A (probably) famous writer was once interviewed.
INTERVIEWER: Where do you get all your great ideas from?
FAMOUS WRITER: Same place as all my bad ideas.
Awesome. The fact that I can’t remember who to credit goes to this second pair of questions:
Who are you and why should we care?
The first question is irrelevant if the second one has an answer.
If you like step-by-steps:
1) Make a thing
2) Put it out there (loads of ways to do that)
3) See who would like more
4) Stay in touch with them
5) Repeat 1) – 4)
If you’re in a rush, the one essential thing if you want a following:
1) Be going somewhere
My last couple of posts were about making money and industry. Money. Eew. Not very artistic.
For “making money”, read: eating. I haven’t yet been able to take my jokes to a farmer and exchange them for food*. I look forward to that day.
Just for the record, I reckon there’s only one area of life where you can concentrate your efforts to make these “how are we going to survive?” and “how are we going to make enough money?” conversations go away.
That area of life is called activism. Activism is not voting. It’s picking and getting behind a campaign with a goal, and it can be as creative as you like (see Banksy pic).
Sometimes the end is a long way off (see: women’s suffrage, civil rights, the end of apartheid), but it’s worth it because it’s right, not because you’ll be around to do the victory dance. The arc of history can only be bent so far in one lifetime, but you can still pull on it.
I hope you set aside time for activism, but I wouldn’t blame anyone who feels like it’s too overwhelming and that there are a million other things that need doing. All I’d say to that is that there are different levels of engagement, with different levels of time required.
I’ve picked my campaigns, I hope you’ve picked yours, but I’m not going say anything more, because I think people come to this stuff when the time is right for them.
That’s why I think it’s more useful for me to blog here about writing, comedy, surviving economically, creative tensions and all that jazz.
I’m happy to talk with anyone about ideological stuff if you want to get in touch, but it’s just a weird time we’re living in, where we have to be permissive about everything, but closeted about what we actually think!
*(Insert rotten tomatoes joke here!)
Like a lot of industries, the comedy industry goes through tough times during a recession.
When this happens, comedy is not going through a tough time – people still want a laugh, but fewer are buying tickets and taking chances on lesser-known comics or club nights.
I reckon those of us who are committed to creating stuff and putting on a show will prevail, one way or another.
Just so you know I’m not wearing rose-tinted specs, I’ll say it – survival is the new doing well.
When the going gets tough, remember:
When you started, you had to be really resourceful to get gigs, fail at them, keep getting more, keep turning the material over, wrestling with negativity every day. There were no “how-to”s, degrees, or “Dummies” guides.
You are so resourceful, the hot air that comes out of your mouth now translates into food on the table. That’s quite something.
Maybe you’re newer at selling hot air, and haven’t made a sale yet. You’re facing down all of the above, just in the hope that it will lead somewhere*. That takes some rare and valuable qualities. I hope you recognise that you have them.
My point is: If we can slay these dragons, we can slay other ones.
When the going gets tough, just look at how resourceful you’ve been.
If we didn’t all have dad issues, we’d be quite dangerous!
*If you don’t quit, it will.
Maybe you’re a poet. Maybe you’re an activist. Maybe you knit lampshades.
You spent a lot of time writing those poems, agitating and knitting. The one thing that we all have in common is that we all need to connect with people who might, at some point, want what we create.
If you want people to pay money, and even if you want to keep your art pure, by getting people to pay in attention rather than money, we all have to get our stuff to market. Eek. Marketing. (Please read on!)
(Please forgive me, ghost of Bill Hicks. Just trying to help.)
You might sing a better song than that person on TV, but they somehow (probably unfairly, using evil trickery) got their stuff to market.
Fame isn’t meritocratic. In the bad old days, all you could do was whine about monopolists and the TV-industrial complex. Doesn’t have to be like that anymore.
Some people don’t like the word “marketing”, and that’s why Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book about ideas spreading and called it The Tipping Point. It made people feel clever and became a best-seller.
Turns out people are interested in marketing if you call it something else. This is marketing marketing.
Where Gladwell wrote the The Tipping Point for the general audience, Seth Godin wrote Spreading The Ideavirus for people who wanted to get stuff done and out there.
He made it free and downloadable.
In All Marketers Are Liars, Godin suggests that if you have an idea, and you want people to engage with it, you’re in marketing, whether you know it or not. (He might be lying, though!)
But Seth’s early innovation was Permission Marketing. The idea here is that you shouldn’t bother people who don’t want to hear from you. It’s common sense to you and me, but some in the marketing world needed Seth to write a whole book about it!
The old model revolved around the right (purchased with bales of cash) to interrupt people over and over again until they give in, and buy Coke or vote for UKIP.
It still works, evidently, but the internet changes things a little bit – and it’s good news for you!
How many Viagra emails have you opened lately? How many ads have you skipped lately? Now think about emails and messages from people you want to hear from (anticipated, personal and relevant, as Godin puts it).
That Viagra salesman (it has to be a man, right?) that just spammed a billion people is getting his ass kicked, in attention terms, by your little mailing list, because everybody on it wanted to hear from you.
Your list (or however you prefer to connect) wins, because you made a genuine connection with people who like what you do.
Whatever it is you’re making, (poems, social change, knitted lampshades), if it’s for other people, you need to build a following and get it to them.
Yes, it’s a lot harder to do for those of us without powerful media connections, but it used to be impossible. Now it’s not.
So, just to round up, build away with the social networks, lists, and what have you, but build permission at the same time.
Good luck!
PS. Some of my best friends are marketers. Go easy on me if you read this, guys!
Happy Monday! Today’s the day I take my son (seven years old) ice-skating.
I always say to him, “I remember when you were a baby, you couldn’t even crawl! We used to have to carry you everywhere. Then you learned to crawl, then you could walk and run, and now look at you. You can skate!”
He’s probably sick of hearing it, but I’m taking the opportunity to sneakily reinforce the idea that no-one taught him a lot of crucial stuff. He can’t remember being between the ages of 0-3, being helpless and then helping himself.
We did our first stint on the ice at Christmas. He was wobbly at first, there was a fair bit of falling over, but after about three sessions, he stopped holding on to me, another three sessions after that, he’s like a pro!
He only asked me once, at the beginning, how to skate. I said, “Just try and stay on your feet and go, there’s no secret.”
Don’t get me wrong, he might benefit from some lessons, but I like that he’s gotten himself to the point where he’s having fun with it.
This week, I’ll be writing and singing for my supper. A lot of people taught me a lot of different things (thanks!), but no-one quite taught me how to do this kind of work I’m doing now.
It was (and will probably continue to be) a fair bit of falling over.
(A bit like being a parent!)
It’s not always easy to talk or write about what you believe in (especially if you really care!), but this might help.
George Lakoff is a cognitive linguist (please keep reading, it gets better!). When I first heard the title of his book, Don’t Think Of An Elephant, I’ll confess, I thought of an elephant.
The idea is that when we’re talking to each other, we’re putting (sort-of) pictures in each other’s heads.
He calls the pictures “frames”. You have a frame for an elephant. You just saw your elephant picture, I just saw mine. They might be different.
Now say, for example, when you hear the words “capitalist”, or “socialist”, or “Christian”, or “atheist”, other pictures and emotions (frames) will pop into your head. Probably quite powerful ones.
They’ll vary from person to person. None are more correct than others. They just exist. They’ve been under construction since you were a baby, so you’re probably stuck with them.
About half of Americans believe that “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is in their Constitution. Who could argue with that? Did Jesus say that?
It’s actually from the Communist Manifesto! I guess lots of people like the statement, but they don’t like the frame that pops into their head when they hear the word “communist”.
If you care about your idea being heard (political or not), it might be food for thought.
Here’s five minutes of George Lakoff talking about frames, if you have time. It’s really interesting!
If you want to think about something else…
Elephant!
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
…So wrote Upton Sinclair. What a great line. It’s witty and insightful. Steal it. Use it. Everybody does. That’s why it’s so famous.
I used to sell clothes to people who had shops for a friend of mine. I sold T-shirts and fleeces with designs on them, drawn by my friend, who was a talented and funny artist.
Her designs got ripped off a few times by greetings card companies, but there was one design that was just un-stealable.
It was so her style, you’d have to rip the whole thing off, which would mean becoming her. Which was impossible.
I’ve noticed if I want to tell a Johnny Vegas joke, or a Dom Irrera joke, or a Mike Wilmot joke, or a Rich Hall* joke to someone, I pretty much have to mimic the comedian in question.
It’s like an anti-piracy device built in to the material. You have to add the persona (and thereby crediting the creator).
I don’t quite know what it all means, but if you make a thing that’s as utterly nickable and costless to steal as a great joke, you may as well get something out of it. Like Upton Sinclair. You might read some of his other stuff now.
Couple of thoughts:
1) Is there any way you can inject a bit more you into your more spreadable stuff?
2) And which of your lines only work when you’re behind it? Maybe that’s a signpost to your next joke**.
People used to tell me there was a guy on the circuit doing one of my jokes (good luck with that!). He’s probably in another line of work now.
I reckon if the joke was so steal-able, my mission should be to make the next thing I come up with more unique to me. It’s about the only thing I can control.
Don’t get me wrong, I would definitely try and sue if I thought I could get some dosh out of it, and I’m sure there’d be lawyer out there willing to take my money to try, even if it was futile.
It’s difficult to get a person to see the futility of a thing when their income depends on them not seeing it.
*There he is again! Sorry, regular readers!
**This is just my home-spun rubbish. Remember the Golden Rule – don’t listen to anyone!
I was talking to a nursery school teacher once. She said that when you see little kids playing, one of the the first things you hear them say is, “That’s not fair!”
If you’re reading this and you’re 12, tell me you’re not a little confused about how adults carry on and how they tell you to carry on. If you’re 30+ and you’ve had a lifetime of bosses, tell me you don’t have any feelings on co-operation versus coercion.
Those negative comments on YouTube are a creative act*, compared to just consuming. In fact, some people are at their most artistic when they’re running things down, and that’s a shame.
We’ve got no shortage of opinions, thoughts and feelings on a wide range of topics.
There is a shortage of people who can turn those thoughts and feelings into something useful to the rest of us who live outside the thinker’s head.
You’re an expert when it comes to your own experience of life. Paint us a picture, write us a story, yes, even do us a drum solo. Let’s hear it.
*Maybe the answer to not liking things is not trolling. Maybe it’s to build a more pleasing thing. Build a better YouTube channel, write a better joke. You’re already in front of the computer!
Here’s some useful advice I got before my first stand-up gig.
I was really nervous the day before.
I had tried some of my lines out on actual people. There was no Twitter back then. I knew from their reaction that my first gig would be carnage.
I was lucky enough to be able to ask Rich Hall for advice. I said to Rich, “Is there anything I should keep in mind when it’s all going tits-up?”
He said, “Yeah, remember this. EVERY. BODY. DIES…”
I tuned out for the rest of it. (He went on to say, “…Even me!”)
That’s not the useful advice I meant. After performing for a few years, I now totally get what he was preparing me for, and what a generous thing it was to say, but at the time it shook me.
As it turned out, angels intervened and my first open spot was cancelled due to someone in the venue having a heart-attack before I got there*. Phew.
My next bite at the cherry was three months later. This time, when I got nervous the day before, I asked a newish act friend of mine if he had any advice.
He said, “Yeah. Just stand there, get through your five minutes. If you get a couple of laughs, literally two, you’re doing really well”.
This really took the pressure off and helped me get through those hard early gigs.
Maybe, because my new act friend was having experiences a bit closer to my own, his advice helped. Maybe you have to travel a bit of road to be able to interpret the advice of someone so far into a journey you’re just starting out on.
Maybe the lesson is that everybody’s got a valid point of view, but no-one knows what you need.
Or maybe the lesson is cut down on fried food.
*(The show before my cancelled first gig was called “Cabaret Extreme”. Ironically, the flyer said “You’ll die laughing, or we’ll die trying”)
Christian Reilly 