The Curse Of The Creative

There are cer­tain rules that must never be broken.

One that has always puz­zled me is the unwrit­ten rule that says we may not use cat fur for cloth­ing. For some rea­son, cats are pro­tected by this iron-clad edict, despite the fact that their fur comes in many dif­fer­ent styles, and is exquis­itely soft and warm. There is a strict “hands-off” pol­icy when it comes to cats.

Similarly, we are not allowed to make jokes about the Blessed Virgin Mary or Joseph, ever, but espe­cially dur­ing the Christmas sea­son. In fact, we are pro­hib­ited from dis­cussing Christmas at all, unless we toe the party line and dust off the old tropes about Christmas office par­ties, Christmas shop­ping and over eat­ing dur­ing the Christmas sea­son. If we cross the line and delve into deeper and more chal­leng­ing themes, then we are deemed haters of Christmas and are not too far removed from those who would openly adorn them­selves in cat skins and have sex with dead people.

The only time that it is appro­pri­ate to don the prover­bial cat-fur lined gloves as a humor writer is when we are well-know come­di­ans, thereby ren­dered valid in the eyes of the world. Only then is it accept­able and funny to refer to the BVM as “bovine” and her hap­less hus­band Joseph as “brain dead,” a man who, let’s face it, did not dis­play very good logis­ti­cal skills when he decided to lead a hugely preg­nant woman into the desert on a donkey,

As a new humor writer, who has not yet been val­i­dated, I am once again grap­pling with bound­aries, an idea that I try to ignore so that I can go about the busi­ness of writ­ing funny and orig­i­nal things.

I have spent my entire adult life tak­ing the drub­bing that is meted out to “cre­ative types.” Being a born a cre­ative is like being born with unde­scended tes­ti­cles, or an extra breast that you are com­pelled to rou­tinely expose to the world. As a cre­ative pro­fes­sional you engage in the intel­lec­tual equiv­a­lent of pub­lic nudity on a reg­u­lar basis. Sometimes you look pretty hot, stand­ing there by your­self with your extra boob under a spot light, and some­times the light­ing isn’t so great, and you look like home­made shit.

Before I became a writer, I was a graphic designer and com­mer­cial artist. Being a graphic designer and com­mer­cial artist these days sucks the big hairy root. If I had a dol­lar for every clue­less non-creative exploiter who has asked me to design their logo  or web­site for free, I would be rich. A few years ago, I decided that if I was expected to work for free, which is what is expected of cre­ative peo­ple, I would do it  as long as I could exer­cise com­plete cre­ative free­dom and write what I want. My the­ory is, and has been, that if I write orig­i­nal things with­out sec­ond guess­ing myself, I will be a real writer who will some day get some traction.

What I dis­cov­ered when I made that deci­sion to be a devil-may-care humor writer, is that the only one hold­ing me back from total cre­ative free­dom is me. The first year that I had my web­site, I would sit in front of the com­puter  with the worst case of men­tal con­sti­pa­tion ever, a cre­ative paral­y­sis caused by visions of scan­dal­ized read­ers run­ning out into the street and rend­ing their clothes at the hor­ror of my words.

Then, one day last sum­mer I stum­bled upon a lit­tle blog writ­ten by a woman some­where out in California. When I found her, she was on a seri­ously funny tear. She was laugh-out-loud funny because she was fear­less. After read­ing her stuff for a few weeks, I grew my own  pair. At the time, I had about 5 vis­i­tors to my site who had only ended up there only because of my URL which includes the word “mistress.”

I toiled in my vac­uum for sev­eral more weeks and then with great trep­i­da­tion and plenty of anxiety-induced insom­nia, I started post­ing my crap on a humor writer’s group on LinkedIn. The world did not end, and since my design career was essen­tially nonex­is­tent, I had noth­ing to lose pro­fes­sion­ally. I did get some encour­ag­ing feed back, and I started to con­nect with other humor writers.

It took months before I revealed to my fam­ily that I had res­ur­rected my writ­ing web­site, which was a nec­es­sary con­se­quence of my ter­ri­fy­ing deci­sion to start post­ing links to my site on my Facebook page. I am not being hyper­bolic when I say I was ter­ri­fied to expose myself peo­ple I know on Facebook. Before tak­ing that dras­tic step, I first expunged the var­i­ous tan­gen­tial “friends” from my account, such as my son’s friend’s mother and the vice prin­ci­pal of their high school who I wor­ried about gra­tu­itously offend­ing. With my account whit­tled down to the peo­ple who I thought could han­dle my sense of humor, I posted my first link.

Yesterday I posted a story about Christmas in my home when I was grow­ing up, and how it came to be that we now avoid the whole thing and go on a fam­ily trip each year. Suffice it to say, there were no sugar plums or children’s eyes filled with won­der at the magic of the sea­son.  There were a few jokes about the BVM and alco­holism, and dis­carded Christmas trees on street cor­ners that reminded me of used con­doms fol­low­ing the col­lec­tive con­sumer orgasm that is our retail Christmas.

There was a com­plaint about the post. Shock was expressed at the idea that Mary, Mother of Jesus, was char­ac­ter­ized as bovine, despite the fact that she will­ingly fol­lowed Joseph (who we have already estab­lished was a lit­tle sim­ple) into the wild, and then gave birth in a barn. Inexplicably, a story that was entirely my own became a story about my offended reader, and I was filled with shame and mor­ti­fi­ca­tion at hav­ing given offense.

I am not exag­ger­at­ing when I say that the con­fi­dence that I have incre­men­tally acquired with each post is now back in the toi­let as a result of this one lit­tle com­plaint. I am a huge cre­ative wimp and I am seri­ously upset with myself.

My read­ers most def­i­nitely have a right to their opin­ions. As I said, I am a vet­eran cre­ative pro­fes­sional who has lived on a steady diet of rejec­tion for my entire adult career, so rot­ten toma­toes are noth­ing new to me. What I find so upset­ting is the fact that I am so spine­less that I imme­di­ately trashed the post from my own site and another site that I reg­u­larly con­tribute to.

How does one explain to a non-creative just how hard and iso­lat­ing and fright­en­ing it is to think up an orig­i­nal idea and smack it around until you think it is ready to make its debut? Those of us in the busi­ness of ideas  must first have the idea and then tune it up. There is no safety net. Obviously,  you are going to write humor and then try to get read­ers, you have be orig­i­nal, and risk-taking is the lifeblood of originality.

Writers need read­ers, just like an actor needs an audi­ence, but damn, some­times you just want to rough them up a lit­tle. You want to take them by the throat and say “hey, you, the smug guy on the right­eous high horse, when was the last time you put some­thing ‘out there’ or took a risk?” Being born cre­ative is like being born gay—it’s not some­thing you can turn off and on at will.

To my fel­low humor writ­ers who aspire to some mea­sure of pro­fes­sional suc­cess, here’s my advice, the same advice I give to myself and am inca­pable of fol­low­ing: The story you write is your own story and is just a chas­sis on which to hang your jokes. Be brave. As long as you aren’t  being libelous, it’s all good. Remember that. And help me to remem­ber it too.