I recently came across a link my sister had sent me regarding Clay Shirky’s book called Here Comes Everybody. It came out in 2008, and I remember her ordering me a copy and making me read it, which is a thing that she does from time to time. And it wasn’t because she had control over my reading list, it was because I had been wondering (a lot) if there wasn’t more to life than a 40 hour workweek and making documents pretty for a company (many companies) that never seemed to care.
So I read the book and realized that he was talking about me, in particular, that he had written the book exactly about me. About how I’d misspent my youth watching sitcoms because I had all this free time and not a whole lot of options as to what I should do with it. People in those days, when I was young, had one TV. It might be color, or it might still be black & white. It didn’t have a remote, and it plugged into the wall. You got maybe 12 channels, and at midnight or so, the TV waved goodbye, posted a test pattern, and that was all she wrote.
I was into those sitcoms, let me tell you. My favorite was Hogan’s Heroes, and I don’t care what we found out about Bob Crane, because at the time, I didn’t know. No one did, and it didn’t matter because Hogan’s Heroes was GREAT. It had a premise, it had a great laugh track, it had good characters, and it never jumped the shark. It wasn’t till years later that I could see that the whole thing had been filmed in Southern Cal because just beyond the snow covered barbed wire were those danged palm trees. And you could never see Hogan’s breath. Or anyone’s.
You can see how invested I was, but that’s part of Shirky’s point. We were all invested at the time (or at least most of us) because as gin became a balm to the shocks of the Industrial Revolution, sitcoms became our modern-day balm. We needed sitcoms to cope with all that free time.
I think TV sitcoms (and the like) could have kept us there on that tipping point, if someone hadn’t developed cable. Which, by the way, used to be commercial free; that was their promise: you pay for cable, and you get no commercials. Now there are commercials everywhere, and when you realize (as I did) that a Starsky & Hutch episode used to be 50 minutes of The Boys and 10 minutes of crap, but today, you get 40 minutes of Supernatural (if that), and 20 plus minutes of crap, you realize you are being fed a lot of crap. And while there were some funny commercials, eventually someone invented TiVo, and even though people were still watching hours of TV, they had 20% more free time on account of no commercials.
I didn’t get TiVo, instead, a few years back, I got unplugged from cable, and believe me, it wasn’t easy. They’re still charging me an arm and a leg for the internet alone and are desperate to give me some package deal so they can continue to feed me schlock. I can get Netflix, thanks, so I’m good. The point is, regarding the idea of surplus time, as so cleverly laid out by Shirky, is that eventually you get bored doing “nothing” and start doing something. If you know Hogan and his boys are never getting out of Stalag 13, and that’s okay. The opening sequence to that show will never cease to be a comfort to me.
As to what I decided to do with all that free time was write. I wrote for many years for pinkraygun.com under the name Sylvia Bond, doing reviews of various things, mostly the TV show Supernatural. Pink Raygun was a great site to write for, and I learned a lot about writing, week in and week out, and always (mostly) hitting the deadline. And when Supernatural jumped the shark (which it did, many, many times) I realized that I could take all THAT time and write for myself.
Which is what I have been trying to do, but as Shirky says, it’s not easy. I’ve been going by the mantra that a writer writes every day. But have you ever just not felt like it? I do. All the time. And it’s easy to blow it off when you’re writing for yourself. If you’ve got a deadline for someone else, sure. You’ve got an obligation and if you’re the Boy Scout type like me, you can’t even bear to think about letting that person (or website) down. So you write. I guess I’m going to have to imagine a bigger, meaner me, who’s standing there with her hand out, waiting for me to produce the daily quota of words.
In the meantime, here’s Clay Shirky, live and in person:
P.S. Many thanks to Jack Humphrey on the quick youtube tutorial on how to imbed youtube vids into WordPress!