Business Hat

Great Writing Advice Learned from Pro-Wrestling, Part One

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Unless you’re a wrestling fan, you’ve probably never heard of Al Snow. He was a wrestler, and a damn good one, and he’s spent years behind the scenes training new wrestlers and talking about wrestling and generally holding forth on the state of the industry. Basically, Al Snow is a smart wrestler whose fond of a good rant, and as a fan of wrestling in general I’m okay with paying twenty bucks for an entire DVD full of his rantings.

Some of his rants about wrestling contain remarkably good advice about writing.

For starters, Al Snow never lets you loose sight of the fact that wrestling is a business. It may be fake – it’s always been fake – but the wrestlers job is to get in there and put on a match that allows fans to suspend their disbelief and buy into the illusion that it’s real. This is no different to fiction, at all, and it’s one of the reasons I’m always perplexed when people look down on pro-wrestling.

In Al Snow’s wrestling world, “good” is less valuable than “profitable.” He looks at Wrestlemania III, arguably the biggest and most-watched wrestling show of all time, and challenges the conventional wisdom of wrestling critics that suggests that the technically brilliant match between Ricky Steamboat and Randy Savage was better than the headline match between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. The critics aren’t wrong. You can find both that matches on YouTube if you search, and there’s no doubt that watching the athletic display of the former is far more interesting than the plodding actions of the latter.

But people paid to see Hulk Hogan – a charismatic bodybuilder with a five-move arsenal – bodyslam Andre the Giant and that makes it the best match on the card in Al Snow’s world. Hulk-Andre made the company money, it kept people coming back for more, and it had casual fans invested even if the hardcore wrestling fans would rather watch the guys in the midcard.

Replace “Hulk-Andre” with “Twilight” and you’re probably seeing the analogy I’m making. I may not enjoy Twilight as a reader, I may find it enormously problematic, but that doesn’t mean I want it to ease existing. By some objective standards it may qualify as the best book in publishing – it’s not only a blockbuster that generated new readers, but it’s now spawned a second blockbuster (equally maligned) in the form of 50 Shades of Grey.

It’s all very well to get caught up in the art of writing, or in producing the best work you can, but at the end of the day writing and publishing is a business, and business has a pretty useful way of figuring out who wins and who loses.

If you’ve got the most money, you’re the winner on that day. If you’ve got the most money and people are *hanging out* to see what you do next, then you’re the big winner overall.

Given the choice of being Ricky Steamboat or Hulk Hogan, I’d still probably choose to be Steamboat. He was smaller, faster, more  athletic, and over the course of his career he drew plenty of money as a wrestler. People paid to see him wrestle, to see him gain and defend championship belts, to see him face down nemesis after nemesis. He coupled quality matches with the ability to make money, and while he never became the star Hulk Hogan did, you’d be hard pressed to say that he didn’t do okay for himself.

But it’s stupid to look down on Hulk Hogan when what he’s doing works. When what he’s doing is bringing other people to the show, and creating the platform that allows everyone else to earn money as well.

It’s okay to create art, but treat your fucking business like it’s a business. Figure out how it’ll earn you money, ’cause paying rent is one of those things that needs to be done and it’s no fucking fun dying alone and broke in the gutter.

Bonus Post: Tuesday Therapy and Some Additional Thoughts on Rights

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You may have noticed that there’s a routine building around these parts. Or not, ’cause really, it’s mostly a routine that exists in my head and it’s only been going for, like, a week. In any case, this is a bonus post. As in, something I didn’t intend to write, but I’m going to anyway.

I’ve offered some advice about Writing and Tracking Your Rights over on LL Hannetts blog as part of her Tuesday Therapy series.

I am, for someone who once made a career of dispensing writing advice in the tertiary sector, remarkably squeamish about the process. I either want to impart everything or nothing, since the wrong piece of advice delivered at the wrong time can be fatal to a developing creative process. I still suffer crippling moments of doubt induced by something I read in Samuel Delany’s About Writing four years ago. It’s not bad advice – it’s remarkably good – but I heard it at the wrong time and I can’t let it go and its incompatible enough to my practice to be a problem.

I’m also aware that the vast majority of my writing advice isn’t mine, since teaching writing means you accumulate advice like a bowerbird, lining your nest with the wisdom of better writers until they become part of your habitat. Any advice that I give is probably ripping off someone smarter than me, and it’d inevitably result in me spending hours revisiting folders full of print-outs until I figured out who.

Copyright, though. Rights are something I get passionate about.

I don’t mean this in a piracy kind of way – I have my issues with electronic piracy but they’re somewhat marginal compared to the bone-headed things writers will do when signing contracts. Hell, it’s nothing compared to some of the boneheaded things in contracts I’ve signed over the course of my writing career, and I tend to pay attention more than most.

I talk about it in more detail over on Lisa’s blog, but the basic gist of most writing advice should be this: be smart, do your homework, think long-term, and treat your writing like a business. It’s possible to do a lot in writing with very little technical training or awareness of how writing works, but the business part is one of those things that should be universal.

I’ve sold a few short stories over the course of my (relatively) short writing career; in that times I’ve asked for contracts to be changed a couple of times because there was something, usually e-rights related, that bothered me. Publishers have occasionally been surprised by that, but they’ve always been remarkably open to discussing the agreement I was about to sign and changing it to address my concerns.

It surprises me that more people don’t do that. Worse, it makes me a little sad.

Transition Periods

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It’s weird – the business side of writing always creeps up on me and mugs me while I’m not looking. And it’s not because I never thought I’d need to paying attention to this stuff, just that I always thought the process would move a little slower than it does.

Over the last couple of months I’ve had to set up two new spreadsheets in my writing folder. The first, originally set up a few months, is your basic quarterly profit-and-loss data – what’s coming in, what I’m spending, etc. I’d been avoiding doing this for a long while, but the realities of my working situation (heading into a year of long-term unemployment, albeit broken up by some short-term and part-time contracts) have made it necessary if I wish to continue paying rent and avoid some unpleasant conversations with the local social security office.

The second spreadsheet, and the most recent to be created, is designed to keep track of what rights are where for stories that have already been published – something that I was first told was worthwhile about two years ago, but never really seemed necessary until a few days ago (reprints, after all, were things that happened to other people). This was one of those things I figured I could get away with not doing for much longer than this – after all, I could just go check contracts when the questions came up – but what I thought was a stray question about the rights of a particular story quickly got followed by a couple of others and after I spent a week not-replying to an e-mail because I was in the midst of reorganising the files…

Yeah, well. Yet another moment where I realise that I’m slowly drifting away from being the guy who just writes and submits stories and started becoming a guy whose running a slightly wonky, badly administrated and marginally profitable small business.