the pretty white ships that i’ve been dreaming of

Posted on By Wil

I haven’t had a theatrical agent for years, so I don’t have as many auditions or opportunities to work as an actor as I once did. I have a fantastic manager, though, who always gets me into quality auditions, where I have a real shot at booking the job.[1]

My manager and I have an understanding that I’m primarily focused on writing at the moment, so he can put his time and energy into his other clients who are full-time actors, while keeping an eye out for parts like NUMB3RS, where I have a better than average shot to nail the audition.[2] This arrangement has worked out really well for both of us.

Last week, he got me an audition for a wonderful role on [awesome show redacted]. I had less than a day to prepare it but I did my best, and when I got into the room . . . I sucked. Oh, man how I sucked. I think the stink of my reading is still sitting in that building, a week after I left. In fact, if you see hazmat teams in Studio City, now you know why.

Luckily for us, the casting director was willing to give good, honest, useful feedback on my audition. The bottom line? He felt like I was really “acting” when I was in there. My performance wasn’t organic, it wasn’t honest, it wasn’t real. In other words, it wasn’t very good.

When my manager relayed this to me, it was like Billy Zabka swept my leg. Getting caught acting was one of my worst fears realized. Good actors don’t get caught acting, bad actors get caught acting. Ergo . . . well, I’d rather not say it out loud.

For the next couple of days, I spent a lot of time thinking about how that happened, and I had to face an uncomfortable reality: maybe I was so out of practice, and so focused on writing (instead of acting), maybe I just don’t have what it takes to be a successful on-camera actor anymore.

I had a real crisis on my hands, but before I could call my manager and discuss it yesterday, he called me with another audition.

“Okay,” I thought, “I’ll just go on this audition, and after the holiday weekend, I’ll see if we can have lunch, and face this reality together.”

I prepared the audition, keenly aware of all the things I’d done wrong with the [awesome show redacted] audition. I went through all the things I’ve written about acting and auditioning, and listened to a lot of my own advice and experience. I decided that I’d get in, do my thing, and get out.[3] I thought about a number of conversations I’ve recently had with a friend of mine who just booked a similar role on [very very very awesome show redacted], and applied some of his decision making to my own. I kept it simple, and I never thought, “Well, this is it. If this one doesn’t work, I’m hanging up my dance belt.”[4] Instead, I just prepared my take on this character, made some deliberate-but-risky choices, and went to work.

When I was in the room, I didn’t think about the people there, I didn’t think about what was at stake (directly or indirectly) and I just focused on the person I was reading with. I didn’t do anything fancy, just gave them my simple-but-deliberate take on this guy.

I felt better than I felt after I sucked out loud last week. I didn’t know if I nailed it, but I’d made my deliberate-but-risky choices, and I’d committed to them entirely. Whether I got the job or not, at least I had that to take home with me and keep in a box on the shelf for the weekend.

A few hours after I got home, my manager called me.

“Well, I have some feedback,” he said.

“That was fast,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess they wanted you to know right away that you’re hired.”

“Really?!” I said. I always say that, even though I know that my manager is never going to call me up, tell me a got a job, and then say, “Ha! PSYKE!”

“Yes, really.” He said.

So I squeed, and he outlined the deal for me. I get guest-starring billing at the beginning of the show on my own card, I work for eight days, and — best of all — I’ll earn enough to qualify for SAG’s “good” health insurance for at least another year.

I can’t say anything about the role, because I don’t have permission from the producers and the network, but I think I can safely reveal that it’s for Criminal Minds on CBS, and it’s a part that I am going to love bringing to life.

There is a lesson here about not giving up. There’s a lesson here about learning from your mistakes and applying that knowledge, instead of wallowing in self-pity. I’m not pointing that out because I think anyone else needs to hear it; I’m pointing it out because I’m going to forget it sooner or later, and I want to remember it the next time I go searching through my writing for advice from myself.

One more thing: when I had the audition last week, I did my best, even though my best was crap. When I did my audition yesterday, I did my best, and it was much better than what “my best” was just a week ago. Someone once said to me that we should always do our best, and understand and accept that “our best” will vary from time to time. I’m glad I remembered that.

And now, footnotes:

[1] That may not make sense. Let me explain: pretty much every agent I ever had would submit me on as many projects as possible, whether I was really right for the role or not. I guess the logic here is that you get more chances to score when you take more shots, which makes a certain amount of sense, but in practice is pretty frustrating for actors who keep getting sent out for roles that they have no chance of booking. (I realize that, to actors who are struggling for any auditions, this seems like a wonderful problem to have, but it really isn’t.)

[2]Years ago, I took an extensive and comprehensive marketing class, where I learned a whole bunch of stuff about how to market myself as an actor, and how to find breakout roles that are supported by five or six things that define my personality — my essences, in the language of this course. My manager looks for roles that match up with my essences, while a larger team of agents may just look for parts that call for a white male, 30-36.

[3]This is one of the valuable things I learned while writing sketch comedy.

[4]What? You don’t wear a dance belt to every audition?

in which wil clarifies something for artists and designers

Posted on By Wil

I’m speaking to professional artists and designers. If that’s not you, skip this and listen to Leif Garrett.

Okay. Earlier today, I said:

It’s years out of date, so I’ve been considering either closing or updating the WWdN Cafepress store. I can’t design for shit, though, and even if I could, I don’t have time to do it.

Rather than just close it down, I thought I’d pose a question here: I’m sure there are lots of good designers and creative people who read my blog, so if I had a contest to design things like shirts and stickers and stuff, would anyone be interested in participating?

The winner would get a signed Happiest Days hardback and credit + links to the winner’s website, blog, store, whatever.

Response is mostly positive, but some designers were offended by my suggestion to do this thing as a contest. After reading their comments, I totally understand why, especially after reading the links to No Spec that they shared with me. I didn’t think about it until after I read those comments, but I get the feeling that contest is a loaded term in the design community, and though I spoke to this in a comment on my earlier post, I want to be really clear about my thinking, so I’m posting much of that reply in this entry, so RSS readers who don’t read or post comments can see it (I’ve also edited and expanded upon it a bit):

I’d never write something for free, unless I was getting some other form of compensation. One of the main reasons I stopped doing live sketch comedy shows was the poor investment:return ratio on time and money. There was a time when it was totally worth it to me to get nothing more than the joy of a performance out of the whole thing, but over time, something in me changed. It wasn’t adequate compensation anymore, so I stopped doing it.

People ask me to contribute to various blogs all the time, just because it would be neat; I always decline, because I write here, and for other places that pay me for my time and energy. But if I got a chance to do something like be an unpaid boingboing editor for a week, I’d do that in a heartbeat, for obvious reasons. This is why I thought I’d offer publicity and a signed book as compensation.

I didn’t even consider that it would offend, but thinking about it now, I totally respect that some (most?) designers would feel disrespected or demeaned by my idea, and I totally support and understand those designers who choose not to submit designs to me. You absolutely deserve to get paid for your time and effort, and if what I’m offering as compensation isn’t worth it to you, I completely understand.

See, if I had the money to pay someone for the work, I’d do that, but since the store isn’t a real big part of my business model (selling books is) I don’t have any budget to spend on it. To be clear: if this sort of thing offends you, please accept my apology; it’s not my intention to diminish you or your profession.

Contest is the wrong term, I guess. Maybe if I said that I’d be willing to trade credit, links, promotion, and an autographed book, it would be less offensive?

I want to be really, really, pedantically clear here: I totally respect the training and experience that goes into being a successful artist and designer. It was never my intention to demean anyone’s work or experience, take advantage of anyone, or exploit anyone.

So, let’s try this again, in a different way: I’m considering revamping the WWdN store (the alternative being just closing it down) but I don’t have the time or skill to do anything worthwhile with it on my own. I can’t afford to pay hundreds of dollars or more to commission designs. So here’s my idea: if you’d like to submit something to me, kind of like what Jonathan Coulton did recently, I’ll trade you exposure and publicity, as well as an autographed hardback of The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

Comments are closed on this post, but can be left on my post from earlier today, where there’s already an interesting conversation happening.

the joys of weird audio

Posted on By Wil

I have a folder of mp3 files that’s called ‘weird audio.’ Most of it is stuff I ganked from WMFU’s 365 Days Project, but there’s also a few gigs of bizarre and rare recordings I found during several late night trips down the vinyl sharity blog rabbit hole.

Mostly, I chop these things up to make RFB Mixtapes, but from time to time, I put the folder on shuffle play, and enjoy a truly weird experience, including music from Telly Savalas, interviews with Burt Reynolds, strange commercials and PSAs, and tons and tons of 1950s and 1960s Hi-Fi muzak.

Today, I shuffled the folder for background music while I prepared an audition, and stopped for a five surreal minutes while I listened to this recording of Leif Garrett welcoming you, lucky 1970s teenage girl, into his fanclub.

I’m not sure what I like more: how obviously Leif Garrett is phoning it in (it sounds like he didn’t even bother to read the ‘personal welcome’ someone wrote for him before recording it) or how clearly you can hear him flipping the pages while he reads it.

I wonder if the poor hapless soul who wrote this thing ever listened to it, and cried out, "My words! My beautiful words! He ruined them!"

in which wil asks the readers a question

Posted on By Wil

It’s years out of date, so I’ve been considering either closing or updating the WWdN Cafepress store. I can’t design for shit, though, and even if I could, I don’t have time to do it.

Rather than just close it down, I thought I’d pose a question here: I’m sure there are lots of good designers and creative people who read my blog, so if I had a contest to design things like shirts and stickers and stuff, would anyone be interested in participating?

The winner would get a signed Happiest Days hardback and credit + links to the winner’s website, blog, store, whatever.

I would probably use the “Hey, that’s awesome!” method of choosing a winner, which may lead to two or even three designs making it into the store. All winning designs would get the same book + credit + link prize, of course.

I’d have to find some contest rules to use somewhere, but it would probably be one of those things where you hold onto the rights to your submission, and I get a royalty-free license to use it commercially until the sun burns out, etc., so it’s kind of like work for hire, I guess.

I don’t know if this is the best idea in the world, so let me know what you think in the comments, mmmkay?

bustin up my brains for the words

Posted on By Wil

Did I mention that I’m writing a full-on science fiction novella that may even grow into a novel? It’s a noir kinda thing, set in a dystopian future Los Angeles. (It’s not Blade Runner. That’s the first thing people think when I say it, but I’m keenly aware of that, and I’ve taken the appropriate world-building steps to make sure it doesn’t go there.) It’s been ridiculously fun to write, which is good, because the joy I’m experiencing while I discover new and entertaining things about my world and my characters is (barely) holding the voices of Self Doubt and all of its friend Performance Anxiety at bay.

A lot of what I’m going to write in this post is probably obvious to more experienced writers, and will feel like real duh stuff to a lot of you, but I hadn’t really thought about any of this stuff until a couple weeks ago, and I thought that I’d write it anyway, because it may be useful to someone else out there. I’m going to talk about the differences I’ve discovered between non-fiction and fiction, and one of the key differences between short and long form writing. Hopefully, sharing my own experiences will help dispel fear for some other newbie writers.

In narrative non-fiction, I know the entire story, and when I find a lull, I just look around in my memory for something that can keep the story interesting until the next thing happens. I know how it’s going to end, so I have a certain amount of security while I’m writing, because I know where I’m going.

In fiction, I have no idea what’s going to happen until it’s actually happening. I mean, I have a basic outline, and I know that I have to get the guy from point A to point B, but everything that happens along the way is a mystery to me until I write it. This is really scary at first, but eventually it becomes pretty cool.

I remember asking Roger Avary how he ended up with the Gimp in Pulp Fiction. He told me that he crashed the cars together, had Marcellus chase Butch until Butch found a store to duck into, and . . . well, there was a Gimp in the basement. I was inspired by that, and I’ve never been afraid to let my imagination go nuts and lead me to unexpected places when I’m creating stories. (Note: so far, I haven’t found a Gimp in any of my stories, but I suspect that he’s sleeping, somewhere, waiting to be woken up.)

In some regards, fiction is more fun than narrative non-fiction, because I can do whatever I want; I’m not constrained by what really happened, so when I think, “That was cool, but wouldn’t it be better if this happened?” I can go ahead and write that. For example, in this story I’m working on now, I had my main character, Charlie, walking up the street on his way to someplace important, and when he stopped at a red light, he was suddenly surrounded by a group of teenagers who tried to mug him. How he dealt with that revealed a lot to me (and the reader, eventually) about who Charlie is. I didn’t know what he was going to find between his office and his destination when he left, but I trusted my brain to kick something interesting or entertaining (or both, if I was really lucky). It took a few fitful stops and starts, but I eventually ended up with something cool, because I was willing to find the Gimp, if that’s where the scene wanted to go.

Not having a clear memory to draw from can be super intimidating, though. Yesterday, I knew that Charlie was going to this building, but I wasn’t sure what he’d find when he got there. It’s not the most important scene in the story, but it’s something I need to have so I can logically move the plot forward. I had a couple of different ideas, so I chose one of them and wrote it down to see how it worked. It was a decent scene, with some nice dialog and a few turns of phrase (noir, it seems, is all about the turns of phrase, like, “The only place you could find an honest cop in this town was in a history book at the central library.”) but it didn’t feel right to me. In fact, Charlie actually said to me, “This isn’t what I expected to find. . .” and I knew it was wrong; I’d have to throw it out, and start over.

I went for a run, and after a couple of miles, I figured out why it was wrong. By the time I got back to the house, I’d figured out what to write in its place.

Want to see how different the two bits were? Here’s part of what I wrote first:

His work address lead me to a two story tan colored building with an empty loading dock down the right wall. It was in an industrial park that didn’t have too many tenants. The parking lot was empty, short weeds growing up through cracks in the asphalt. As I crossed it, I saw there were several flyers jammed between the smoked glass doors in front.

Where this guy Charlie is looking for works isn’t that important, because [spoiler]. But having Charlie find an empty building just wasn’t right, and when he told me that, I rewrote it:

A few minutes later, I walked down a well-landscaped path toward a five story mirrored glass building. A few workers with badges affixed to their shirts stood in the shade of a tree, their eyes staring into infinity while they talked to each other through cochlear IM devices. They ignored me as I passed.

Glass doors opened automatically, and I entered a spacious lobby in a two-story open atrium.

Neither one of those excerpts is final draft material, but I’m willing to share them to make my point. Those are two completely different settings, aren’t they? I mean, they couldn’t be more different, unless I put on my robe and wizard hat in one of them. Maybe when I’m more experienced, I know that the first way was wrong, and not invest half a day writing a scene that I can’t use, but I learned a lot from the effort, and I think I can rework the first try into a different part of the story later on, so it wasn’t a total waste.

What was my point here? Oh, when I recall something that really happened, I try to capture the feeling and as many details as I feel are necessary to bring it to life, so I pull those out of my memory. It’s totally different when I’m making something up, because I’m pulling them out of my imagination, and though the uncertainty is a little scary from time to time, it’s also tremendously liberating. (I just realized that this is a lot like Neil Gaiman’s Trudging Through Fog thing. See? This is all real duh territory, isn’t it?)

Okay, this is way too long and rambling already, so I’m going to wrap up with the key distinction I’ve discovered between short form and long form writing.

The hardest thing to get used to is working all day and not having a completely finished work that I can publish. Some days, I get 500 words and others I’ll get up to 3000, but my target is between 30000 and 40000 words for this story, so it’s impossible to finish it in one go. I’ve had to retrain myself to be happy with different milestones than I’m used to, and — hardest of all — I have to trust myself to keep on going without any outside feedback until the thing is done, when I’ll find out if it’s worth a rewrite, or just a good learning experience that gets filed away in Time Machine.

I’m excited about this story, though, and that’s carrying me through every day, especially the frustrating ones. I want to know what happens, and I want to see how Charlie handles all the obstacles I know I have in store for him. The world I’ve built is fun to explore, too, though I have to be very careful not to get seduced by high concept, big idea stuff that distracts from the story.

Anyway, Charlie has a meeting to attend, where he’s going to learn something pretty important, so I guess I should stop writing here and get back to the future.