PERSONAL ESSAY
Montaigne is credited with having created this introverted literary form as a clever way of avoiding hard work. He could afford to, having been born rich. So, unless you expect to inherit a château in a lush part of France, depending on the sale of a book of essays may be an early symptom of dementia.
Like the diary form associated with Samuel Pepys, it’s a case of “Don’t give up your day job.”
However, you do have the role model of America’s most cherished essayist, Henry David Thoreau. Living in a simple cabin on Walden Pond, Thoreau didn’t entertain much other than the ducks. His livelihood depended mostly on doing yardwork for Ralph Waldo Emerson, another essayist. Such was the Golden Era of Essayists in America before they all joined the staff of Time magazine and forgot about writing earthy homilies like: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
Thoreau wrote most of his best stuff in his journal. This assured him posthumous fame, which isn’t as rewarding as being somebody while you are still alive.
SCREENPLAY
Here dwelleth the Big Bucks. Film producers spare no expense to obtain a screenplay for the film director to ignore once shooting starts. The screenwriter must shed all sensitivity and feel comfortable selling his soul to the highest bidder. He is, after all, relieved of responsibility for the final product, left to merely wince as the credits roll by on a violated screen.
This raises the question: Is it possible to maintain complete artistic integrity and still afford to buy food?
Instead of pondering this question, the smart screenwriter must find satisfaction in being part of the process of elimination — he must have the integrity of a turd.
It is now possible to take a university course in screenwriting and study models drawn from the kind of movies that are no longer being made. Any college course that doesn’t have calculus as a prerequisite is bound to boost a writer’s self-esteem if he avoids writing the final exam.
Also, there is a good chance you will form a relationship with a classmate, an affair that ends unhappily when the classmate turns out to be bisexual, thus providing you with dramatic scenes that would have been inconceivable had you taken a correspondence course.
STAGE PLAY
This form of creative writing worked quite well for Shakespeare, and there is no reason why you shouldn’t follow in his footsteps — if you have a really long stride.
The main drawback to writing stage plays is that they nearly always involve spoken words. A screenplay can be successful with a minimum of verbal exchange — as proven by the Olympian stature of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. But it is difficult to have characters onstage without somebody’s saying something. Otherwise what you have is pantomime, a genre pretty well restricted to an audience that still wets its pants. The main benefit from writing for the stage is not financial but social, as the playwright gets to meet a lot of people — director, actors, stagehands — whom he might otherwise never have hated.
(Note: since the Age of Aquarius has pretty well dried up, presenting nudity onstage is no longer a novelty and rarely substitutes for dialogue.)
Occasionally, a stage play first mounted in the boonies (e.g., Canada) will graduate to Broadway, off-Broadway, farther-off-Broadway, the Great White Wail, Bad Times Squared, or some other doomed site. For New York critics the only good plays Canadians make are on the ice of a hockey arena.
POETRY
Early in life nearly everyone discovers that some words rhyme with other words. This incites the young person to write what he believes to be poetry but is, in fact, the mental equivalent of a wet dream.
For most writers this is just a phase, the acne of literary puberty. They recover from it without permanent damage to their ability to express themselves on paper. In fact, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the dean of budding scribes, recommends verse writing as a good exercise for the mind that has a tendency to wander into blank prose.
We might also recall that in the heyday of Greek literature, the Olympic Games included a public reading of original verse, something hard to imagine as an element of the Grey Cup or the Super Bowl.
The main advantage that today’s poet has over the ancient Greek is that modern poems may be — indeed, should be — comprehensible to no one but the author. Freed from the strictures of rhyme scheme and grammar, the poem reflects the breakdown of Western civilization. It draws praise from critics who recognize that it transmits the inexpressible, being as impenetrable as a mother superior.
However, the novice should understand that very few poets today can make a living from this activity alone. Even Ovid — a top-ranked poet in his time — was moonlighting from his job as a lawyer. Which of these activities led to his being exiled to the city on the Black Sea where he died, we don’t know. But the message for today’s aspiring poet is clear: unless you are independently wealthy or happy to be housed in an abandoned piano crate, with the Muse, you lose.
That said, if you do take a turn for the verse, and just can’t resist rhyming couplets instead of leaving them alone, you may derive a lot of perfectly legal pleasure from penning an ode. (An ode is a poem meant to be sung, which may be going too far in a shaky relationship.)
JOURNALISM
This is sometimes called “the Fourth Estate,” the other Three Estates being Lords Spiritual (the heads of churches), Lords Temporal (the peerage), and the Commons (the rabble). Also called “ink-stained wretches,” today’s journalist rarely comes into contact with ink. Instead he has an intimate relationship with a computer, which is likely to become insanely jealous if the journalist goes to the toilet.
The main virtue of journalism is that it combines creative writing with a steady job. An actual livelihood. Which in turn makes the writer able to afford a spouse, children, a motorized vehicle, and possibly a permanent residence with indoor plumbing.
Journalists — whether in print or electronic media — comprise the major class of employed writers today. There are actual schools of journalism and university courses to train the average writer to transmit news or opinion without attracting undue attention to himself. These courses may be combined with athletics, such as rugby, to train the reporter to take notes in a media scrum or while hanging on to the door of a politician’s limo.
The basic college course for journalism is that of writing emissions for the campus student newspaper. The student — naturally shy and socially inept — gains confidence in his ability to write for an audience other than his immediate family, as well as to drink beer with other introverts.
Today the college newspaper’s editorial room isn’t as anarchic as in earlier times when it served as a mating ground for the creatively queer. Some observers fear that it has become merely a mirror, in miniature, of the daily newspaper, decorum snuffing out the divine afflatus.
However, writing for the student paper does familiarize a person with the hierarchy of the trade:
• cub reporter
• editorial writer
• star columnist
• publisher
• paper carrier (without whom revelation remains with St. John the Divine)
While less prestigious than being an award-winning novelist or an esteemed historian, being a journalist does get the writer out of the ivory tower and into the pub. With enough wampum to pay for a round. And seeing your name as a byline is visible proof of your existence in case you have doubts based on buying lottery tickets.
HUMOUR
Canadian