Day 146: An Elegy For The Line
Five Things I'll Try To Take With Me From This Miserable, Productive Strike
It’s over.
We don’t know the details yet, but it’s over. Considering NegComm seemed ready to go to 2025, I have to assume we’re going to be pleasantly surprised as the details of the deal start to leak. Congratulations to them. And holy shit, does that relief hit hard. Considering I’m at the tail end of a gnarly case of the shingles, I’m gonna keep this a lot shorter than I was intending.
This, I warn you, is going to be as close as I ever come to a Hallmark Substack Post.
I’m not sure what to call the feeling of the last few days. Ever since the Negotiating Committee headed back to The Starcourt Mall this week, it’s felt like we were done… and along with that feeling, some kind of new and mucky dread-fog has settled onto my brain.
Not quite Oh no, the strike is ending.
Hell no, not that.
More like: You’ve learned a lot. Don’t forget, Patrick.
I’m a sucker for HBO’s Band of Brothers. In the early aughts, while I was in graduate school, it snuck onto my TV screen alongside the English version of The Office, Deadwood, The Wire, and the last season of The Sopranos. This ragtag all-star collection of TV story treasure— some watched out of order, always watched alongside NBA playoffs on the impossibly heavy RCA that would one day, when I left Ithaca, be the heavy thing responsible for the slipped disc in my back that fucks with me to this day— coalesced into the case television writing stealthily made for itself, to my subconscious at least, as a viable career alternative to teaching creative writing.
Donald Antrim and A.M. Holmes and Jayne Anne Phillips and Zadie Smith were still the people straining and scraping at the divine, and I still wanted to be one of them, if I could somehow find a way, but… damn. That episode where Chris beats up that pedophile, in the alley, in S3 of The Wire, sure had that feeling, too.
This was coincidentally happening just at the time I was having to admit that Novelist, in America, in the twenty-first century, was likely going to be impossible for me, and I was likely going to need to be a teacher, if I wanted to be a writer.
I’m too out of touch with the fiction marketplace to know if this is still true, but back then, even to a 25 year-old, it was pretty obvious that the only way to avoid teaching, but make it as a novelist, would be to a) be independently wealthy, b) marry someone who was okay supporting you, or c) score the huge first one- or two-book deal for $500,000, then hope that your first finished books, incubated with the care and perfectionism and isolation an MFA could provide you, would break through. That would mean enough money, probably, for a sane-feeling life until 30, with enough space for a third book, all without feeling the awful specter of “Is this book going to make money?” infecting your imagination, and all fully ignoring the question, “Have I actually lived enough to have anything worth writing about?” 😬
(Just like we’ve had to do throughout the strike, I feel compelled to pull over for a second to repesat something that the brilliant Hannah Tinti, founder of One Story magazine and a recipient of a large-ish early deal for her first two books, emphatically said to me at a bar in 2004, after One Story became the first publication to publish something I wrote: “Patrick, you realize this is not a lot of money…” She was right, and I pretended I understood, even though I was imagining swimming in a Scrooge McDuck coffer of bullion as she said it. $500k, after agent and taxes, spread out over seven years (23-30), was a $35,000/year job. You could count on one hand the number of twenty-something American novelists who were granted this stay of execution every year, and you could also usually count, on the same hand, the number of authors for whom an early deal like this became a mindfuck in and of itself.)
$500k for a first inning, first up-to-bat rocketship to start your lit career, though? Good deal if you could get it. Miracle deal, really.
I didn’t get it.
I say this with zero irony or ire: That was for people from N+1, whose taste was watermelon-halving-scimitar-sharp by twenty-three. That was for people more obviously unique and electrifyingly on the page— scarily talented and deserving minds, like Karen Russell’s— right out of the box. (I want someone to give Karen $100 million and ask her to build a spaceship and see what happens.) That was for people with stories inside of them— new stories, for a new century, told in a new way, by legitimately new voices— that the world hadn’t yet heard, but which the world nevertheless needed.
I was not ready for anything like that when I was twenty-five years old, nor did I deserve it, nor did I need it. I thought I was, did, and did. I thought the same thing when I spent seven hours a day beside my pool, the summer before college, reading The Lord of The Rings while high, preparing to move to Madison, where college would be the same. Life was as simple as the vision of good and evil in Samwise Gamgee’s eyes. Was I independently wealthy? Not at all, but my parents had money, and that in and of itself was a backstop that kept me from ever feeling real socioeconomic desperation. I was a straight white six-foot-two dude from the Midwest who was good at golf and pleasing bosses, who understood inherently the certain code of white corporate spaces (because they were made for me), but who was also deftly political, but in an invisible way, as only the child of an addict could be.
This meant I was going to be able to work, in America, always, regardless of my qualifications, forever; I was always going to be able to work, in America, because I came out of the box not armed with unbelievable prose, but armed with an unbelievable ability to service narcissistic men without ending up in their crosshairs; I came equipped with an uncanny ability to tell not just when someone was lying to me, but why they were, and the ability to fold that into myself without taking offense, and also the Machiavellian skill of letting the liar believe I hadn’t noticed the lie; I came with a gentle sense of humor pre-installed, but one that could turn shockingly satirical and ironic, on a dime, depending on how dry the most powerful person in the room was; my terrifyingly weird imagination fritzed and showed itself in private; my extroverted dinnertime self was like a vaudeville show, designed to distract whoever was dangerous (my father) and delight whoever was his victim (my mother and my sister); I came armed with a disposition that didn’t need validation from others, because I was busy with the reality in front of me, and I had plans for the future. I was fine hiding everything about myself until I escaped my origin.
I guess I had always known that because of these traits, I would always be able to get special treatment, fast-tracks, and greased rails from the American power system, and whatsmore, I could pretend not to notice, forever and ever, all the way to an undeserved six-figure income, which I could ingest for a decade, and after which I could suddenly reveal, having never taken a risk in my life, that I was an artist, too. But a better, more honest, less calculating part of me knew, too, that I’d be dead before thirty, spiritually, if I went down any road like that. By the time I was twenty, and in college, I had found my people. I was game to write humiliatingly bad poetry and know it was bad, but keep going. I knew I’d probably be a failure in the world. I didn’t care, because I was going to be an artist. My business was making new worlds. Sometimes, people paid big money for that.
Back to Ithaca. It turned out fabulist short stories about food scientists and C+ short stories about young men failing to communicate well about their emotions did not warrant big money. Thank God, because I had a long way to go. The miracle of my life was to even get into Cornell’s MFA program, and I’m still confused about how this happened. I got in off the wait-list, having been rejected outright from the four other schools I applied to. Cornell only took four fiction students, and so I had assumed “Wait List” meant I was #875 on the list. I came uncomfortably close to the reality that I didn’t have jack shit to offer in the winter of 2002, even after finally writing two short stories that felt kinda good, for the fist time ever, and sending them out to MFA programs. That March I fled New York City buried inside a tomb of depression, only to find out a few weeks later, while lying catatonic in my childhood bed back in Green Bay, that I was actually the first name on Cornell’s waitlist. I was #5, and it looked like one of their picks was going to Columbia. His name was Gary Shteyngart, whoever that was; all I cared about was that strangers in a room very far away had decided that my story about an eccentric, suicidal novelist who lived in the woods of Wisconsin was kinda funny, and that I might make a good writer one day.
Getting into Cornell was my life-changing miracle. What I got on my way out of Cornell, while not the big lit contract, was also a small miracle— an great agent, first and foremost, just starting her career. And then, a few months later, my first book of short stories bought by Vintage Originals for a $5000 advance. Maybe more importantly than that MFA credential itself, with that book deal, I got a new stamp of legitimacy. I’m grateful to this day that I got such a gift; it might I got to avoid the next awful step of the Modern Fiction Career Algorithm: if you haven’t published a book, you don’t exist, and the longer you don’t exist, the less likely you’ll be ever to exist.
That’s some dark shit.
Back to me sitting in my apartment in Ithaca in 2005, eating Doritos and watching Band of Brothers, because I swear to god this is going somewhere: I was happy.
I liked teaching very much, even though I was a little worried what it would do to my ability to write, long-term. I also had no idea how to write for the screen and had no access to people in TV. So as I watched all those great shows and was astounded by how moving they were, it didn’t really even occur to me that I could go write for TV one day. That I could make a show, or shows. That I might one day be in charge of a lot of people, and more miraculously, know what to say when they looked at me for answers.
Back then, the realization was just that TV, for all intents and purposes, had gotten as good as literary fiction.
The culture thought so, but more importantly for my own future choices, my taste (always delayed!) thought so. Writing for TV, even on someone else’s show, really would count as writing.
I wanted to be a writer.
I was not a good critic and was never going to make a living down that road.
I probably couldn’t support myself with fiction.
I didn’t know it yet, but this insight about TV meant there was one more way (and honestly, maybe just one way) for me to be okay.
In the last episode of Band of Brothers, then-Major Winters, after his impressive rise throughout the episodes, is reflecting on the odd feeling of peace while awaiting orders and fielding job offers in Austria.
What’s next? Keep going? Go work for a friend, out of danger? Go be a farmer? Winters seems aware that there are no wrong choices, and yet they’re all wrong choices; he’s done his war and he’s fought honorably. He’s made his mistakes and tried to atone. He’s survived. What value is there in him, anymore, now that the world’s changed? Which direction is right?
I’m guessing a lot of people feel like E10 Winters, tonight.
The strike has informed the mood of the last five months, tremendously so, but for me, personally, it’s only been one phenomenon in a cluster of things, all of the events adding up to a liquified reality, perfect for either self-reflection or mental collapse. Of course this is reminiscent of the pandemic, when it felt like all our old agreements and pacts and unions were suddenly on trial, but for me, personally, I was working during the pandemic, and I had a goal bigger than Survive The Pandemic. It was Make Station Eleven.
Crazy as that sounds, this is the beauty and horror of our business; we subsume all of ourselves into the greater problem, and in so doing, we get to escape reality while we’re at work. This is where what Brian Eno calls “scenius” comes from— it’s the particular ability human beings have of mind-melding with one another to create a kind of super-computer. A “we” more powerful than any genius could ever be. A “we” that’s big enough to carry our individual pains away, too.
Madmen and Madwomen chasing that drug is what makes great things come out of Hollywood, and it’s also the thing that makes working artists vulnerable to all the things the WGA has been insisting on naming, and changing. It’s hard to even talk about such things without sounding precious, and then immediately being infantilized for the misstep; that’s where all the armor comes from. A lot of times, that armor feels far too heavy to carry for the journey. Artists are supposed to travel light.
That’s why collective action is the only answer for this very unique industry, and that’s why 146 days of unity is required to even make a dent. The product we make isn’t a want, it’s a need. The process of making it is bizarre. And while you might roll your eyes at saying that its production is dangerous— assembly lines are fucking dangerous, being a cop or a soldier is a dangerous job— it’s dangerous. Trust me. If you don’t, trust everyone else. We need help, and we need to be protected. We get paid money to enter a trance, and we need agents, each other, and yes, even our employers to understand that it’s harmful to slit our throats and steal from our pockets while we’re in this trance. Even if we don’t react.
I don’t like asking for help. In fact, it’s a problem. You know what I like? Lists. Bolded headers. Takeaways.
I need this help from the WGA.
As I said above, the strike informed this summer, but it was one of many things. In June, an old friend of mine— an old writer friend— was hit by a car crossing the street in Raleigh, North Carolina, and sustained a massive head injury. He was in Raleigh for work; he was a fellow copywriter with me, back in Chicago, at Razorfish, from 2009-2012. When I left to go work on The Bridge and chase another way of making money as a writer, Scott stayed, and thrived. We were in a fiction writing group together, and Scott’s stories were just as good as mine; more importantly, his outright glee and enthusiasm for stories— whatever you handed in, whatever you were trying— was infectious. He would text in the middle of the night, and you could almost feel his wide eyes and smile at a sentence of yours he’d just read. Scott always manifested that glee I felt when I wrote something good; he made it real with his laughter, with hopping up and down in the gray muck on the Chicago sidewalk because of the audacity of a line. Scott turned my sentences into human joy.
The problem with fiction is you think you’re doing it alone. But you’re not. You always need Scott, too. Every story is a we.
Watching Scott’s slow recovery, and his attempt to free himself from the prison of aphasia— a writer’s nightmare, a place where all words are scrambled, and where the letters inside of words themselves scramble on him before he can get a sentence out— has coincided almost perfectly with this hot summer of labor. Even if we get the deal right, it’s felt, Scott’s brain’s fucked up. And he wasn’t even in the WGA. He didn’t make it to the WGA. (Not that he even lived in a framework like this… all I’ve gotten from Scott, over the years, are strings of texts with huge runs of exclamation marks about any show I’ve worked on or created.)
Every job is dangerous. Every day is dangerous.
I bring Scott up because he’s operated as a larger context for me, again, during this time of being shut down, reflecting on “work”. As Miranda might put it:
I published that scene on its own at two o’clock in the morning on Day 2 of shooting Station Eleven, mid-January of 2020, just as we were beginning to hear about the pandemic. I couldn’t think about a catastrophe that might be coming, because I was inside of another one. 103 was deeply unstable. We’d prepped something for four months that was gone, and now… a new version of the episode, scene by scene, with every executive watching. I didn’t even know if the words of the scene made sense. I hadn’t slept in two days, and I was busted; for all I knew, it was the last scene I’d write as a showrunner before being fired.
Our AD Jenn Wilkinson was just done printing out the new sides when I got to rehearsal. I listened to the actors do the scene, and everyone pretended this wasn’t batshit, to give just the new ending of an episode out while we were shooting it. I had a couple of ideas. Still didn’t know.
And that’s the moment I let go, like my friend Maggie had let go when she was pinned under a canoe, and the words went into the hands of Hiro Murai, and Danielle Deadwyler, and Tim Simons, and Christian Sprenger, and everyone else who was committed to making the show work, and I watched as they took over, and they made it real, and special. Scenius.
They, not me. Scenius,
And when the scene was done, we had a show.
If Station Eleven is a gravitational system, everything orbits this 103 scene.
It’s the sun.
Last night, I wrote down a list of all the things I want to do to never get back into such a place of desperation.
That’s why I say “elegy”. As long and brutal as the strike has been, it’s also been a pause that’s felt safe. Like an oasis. This profession— and mostly the capitalist systems intersecting right on top of this profession— have made it quite dangerous.
I had dug my own hole, leading up to that situation on Station Eleven, that night, but I was new, and in a lot of cases, didn’t know any better.
At first I was going to go through these five things, the things I’ve learned during the strike, and talk about them all, but honestly, I think they’re self-explanatory, so here’s the list:
Take Care of Yourself Before You Take Care of Work
Make Friends With The Internet
Stay Friends With Your Friends
Listen
Fuck Around
I usually use my children’s art as scrap paper, so here’s the list, irl:
Those are five good lessons, hard-earned, and ones to remember.
Scott would like them. They can’t help him, at the moment, but that’s because he got run over by someone in a minivan while he was at work.
That’s a list of five things I felt were obvious, to everyone, when we were out on the line.
Maybe most importantly for me, personally: that’s a list of five things 25 year-old me needed to hear back in Ithaca, too.
You know you’re on to something when the when doesn’t matter. Nor the who. True things stay true, whenever. Day 1, Day 146, and tomorrow.
Don’t forget, Patrick.
Don’t forget the line.