"Freelance Hack and Literary Mechanic"

Hi there. Stephen Barnes here with Life Writing. Live one week before Christmas and my baby got back yesterday. I'm so happy. So I have my family together. You know, Nikki is down in San Diego and you know, my sister is off with her husband, but Tananarive and Jason are right here under the roof. And so there's a part of my heart that is at peace about that. You know, we're talking about, we've been talking about soulmate relationships a lot because that core anchor is our own heart and our ability to connect with our heart and our ability to use that emotional connection to drive accomplishments in the adult world. And so there are external relationships with other human beings and they're that internal relationship. So we're talking about this stuff because there's. Whether you're talking about a relationship with a person of the opposite sex, of the same sex, or the way our male and female energies are wired up within ourselves, all this stuff connects. So in that spirit, let's talk about something that happened 35 years ago. It must have been about 35 years ago. I was at an autograph part. I was conducting an autograph party on Ventura Boulevard in Van Nuys, California as a comic book. Science fiction stores. I recall this is before the Dangerous Visions bookstore existed out there, which was a great bookstore, by the way. Art Cover and Lydia Morano, they did a fantastic job. Anyway, a guy in his 50s came into the store and he was a moderately well known writer. I mean, I'd seen him at conventions and thought he was bright and clearly knowledgeable about the profession of writing. So I listened to him whenever he spoke. And it was kind of him to come to a young writer's autograph session. After a brief conversation, he handed me his business card which said to my surprise, freelance hack and literary mechanic. I thought, whoa, that's putting himself down. That's kind of an odd way to describe yourself, especially officially. And about a year later, I heard that he had drunk himself to death. Look, I never really knew this guy, but it seemed to me that he offered me a tremendous gift. His death, his very self destruction, offered me a tremendous gift. I focused my whole life on finding what I call Tony Robbins. I think calls it pathways to power. So it's when you model someone, you're looking at their recipe for achieving a particular result. If you perform that same recipe in same way, you get the same result. That's the idea. But I concentrated so much on paths to success that I thought it might be useful to take a look at a pathway to Failure, pathway to self destruction, death, in essence. So let's call this guy Matt. And even though I don't know him, let's try to reconstruct what might have happened to take Matt to where he ended up. Once upon a time, there was a boy child named Matt. He liked to play and dream and read and tell stories. As he grew older, he discovered that he was good at telling stories. I mean, really good at it. And people cheered when he wrote them. And he enjoyed sharing himself in that particular way. And he asked himself, could I make my way in the world telling stories? You see, like all children, he looked out at the world and saw adults doing mysterious adult things and wondered what it was going to take for him to be able to go into that world and earn money and have a house and support a family and all that mysterious stuff. Because remember that stuff when you're a kid, all that stuff seems like magic. What adults do is like magic. How can I do this? The other thing that he would notice is that most adults didn't seem to enjoy what they did for a living. They seemed to spend all their time trying to get home from it or get weekends and vacations from it, where they could do the stuff that they really cared about, because their occupations were just the things that they did to support their lives. So what if, he asked himself, what if I was able to take this thing that I love doing and find a way to make money at it so that I don't have to do something that I don't want to do? That's a brilliant idea. It's a brilliant notion. And at some point it comes to all writers, all artists. So the idea being he wanted more, that he would find a way. He had found a way potentially, to tap directly into that wellspring of creativity and to use that to create his world without having to split himself into two different personalities. The sort of worker drone part of his personality and the sort of creative artist part of his personality. What if these two things could be the same thing? Wow, what a notion. Like I said. So he started doing it, and he began to write. And after a while, he achieved a measure of success. You know, he sold books and stories and made enough money that eventually he could quit his day job. Now he'd made it, he thought, wow, this is great. This is the best. Okay. Then one day his agent said to him that a particular book that he'd written had caught an editor's eye, and the editor wanted another one of those books, another one of those books. And If Matt could write that, could write another one of those books, he'd get a bigger advance, more money. Hey, this is great. And when Matt went to conventions, fans told him that they loved that book and that they'd like to see more of them. And girls flirted with him and they kind of. That glowing at him, that limerence thing, telling him how much they really loved that book. The secret here is that Matt hadn't really liked that book a whole lot. He hadn't really thought much of that book. He hadn't. It hadn't been a subject close to his heart. It had been clever enough, but nothing that really moved him. But he went ahead and wrote another book like that book, and people cheered and the money came in. And deep inside, Matt kind of said, wow, they suck. They don't have any idea what good is, you know, they're giving me money for this. And he kept doing it. His heart and soul went into other things, okay, Other stories. And those works, the works he would have written for free, the things that were dear to the spirit of the child who had started his journey were forgotten, ignored, projects abandoned because people did not want the things he felt most precious to him, you know, and because they did not, he didn't respect those people, the very people who were paying him money for his work. They were clods, dummies, shallow. But he wrote for them anyway. So what did that make him, exactly? Let's take a look at the words that he used to describe himself. Freelance. That's someone who works without a safety net, you know, swinging from job to job. Hack. That's a person who works at a low level of quality, especially someone who had the potential to do better. Literary. That's the art of philosophical expression using the written word, especially language and structure that references previous written words. And mechanic. Someone who manipulates gears and cogs, pieces, you know, to fit, to fix machines. As opposed to an artist who creates something loving and living and spiritually connected to their deepest selves. He had, in other words, poured out his little boy, the creative artist part of himself, for money, for the service of people he did not respect. For books that he didn't care about, probably wouldn't have read himself. And from there, it became more and more difficult to love himself. And the very discipline, the very craft that used to give him pleasure became a source of pain. Alcohol dulls pain. It also blocks creativity by dulling your senses and cutting you off from your emotions and destroying your ability to consciously and voluntarily into the flow state. Alcohol is a real Trap, as are other drugs if you're using them to enhance creativity. Now we had a toxic feedback loop. You are doing something you don't respect for people you don't respect. And now you aren't even good at it anymore. The self loathing leads to the need to dull the senses. The alcohol diminishes the capacity to get the only benefit remaining from the process, which is money. Worse, even the fans of his early work were telling him how much more they enjoyed that stuff, reinforcing his sense of contempt. Perhaps one day he said, I'll go back to the way I used to write. But once you step off the path chasing fool's goals, you can lose sight of the truth. You can lose sight of the real path, the real destination. You forget what you did to get you there. Now, stripped of the delusion that you are just fine, you wander in the darkness wondering how something that was once, that once brought you so much pleasure, now gives you so much pain. Food, drugs, alcohol and meaningless sex, all dull the need, all just leave you wanting more and more leaves you more and more desperate and numb. And eventually the escape from pain becomes more important than living your life. And it all just slips away. I think all of us have had moments when we were offered the devil's bargain. I know I have offered a chance to betray a friendship for money. To work on a toxic project for money. Something as simple as realizing that the story editors at Outer Limits in Twilight Zone kept changing the race of my characters, casting whites and roles written for blacks using the lamest excuses imaginable. The truth is they just didn't want to. The people most enjoy, people who look like them. It's a simple truth covered up with lies and smiles, justifications. And it's the audience, right? So that I was writing award winning roles, literally Emmy winning roles and powerful healing metaphors that were being hijacked away from the community that needed them. In the deepest part of my existence, the little boy who looked out at the world and said, where am I? When he saw movies and television shows that completely excluded people who look like him. That little boy was churning out work, getting well paid, but being told, you are too ugly to our eyes to cast someone who looks like you. Will cast someone who looks like us but will pay you real well. Money isn't enough. It never is. You have to start with something connected to your own heart and telling the stories that you hold dear. And if you need your adult self to hold down a day job so that your child self can play, then Damn it, do that. Do not put the creative child out on the street paying your bills. The child's job is to play. It's the adult's job to pay the bills. And if you're lucky enough that the output of that child finds an audience, embrace and nurture that connection and be true to it. And thank God that it happened. One of the luckiest human beings whoever lived. And if you're smart enough to set your adult to learning, marketing, let's say, such that it handles the outer world while the child is handling the inner world. Frankly, most of the most successful human beings I know operate it this way. They divide themselves into artist and marketer and find an agent or man, or they find an agent or manager to handle that adult self. But they do not whore the children of their hearts. They just don't. There is nothing anyone can pay you that is worth losing integrity with yourself. Nothing. The good news is that most of the time, it isn't the job that creates the inauthenticity. It is your lack of creativity and integrity. I've written animation, comic books and episodes of Baywatch with truth in every one of them. I found something to love. I really did. Something that my little boy would have written for free, everyone. And that made it alive. It made it valid. First episode of Baywatch that I did, the Immortal Baywatch, was like this chance. It was a chance to work for television and deepen my portfolio. I had never seen the show before. They had to send me, you know, a bunch of VHS tapes. And I decided that, okay, I'll give this a shot, because Nikki actually was. I don't know how old she was at the time, 6, 7. She looked at it and thought that, you know, it was just. It was kind of a fun show. So I thought, okay, I can write that. So I came up with an episode that was called Rescue Bay, about a little girl who wanted to be a lifeguard when she grew up. And because she was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, she wasn't going to have the chance to grow up. So they got her into the Junior Lifeguards for the summer, where she meets Hobie, the son of Mitch Buchanan, played by David Hasselhoff, and he falls in love with her. Yeah, it's love story on the beach. Absolutely. But I took the job seriously. You know, love does hurt. The people we love do die, and we live our lives in the shadow of that endless valley. And so if the emotions were as valid as I could make them, it was honest work, not hack work. If the people in the world were as real as I could make them. I was being an artist, not a mechanic. And there was one line that spoke a truth that I believed with all my heart. That line was love isn't two people looking at each other. It's two people looking in the same direction. At its peak, Baywatch was seen by a billion people worldwide. That means that something that I said that I felt was out in the cultural matrix had made an impact. You know, if I could work with the machinery of production, I had the power of doing this. It meant the world to me. I had done something good, and the little boy in my heart was happy with me. At the same time that I was supporting my family, at the same time that I was developing my skills in serving the world, all of it fitting together. Can you see all of that? Just by asking how I could turn this opportunity into something real? Whatever you do in every moment of your life, you can find a way to connect it to your heart, to your commitments in the world, to your dreams. There's always a way with anything that is ethical and moral. It's up to you as an adult to find a way to make that connection. Do that, and the child inside you is safe. And then you're being an adult, doing the rough, hard, external things that adults have always had to do to protect the children. You're doing the right work for the right reasons. And that, my friends, is its own reward. Namaste. If you enjoyed this talk, please share it. It's the only way we know which conversations are pleasing to you. If you'd like to make a better connection to your own heart, developing that healthy family inside you for which it's possible to work like a maniac but never lose your center, go to www.theancientchild.com for your free copy. Take care. Talk to you later.