The Oldest Drug Around

Feb 27, 2008

So, all those words I cooked up about comedy writing the other night? I'm eating them. And they are delicious.

I finally ended up writing a skit; it was a fairly humble effort. One might call it a skit-let (but only because skit-tle is copyrighted). Because it was a commercial parody, it was only about 30 seconds long, the initial seconds setting up the main joke. Since I am a innate fatalist who tends to find the bad in every situation, I expected uncomfortable silence, and maybe crickets, though I now realize that the insect portion of that expectation was slightly irrational. Then something strange happened. About 15 seconds into my reading of the skit, I heard those soft little expulsions of air that hint at an impending chuckle. Then, the joke landed. There was laughter. Dopamine and serotonin flooded my brain, as if I’d taken a hit of something powerful. I’d found the new drug that Huey Lewis had been singing about all this time, and simply and suddenly as that, I felt differently about the whole genre. And this makes me wonder:
Is my love of constant praise and validation the only reason I'm a writer?

I can date my decision to become a career writer to first grade, in roughly the spring of 1994. We were given a rather strange assignment to fashion a short story out of hieroglyphic–like pictures. Mine was about a Native American who killed a bear for fun, and was then haunted by an entire pack of ghost bears while he tried to escape the reservation. Child prodigy material, I know . At parent-teacher conferences later that week, Mrs. Wall raved about my story. It was clearly a confidence boosting technique; the teacher must pick one positive thing to focus on, and must do so enthusiastically. Never mind the fact that first graders can barely speak English. Never mind the fact that I used pictures, not words to “write” this story. I was hooked, and I made up my mind right there. Language would be my life. I would be a writer. At school, I was never happier than when a teacher would reading my essay aloud, telling the class to “listen to Megan’s wonderful verbs.”

The responses are obviously slightly different now. My college writing program may be a highly diluted version of the industry, but it is closer to reality than my SmallTown, PA public school system. There is formidable competition, writers who are far more talented, who have stronger voices, more relevant stories to tell. Still, every now and then, I get that “fix” that is never too difficult to come by in the academic arena: a positive workshop, a good grade, a bit of laughter.
I suppose I won’t completely understand my true motivations until I get out of school, and the rejection letters really start rolling in. I wonder whether I’ll go into withdrawal, realize that what I really loved were the pats on the back...or whether I’ll find that I never needed them at all.