ad agency copywriter and a freelance journalist, is most likely Exhibit A in my inability until just recently to pay off my student loans.
If I ever have children, I’ll have but one piece of sage advice: DON'T EVER become a writer.
The greatest scribes are alcoholics. Now that I think about it, so are the untalented. Attend your local high school basketball game, at least the competitive ones, and from 19 feet, 9 inches you’ll be able to target the bed-headed, mumbling-to-himself newspaper reporter from the otherwise normal crazed high school hoops fan.
Yup, he’s (or she in today’s ethno-sex equal, smoke- and booze-free newsroom) the one wearing the holey, all-area football camp T-shirt beneath the 1976 faded-red Garfield High windbreaker and Birkenstocks over wool socks. Hopefully he remembered to wear pants amid reciting the 10 best quarterbacks during the 1991 season – in Tulsa, Okla. – and telling anyone within earshot why Banning will go all the way this year and how in disarray the Roosevelt girls volleyball team was this season.
He could never be mistaken for an actual athlete. Basically he’s a junkie but a lot less cool.
Then you have your music reviewer, who probably is on drugs or at least wants people to think he is. You can usually spot them at the club, undoubtedly channeling beatnik down to the black turtleneck and horned-rimmed glasses, swaying to the beat almost disapprovingly with hands jammed in his trench coat pockets. No one would blame you for thinking he was fingering the hidden candy of his next intended victim, but he’s most probably stroking his member – that being his trusty tape recorder. After the show, you’ll spot him chain smoking and waxing on about post-punk debauchery in minor E and 1990s grunge band Failure’s “Fantasic Planet” as early dialogue about the crushing weight of capitalism and the resulting slowly implosion of America.
Let’s no mince words. He’s a groupie, though his orgasm comes at the conclusion of 1,000 bombastic clauses describing varieties of music theory stolen from the pages of Rolling Stone. He reads like a piss poor philosopher..
As they say, those who can do, and those who can’t write. And worse, yet, many times we write for free.
But more to heart of the problem with writing is that welfare can seem a step up the social ladder to a new college graduate when compared to making your living for the next 50 years with the written word. Few jobs pay less upon graduation this side of unclogging toilets. But hell, even plumbers have knee-capping Mob-owned unions in their corner. Writers have the WGA, which is poised to finally collapse in its “negotiations” with the big studios on revenue sharing from, among other things, the Internet and reality TV.
Not that it’s there fault. They are writers after all. If they had true talent, they’d be reciting the lines in the script rather than writing them. They’d have the Italian Mafia in their corner, not the gay Mafia.
Us poor writers, unshaven and living hand-to-mouth as we drive to work in cars with oxidized paint jobs that fart screeches and engine knocks alongside suits in leather upholstered BMW 7 Series. We’re all going to the same office, mind you. The only difference is the suit gets the personalized parking spot in the covered parking garage, while we hike six blocks and play Frogger dashing across the boulevard only to return 12 hours later with a paycheck 1/1,800th the size of normal people. And our car, if you can call it that, is newly anointed with a $65 parking ticket or, worse, the boot.
So you wanted to become a writer, eh? Bollocks.
That’s what the WGA has fought for. Unfortunately, for every Academy Award or Pulitzer winning writer there’s a hundred thousand others living paycheck to paycheck. What’s worse, like chasing the dragon is to the heroin addict, writers will spit out volumes on spec or agree to non-paying gigs in exchange to free admission to The Viper Room in the hopes someone somewhere will notice our art and snatch us from clutches of poverty.
And there’s a plethora of predators out there under the guise of “e-zines” and blogs. Visit Craigslist and try searching for Writing and Editing gigs. You’ll find dozens of sites and schemes to lure penniless writers into freely submitting art reviews or, worse yet, handing over their scripts amid promises of “networking with professionals” and “getting your foot in the door.”
Yet we continue to write, no matter the fraudulent offers, the names we’re called or how bad we smell because our water’s been turned off and we’ve resorted to “showering” with used sheets of fabric softener. (A word of advice: you, too, can put to good use to those samples of cologne glued to the fashion magazine ads. Just be wary of the paper cuts.)
But then again, Van Gogh was a pauper and cut off his ear. It’s rumored he did so because he went crazy for the lack of appreciation from his peers. But most likely he found a guy who paid him a couple of bucks for it.
Then there’s the rare yet alluring tales of writers who were this close to vanishing into debtor’s prison – or putting a bullet in their brain and their brain all across the wall – only to hit it big. I often recall the story a friend of mine from one of those big studios told me about the guy, or at least one of them, who wrote “The Net” with Sandra Bullock. The week before Columbia Pictures snatched the script, he was supposedly washing his clothes outside with a garden hose and Dawn. I suspect it was actually a bottle marked “Dish Soap” purchased – or filched – from the 99 cent store.
So, us writers put our head down and trudge on, reminding ourselves it is truly an art form to be able to pump out 1,000 beautiful words woven into a stirring narrative in a mere 15 minutes, even if we net only 15 cents of free parking for the effort.
Still, somehow, we live on. I like to think it's the Irish whiskey that fights off infection, but us writers shuffle on in search of our Walden Wood, in search of that one perfect muse that will uplift us onto a throne of public acceptance.
We like the punishment. And we’re also all slightly crazy, and most of us are still trying to even get accepted into the WGA. And if that doesn't work out, we always have the local basketball game.