Auteurs Starve, Performers Thrive
Does it still count as "Coffee with Toastmaster John Scalzi" if nobody drinks any? Scalzi himself is repulsed by the stuff, because any beverage you have to load with sugar and creamer just to gag down has to be evil. He guzzles Coke Zero instead, even at 10 AM.
It was an intimate gathering of about a dozen people, set around a long conference table with very comfy chairs and Scalzi in the William Randolph Hearst seat.
Scalzi's current project -- which he was playing hooky from writing to come to the convention at all -- is ZOE'S TALE, set in his OLD MAN'S WAR universe. His deadline loomed and he confessed to being a bit stressed-out about it. His editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, was actually at the convention as well, which meant he couldn't harangue Scalzi about not working on it, because obviously he wouldn't be editing it anyway. I'm sure there were meaningful looks exchanged.
It does my soul good to hear experienced writers talking about how deadlines still plague them -- Scalzi, Justine and Scott all have "I'm just trying to finish the damn book" threads on their blogs, Scott's involving a hard-drive crash in the closing moments of EXTRAS -- and not just amateurs find their muse not returning calls in the eleventh hour.
He did have a lot of things to say about being a "performer". There are and always have been two kinds of creative people: auteurs and performers. Auteurs create something, polish it for twenty years, then release it into the world as a shining, perfect pearl. Performers show up at the club every night for those twenty years and perform: trying out new material, bringing back stuff that's worked in the past, bombing, and killing.
Before the advent of copyright law early in the 20th century, auteurs starved. With nothing to prevent somebody from copying your masterwork and selling their own cheaper "version", there were no guarantees the author would even sell off all their first run copies. Songwriters didn't earn royalties when their songs were performed, unless they performed them. Shakespeare had to have plays constantly in production to keep food on the table. Dickens serialized his novels in the newspaper so he'd get a weekly paycheck.
Scalzi's blog was a topic of interest, since most of us were as familiar with it as we were with his published work. He started it several years before beginning his fiction career, mainly to get himself accustomed to daily writing. He's well-known for being the first guy to serialize a novel on his blog, then have it picked up by a traditional publisher.1
Over the course of years the blog built a following until today it has roughly 40,000 unique visitors a day. Which is a ton to us regular folks but nothing compared to pop stars or movie stars recognized by millions. Fame for "the rest of us" has evolved beyond even Andy Warhol's 15 minutes. Nowadays, Scalzi says, everyone is famous to 15 people. Neal Stephenson2 likens himself to the mayor of Des Moines, Iowa: big fish in a little pond.
Scalzi considers his blog a public performance. He keeps in mind that he's writing for an audience, not just personal entertainment. He's working, in other words.
At the same time, people meet him in person and are surprised he's "not like you are on the blog."3 People tell him they wished their children were as well-behaved as his daughter is on his blog. He says he does, too.
To steal a line from William Goldman,4 Scalzi's blog is "The Good Parts Version." He leaves the boring stuff, the dreary stuff out. Goldman also said5 "movies are about compression." You leave the blah, blah, blah out. That's why you see a cop say to his partner "I don't know, let's go ask him" and then cut immediately to them knocking on the guy's front door instead of showing them sitting in traffic or circling the block looking for a parking space.
Next up, somebody finally mentions Joss Whedon on a panel and the story behind this blog's subtitle.