The Salamander

Writing for a Living Sucks Part VI: Kalashnikov Blues

Consider the Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947, a beast made for sound and fury:

Anyone with a nominally decent grasp of the action movie genre would know it as the AK-47, or possibly as the Kalashnikov. Fully automatic, it spits out 7.62 millimeters of pure death at a rate of 600 rounds per minute and with a maximum effective range of about 400 meters. The M67 projectile that erupts from the its barrel was designed to blossom in human flesh at 13 centimeters from the point of entry, causing massive tissue trauma, substantial organ damage, and a particularly nasty exit wound. Due to its unsurpassed durability and reliability, it quickly became the standard infantry rifle of the Red Army and is still currently used by most of the member states of the former Warsaw Pact. It is the favored thunderstick of irascible mujahideen, genocidal warmongers, Third World hordes, European extremists, and communist firebrands. It was this implement of destruction, this potent totem of human wrath in the blood-encrusted fists of an angry and desperate peasant that turned a ragtag band of barefoot farm yokels into a formidable army that succeeded in driving the American war machine out of Vietnam. Truly, this primitive-looking union of wood and steel is one of the most terrifying instruments of warfare ever invented.

Nevertheless, awesome as the AK-47 may be, no one in his right mind would deign it fit to be used as a farming tool. Against flesh and bone it is undoubtedly the stuff of nightmares, but against the earth it is the dullest spade imaginable. Tools, like the men who make them, have their own natures. A thing that goes against its nature is liable to break. A plough taken into the battlefield will shatter beneath the hail of bullets. A rifle tied to a beast and dragged across rice paddies will rot in the mud.

A storysmith compelled to tell tales for which he cares little will lose his soul.

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Writing for a Living Sucks Part V: The Third World Writer

One thing that never fails to amaze me is how much our entertainment industry loathes us television writers. Think of Pharaoh and the Hebrew slaves around the time Moses was born. Yep, Jews under the terrible yoke of slavery, that’s exactly what we are compared to other workers in this biz.

Take talent fee, for instance.

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Writing for a Living Sucks Part IV: Respect

You’ve heard my argument against writing as a profession. You’ve learned how unprofitable it is. Or at least how large the odds are against you. If you were anything else, you’d have been discouraged by now and would have cast your sights upon more realistic ways of making a living. Yet you’re not. That’s because you are a writer and you’re stubborn that way. Because you omnipotently create small universes in your stories, you think you can grab the reins of your destiny and turn yourself into a rockstar through your art. Hell, you say, print may be out of the question but a combination of TV shows and the occasional movie is not a far-fetched plan. A man can live comfortably on that arrangement. And that same combination may just be the thing to propel one to fame and fortune.

I agree that you can make a living as a screen and TV writer. A decent living, where you won’t slip into the lower economic class status, a thing many of us in the middle class are too horrified to even contemplate. If you get a movie gig in-between shows and if you don’t get a stroke due to all the caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, hallucinogens, and stimulants you’ve consumed; yes, it’s possible. But fame and fortune? That, me foine lad, has a prerequisite called respect; a quality of which screen and TV writers all too often find a serious shortage.

Of all “artist” types, screen and TV writers are the most despised, especially by fellow writers in the literary discipline. Never mind that, monetarily, even semi-successful scriptwriters are Zobels and Ayalas compared to poets, novelists, and their sort, who are almost universally dependent on mommy and daddy to feed them, clothe them, and put a roof over their heads since the money that comes from writing literature can’t even feed mice. No, you’ll hear the fashionably cynical snoterati say, screenplays aren’t art. They’re degenerate, commercial products for mass consumption. A lot of times, they’re right, of course.

Even the biz hates writers. When a movie is good, everyone praises the director. When a movie sucks, everyone asks who the fuck wrote this steaming pile of filth. You watch a movie, the credits say: a film by so and so director. Never the writer. Never. It’s like everyone in the biz thinks the writer is just a necessary evil. It’s this auteur theory bullshit going around, making everyone think the director is everything in a movie.

Let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time I wrote a decapitation scene in a script. Yes, I’m an optimist that way. I detailed how the shot would look like in this manner: the sword falls but we don’t see the actual decapitation. We just see the body falling, something like a head rolling, and then the last shot is of the actor’s head in the foreground with what seems to be his body falling in the background. Worked like a charm onscreen. After seeing that series of shots on the editing room, a producer praised the director for a great job. The director then said he just followed what was in the script. The producer looked at me and changed the subject. Not out of malice. It just wasn’t interesting anymore since it’s the writer who thought that up. Besides, hotshot directors need to be flattered while writers are a dime a dozen.

No, dear aspiring young writer, you won’t find fame and fortune in this biz. Writing for a living sucks eggs.

…

I was about to end this long-ass rant on that note but something came up. I saw a friend of mine who I haven’t heard from in a long while and we started chatting over some paper cups of cheap, awful tasting, machine-brewed coffee. We were talking about our jobs and I was telling him about how a lot of young writers nowadays think they’ll actually make a name for themselves in this biz, like they think that that one shot at literary or film rockstardom is theirs by virtue of their stars. He laughed and then asked me why I kept at it myself. I shrugged and told him that, quite frankly, I think it’s my destiny. I’m going to be a fucking rockstar, man, just you wait.

PREVIOUSLY
Writing for a Living Sucks Part I: Print
Writing for a Living Sucks Part II: Television
Writing for a Living Sucks Part III: Movies

Writing for a Living Sucks Part III: Movies

In the first two parts of this long tirade against the folly of writing for a living, I have shown you why you, my dear aspiring writer, should think twice about turning your hobby into a job. Maybe I’m just nasty that way and relish the act of dashing people’s hopes and dreams into the hard, barren bedrock of my bitterness and disillusion about my own career as a wordslinger. Or maybe I’m trying to increase my odds at making it in this business by killing the competition through propaganda. Whatever my motive, you will agree that the logic behind my argument is entirely sound. In a country as poor as ours, your fiction and poetry won’t sell jack shit. Selling out by writing for magazines and by churning out horrible romance novellas won’t earn you enough to feed your nicotine addiction, which you’ll inevitably develop because cigarettes deaden the pang of hunger. TV, on the other hand, may be your ticket. Not to fame and fortune through your art as you once dreamt it would be, but to a decent living as a writer at least. The only problem is that shows last only for a couple of months on the average and that period of time in between shows will murder you.

By this time, other people would have taken it into their pointy little heads and would have gone on to do something else. Like find a real job. You, on the other hand, are still here reading this. Because you’re a fucking artist, by Jove. To my ‘never’ you’ll say ‘nevertheless’ and to my logic you’ll rage, haggle, beg, and parlay for an alternative. You ask: what about movies? Surely, film scripts are worth much more than TV scripts. Film is a chance to be recognized and to get rich, motherfucker. Oh yeah, sixteen-year-old groupies, here I come.

I say yes. And no.

When discussing your potential career as a screenwriter, we must look at the sad state of the Philippine movie industry. It is a beast once mighty but now felled by piracy. Yes, you had a hand in it. You may rationalize that art is for everybody and piracy just evens out the opportunity for all to see movies; that now even the poorest of the poor has the means to watch Great Films. No, man, the poor don’t watch Great Films. They watch Pinoy mainstream flicks, which have been formulated for them, and which employs workers no better than wage-earners. When we think about movies, we all have the highly-paid stars and directors and producers in mind. A few thousand pesos in loss won’t hurt these people, right? What about the lightmen, then? What about the script supervisors and the gaffers and the grips and the utility guys? And yes, what about the scriptwriters? These are the people most hurt by piracy, not the big-earners. Stars and producers and big-shot directors have TV jobs that you can’t hurt. Not unless you’re a psychic with the uncanny ability to burn on VCDs TV episodes that have not been taped yet.

Wait, you say. I don’t buy pirated Pinoy movies. I buy pirated Great Films! Yeah, well, your demand for pirated foreign movies also serve the impetus for developing piracy technology. The bottomline, dear aspiring writer, is that you’re screwing yourself.

I will not deny it, though. There is big money in screenplays if you can get into that racket. Chances are you won’t. But let’s say you’re lucky enough. Your first shot would probably be in indie movies. Indie, you groan, there’s no money in indie! I say yes, there is.

When I say indie, I don’t mean those awful movies by college students. That is the real indie movement in this country, by the way, but there’s no future in that. Any dumb fuck with a Sony Digital Handycam can make a ninety-minute feature on suckage. The indie I’m talking about are movies produced by companies other than Star Cinema, GMA Films, Regal, Viva, and their ilk. The money comes from the pockets of TV stars who want to go into directing (and some of them are pretty good), politicians trying to be visible for the coming election (thus, from our own pockets as well, har-dee-har to you, motherfucker), etc.  They pay relatively well. These producers expect to profit from their endeavors so the product has that mainstream flavor mixed in with the artsy-fartsy. It’s a great way to make movies, I must add. This is the real Pinoy movie industry now, and I’m hopeful that this will improve the quality of our movies and TV shows. New blood, new styles, new ways of making commercial movies. And, as I said earlier, there’s money in it for the screenwriter if he can get into that racket. But that’s the hard part.

Let me explain:

Indie movies are made by groups. They’re more like Satanic covens, usually helmed by their Head Priest, the director. With the director there’s the writer, the technical producer, the production designer, etc. Most times the indie group is just a handful of people, maybe even two: the director and the writer. Always, there’s the director and the writer. The writer’s the guy who writes the proposals for potential producers, concepts, storylines, letters, and such. Writers are indispensable this way. That seems to make your chance of getting a writing gig even higher, right? No. Because like directors, there’s only one writer per coven. Being a ronin writer is like being a vocalist without a band. And a writer who does have a group is very protective of his position. I, for one, would murder you the moment I suspect you’re trying to usurp me in my group.

Let us suppose you do find a group and get a gig. The newbie screenwriter gets fifty to eighty thousand pesos. Not exactly chump change, no, but no one makes his bread by movies alone. You don’t get a movie gig every month, my friend. If you’re really lucky you’ll make three a year. People are very rarely that lucky. You should look at screenwriting like you look at virgins: it’s great when it appears on your lap but don’t hold your breath waiting for one. If you want to be a screenwriter, you must supplement the dearth of movie gigs with a TV show, which, we have seen in the previous article, isn’t very profitable in the long run.

And there’s also the issue of respect, which makes this series a four-parter instead of the three-parter I had planned.

PREVIOUSLY
Writing for a Living Sucks Part I: Print
Writing for a Living Sucks Part II: Television

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Writing for a Living Sucks Part IV: Respect

Writing for a Living Sucks Part II: Television

Television is a medium that makes zombies out of the masses. It is an invention so horrible that anyone working in it and inflicting it upon the populace is marked by the Devil as his own. Yet TV is where the money is. TV is where you can make a decent living as a writer. Forget about your dreams of rockstardom and fame and fortune. If you make it long enough as a gainfully employed writer, you’ll realize that it’s a state that only one out of every one jillion writers would ever achieve. Chances are you won’t be on that happy wagon even if you live to be a hundred years old.

Let us look into the economics of television writing. A script, say for a thirty-minuter show that airs once a week non-primetime in a decent station will get you about seven or eight thousand pesos. Whoa, that’s a lot, you say, considering that there are four weeks in a month. That’s like thirty-two thousand a month, man. For a dude who’s been living on Skyflakes and instant pancit canton for the past couple of months, that’s a ginormous pile of Aztec gold.

Hold up, genius.

A show has a stable of writers. Usually, you’ll have three more writers with you in that stable. That leaves you with one episode a week. Not much, I know. But let’s say you have two shows. Finding even one show is hard enough, but let us say you’re really pesky so you finally got another one. You’ll have the time to write for two shows because you won’t be coming to work everyday, anyway. Sixteen thou. Not bad. Won’t turn you into another Bill Gates anytime soon, but it’s a decent living.

Now let us imagine you left that station and finally got into the major leagues, the big-ass networks. Your scripts would now sell for ten thousand. If you get a primetime, one-hour weekly show, you’ll get fifteen to twenty thousand per episode. The big money, though, seems to be in soaps. Those dudes get around thirty thousand. Thirty thousand, you say. Oh holy fuck! Soaps air five days a week! A hundred and fifty thousand pesos a week… I’m set for life!

No, you dumb fuck.

Soap scripts are written on a weekly basis. You submit more than a hundred pages of script that would span for the entire week. Considering that you get paid twenty thousand for around twenty pages in an hour-long weekly primetime show, soap writers are shafting themselves.

A TV show, nevertheless, is a steady source of decent income. That is, while it lasts. And that’s about two months. Yep. TV shows here recently tend to last only one Philippine season. That’s thirteen episodes, as opposed to the more than twenty episodes per season in the US. With three other writers, you’ll get four or five episodes out of a Pinoy TV season. When the show gets canned, you’ll be looking for another show. The network won’t give you one out of respect for your loyalty and the fact that you did not leak sensitive developments to rival networks. And with the way more and more aspiring young writers are getting into the biz because the network can pay them less than what they pay writers who’ve been around for some years, you’re in a town called Screwed.

And then there’s the abomination called the SP/writer.

A segment producer, or SP, is the little director/producer of a documentary. Their job is totally different from a writer’s job. Usually, SPs go on to become producers or directors. Television managers, however, thinking that writers are not that necessary in documentary shows, began scratching away that position. SPs are writers too now. They shoot the footage, they write a script to tell the story, and then they edit the material. I’m not going to go into detail about how the product usually sucks when done that way. The consequence of the SP/writer phenomenon upon both writers and SPs, though, is that instead of SPs competing with other SPs and writers competing with other writers for employment, writers and SPs are now in a clusterfuck bitchfight over who gets that single position in a show. If you’re a writer who knows nothing about segment producing, you’re done for. If otherwise, you’ll find yourself earning less than what you’d have earned as a plain old TV writer. SP/writers get paid SP wages, not writer wages. And sometimes, just sometimes, there are more than four SP/writers in a show. Meaning there will be lean months ahead for you should you be lucky enough to get that job.

A niftier job would be as a head writer. You get that job if you impress enough big people. Or suck enough cocks. As a head writer, you’ll get paid for reviewing each script. That means you’re getting something each week; roughly the same amount they pay for each script. Say you’re the head writer of a not so prominent show, you can get forty thousand each month. Plus you have another show that pays twenty per ep with one ep per month. Sixty thousand pesos, then. Again, decent, but it won’t make you rich. And getting to be a head writer is really really hard. Unless you’re a fucking genius, prophet, and ninja all rolled into one.

TV, then, is good. But shows rarely last more than a season nowadays. Nope, you’re still better off in a call center.

Or movies maybe?

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Writing for a Living Sucks Part I: Print

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Writing for a Living Sucks Part III: Movies

Writing for a Living Sucks Part I: Print

Every young writer like you, my friend, dreams of getting rich and famous through his art. A writer who claims he isn’t doing it for the possibility of fame and fortune isn’t much different from a blogger who claims he’s not doing it for the attention: they’re both lying curs. Oh, yes, it’s about fame and fortune. I’m not saying that the need for self-expression isn’t a big part of it, but the overpowering desire for wealth and recognition is as much an incentive as the desire to make art. Who wouldn’t want to have more money than he can spend? Who wouldn’t want teenagers lining up to suck his cock like it was the golden rod of Jehovah? You may go to bed with an empty belly, but it is your dream of being a fucking rockstar that feeds your heart, isn’t it?

The sad fact, though, is that writing for a living sucks. The hungry young writer isn’t hungry because it’s cool. He’s hungry because he can’t sell shit. Every young writer, at one point, has heard of this. Every young writer, at the back of his mind, knows that this is true. Yet you stubbornly refuse to accept this. You think that that one in a jillion chance of actually getting a break and becoming successful through it is yours by destiny.

Others take a more realistic approach towards their desire to make a living as a writer. They get day jobs in call centers and other such places as devoid of art as my perpetually grimacing asshole, thinking that this is just a stepping stone; a rung in the ladder that would lead to their dreams.

Let’s take a look at your chances from an objective point of view, shall we not?

You write poetry. And short stories. And vignettes. And essays. You may even be working on that best-selling novel of yours that would enlighten the world about the true state of the human condition. Good for you. Now, think about this: who the fuck would want to read them? I look around me and I don’t see any arthouse bohemians frolicking about like butterflies on an acid trip. I see pedicab drivers, fish sellers, government employees, construction laborers, maids, factory workers, and others of that ilk. You won’t sell that collection of poetry, good sir. You’re better off writing horrible romance novelettes that Inday likes reading so much. That shit sells, man.

But not much. Usually, a publishing house would hire you to write two of those pocketbooks that I wouldn’t even wipe my ass with. You have to submit your manuscripts within a month’s time, after which they’ll pay you about seven or eight thousand pesos. Way after. Like when they get around to publishing and distributing them. They won’t even give you complementary copies, so don’t even bother asking about royalty. I know eight thousand pesos a month doesn’t grow on trees, man, but it’s not much either. You’ll be better off in a call center. They even have dental plans, if you can dig that.

You think: eight thou a month wouldn’t be so bad if I can get a writing assignment from one of those glossy magazines too. You’d be right if you’re shallow enough to appreciate a whopping two thousand pesos as additional income. You won’t even get that within the same month that you finished your article. Magazine pre-production starts at what, two months before the issue is published? That means your piece would get printed about two months after you’ve submitted it. You’d since be long dead from starvation to be able to appreciate your byline.

Never mind fame and fortune. If you really want to make a living as a writer, then print is not the answer. What you really want to get into is something that everyone consumes every single day. Something that has a semblance of gainful employment and steady income. Something so bad there’s no way in this thrice-blessed earth that it can’t sell.

Television.

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Writing for a Living Sucks Part II: Television