Since You Asked: A Proposal

Why Does This NOT Piss You Off?

This Time We’ll End With a Story. But First, Always Try to Grasp What Pisses You Off … And Why

We’ll start with a recap of last week’s hissy fit. “Are you the poet?” Picture a large room crowded with people. A few people drink wine and say, “Burn it down!” The majority—artists, writers, filmmakers—listen while a political candidate speaks for a long time about how she wants to hear from creatives. The campaign manager speaks off and on. A lawyer adds running comments, and when none of the “creatives” dive in, the host calls on several people to speak. Among them, a writer. The lawyer interrupts the writer with several jokes, and the writer leaves the room. Stiffly.

Don’t Leave Angry, Just Leave

As readers, we ask ourselves: Why was the writer character shaking with rage? Why was he so ticked-off that he walked stiffly to the elevator? What had just taken place?

Have We Talked About Sous Conversation?

As Tom Spanbauer explained it, “sous conversation” refers to the subtext in a scene. “Sous” like in sous-chef, meaning roughly “under” or beneath. Every scene has a subtext, and often the characters are unaware of that hidden tension. Consider how nicely it works when the characters are unaware, but the reader IS aware of the tension buried beneath the surface. In the clip above, Zhivago is secretly banging Strelnikov’s wife, and the audience knows that. Strelnikov does not. Thus sous conversation. The audience is forced to carry the tension.

Have we talked about L’espirit de l’escalier?

Well, sometimes that fabled wit or spirit doesn’t strike you as you walk stiffly away from the gathering. Nor does it occur while you’re in the elevator riding down twenty-one floors to the street. Sometimes the old “staircase wit” waits almost a week to deliver its gift. In the meantime, Why was the writer so enraged?

When we allow people to assume that our work is effortless—when we don’t sweat and grunt a little—we allow them to disrespect us a lot.

Consider That We Don’t Do Ourselves a Favor

As writers, we don’t do ourselves a huge favor when we make a difficult task look effortless. A favorite example of this is dance. At the Prague Writers’ Festival the hosts seated me in the front row of a salon in the Prague Castle, a cavernous gilt-and-mirror reception room. The evening opened with a pas de deux performed by two dancers from the national ballet company. Seen from a seat in a theater, their dance would’ve looked effortless and seamless. But here, a mere breath away from my face, you could see their sweat. As they danced within an arm’s length of me, the pair gave muffled grunts of effort, launching from position to position. A young man and woman, their tendons stood out, and their muscles looked corded, and they smelled like the athletes they actually were. They had small tattoos, even, that would’ve been hidden by distance. Having seen this up close, I now appreciate dance more.

People on the outside will never respect the work hidden in the background of success.

Still, in “the arts” the goal seems to be to make the work look easy. This goes double for athletics. Among my go-to documentaries is The Ice King, about the ice skater John Curry. For the whole film, look here; few documentaries risk such a warts-and-all version of pursuing your passion¹. People on the outside will never respect the work hidden in the background of success. No, “success” means making the results seem effortless. The artist must always feign a faux-modesty … Why thank you, thank you for being so generous with your praise, my work is nothing!!

That’s instead of: I worked my tail off to get to this moment!! I declined parties and drugs and sex, even sex, so I could devote myself to this achievement. No, that level of devotion scares the outsider.

Which Brings Us Back To

In that crowd of wine-drinking people, the political candidate played the room for laughs. Her campaign manager trawled for eat-the-rich anger. They both claimed to want the insight of “creatives,” but eventually they had to resort to calling upon individuals. They’d hardly left any oxygen in the room. It was a Rodney Dangerfield moment when they finally tossed a bone, asking specific people to talk.

As mentioned earlier, when we allow people to assume that our work is effortless—when we don’t sweat and grunt a little—we allow them to disrespect us a lot. The lawyer² interrupted with jokes. The L’espirit de l’escalier didn’t rescue the moment. Again, always ask the why: Why did this event drive you up the wall?

The Proposal I Was Trying to Make

Before I was so rudely interrupted. Let’s call my proposal: The Creative Tax Credit

In abstract: Let’s allow beginning creatives to deduct a set amount of money for each hour they devote to perfecting their craft. We might even allow this time/deduction to accumulate toward future earnings. I’ve talked to lawyers and accountants about this, and the following points address all of the objections they raised.

• We allow a specific deduction on vehicles driven for work (65.5 cents per mile) … for square-footage devoted to work … why can’t we establish a minimum-wage for people to deduct toward learning and establishing their art? Their sport? Their band? We’re not talking a huge wage, just a set amount per hour.

• How will we keep track? Simple, people already log their vehicle miles toward their tax deductions. They already report their square-footage used for business. For crying out loud, WE COUNT OUR STEPS, people! There can be an app.

• But why now? Right now, a disproportionate percentage of rich people create art and culture. Such a credit will encourage working-class people to take their shot.

• But won’t people milk the system? We’ll set a sundown clause: If you don’t show a profit in three years or five or seven, your next deduction is disallowed. If the entire scheme proves “unworkable” we’ll ditch it.

• The biggest objection—among lawyers and CPAs—is that the credit is “unworkable.” But wasn’t everything (Civil Rights, the Reparations conversation, space flight, the Internet) always “unworkable” until it was actually brought into existence?

• Why bother if the deduction from overall income might be slight? Because eventually, with success, you’ll be doing similar tax deductions, and the Creative Credit will train beginners in that aspect of a profession. Screw the romantic idea of garrets and red wine, being a creative means keeping your books straight. Get into the habit. Such a deduction will build that muscle.

• Also, such a deduction will separate the wannabes from the players. Players make the extra effort.

• Also, such an official acknowledgement from the system will help legitimize the pursuit. Tom Spanbauer always said, “Ninety-nine percent of what any workshop does is validate the act of writing.” Your political leaders can make this small gesture.

• The rich people who run the “arts” game, they really don’t want you on their nice field. That should be reason enough for you to consider the Creative Credit.

• What can I do? Ask your local candidates to support this.

  Use this issue to shit-test your candidates. Will they think that your dream is a joke? Will they dismiss the idea that your time is worth a minimum wage or acknowledgement from your government? For every political race, on every level this year, make this an issue.

• Does your local media dismiss this idea? Will they bring the Creative Credit into the conversation?

• Do you actually take your writing seriously enough to do that? Consider the opportunity cost of writing; you give up time with family, time doing other tasks.

• But isn’t money a non-starter issue? Money is boring. Artists are above money. Yeah, that’s what the rich people want you to think, so you go suck their dicks for a little grant money. That way rich people get their dicks sucked AND they get to decide what’s art.

• Those rich people laugh at your dreams.

• A mini-story, with a point. On August 31, 1997, I spoke at the Bumpershoot Arts Festival in Seattle³ where the organizers paid me $300. Within a month the State of Washington inquired about that taxable income. After a dozen letters back and forth, Washington State billed me for the taxes due: 75 cents. I sent them a check for seventy-five cents. This is the reality, get used to it. Success is based on also doing the small stuff.

• I’ve made my bones. I’ve got no dog in this fight. This is about whether or not you want respect from the room. Will you vote for someone who thinks you’re a joke?

• In the post-Napster world, the reward on the back-end is getting smaller and smaller. Isn’t it time to put some of that reward on the front-end? You KNOW the instant you make a buck the tax man will come after his share. In this post-Napster world, shouldn’t creative people get some slight respect and incentive as they lay the groundwork for a career?

• You know that business and industry get their carve-outs up front, don’t you?

• How many innovations never happened because the innovator wasn’t rich, single, shady enough to risk the time to create? Do you really want only shady douches creating your culture?

• Is this failure to acknowledge creative risk—the time, the effort—with a deduction, isn’t that just another way to silence innovation?

• You can tax deduct the use of your car. Isn’t your life as valuable as a car? If they can quantify the value of your mileage, why not your life?

• People will only give you as much respect as you demand. Again, if they want your vote, demand this in return.

• Again, creative work is work. It’s not a “Don’t quit your day job!” joke for politicians to laugh at.

Now the story

This will also explain the illustration above. In the ’90s when Monica Drake was in an MFA program for creative writing, studying with Joy Williams, Monica received some grant money. The sum of two thousand dollars comes to mind. She spent the money and neglected to hold any aside for taxes. When the tax bill came … Monica Drake is creative. She went to a race track and followed bettors, trying to collect their betting slips on lost races.

Yes, people who bet on dog and horse races, they get to deduct their losses. Yet writers toil away and get not the slightest deduction for their lost time. Frankly, I’m not against taxes. My mother was a bookkeeper who prepared tax returns for countless people and businesses. She died at the age of sixty-nine. John Curry died at forty-four.

I’m against a system that thinks you’re a joke. A system that will come around every four years and pretend to “listen.”

Whether or not you’re the butt of their joke, that’s up to you.

1. For a decade between school and writing, I threw the discus in regular competition. An established champion coached me, but the practice mostly involved finding a playing field empty of people and dogs. God forbid a dog mistake your discus for a Frisbee and try to catch it. So practice meant the hour just before sunrise and the hour just after sunset. Long stretches of time spent alone, throwing a thing. Fetching a thing. Falling down. Getting up. Alone. Always alone, but not stopping. Dabblers and dilettantes will never embrace such a life, that of the driven loner. The zealot. The Curry story begins with the loneliness. Perhaps only athletes can endure such loneliness. Athletes triumph in public, but they train in loneliness. Curry made his feats look so easy that most people couldn’t appreciate the effort behind them.

When I first met Tom Spanbauer and began to study Minimalism, I was still wearing the gold medal from an international discus competition; albeit under my shirt and always in secret. Almost no one knew I threw the discus for hours every day, and all of that drive subsequently went into writing fiction. A story for another time.

2. Lawyers bill by the quarter-hour.

3. The same day Diana Spencer died in Paris. The news traveled like wind through the crowd; in that, the pre-cell phone age, such news moved through a large room like a wave. At the Sundance Film Festival the news of Heath Ledger’s death moved through the crowds in a similar wave. The film version of Choke had sold the night before, and Ledger’s death cast a pall over the rest of the festival.