[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: Are you a full-time artist, John?
John Vorhaus, Author/Speaker/Artist/Screenwriter: Not even close. I’m barely a writer at all in this phase of my life. And proudly so. It took me a long time to get to this point. Let me tell you what I mean.
First of all, in my youth, for every five minutes I spent writing, I would spend four minutes worrying and one minute writing. That was the math. One minute writing, four minutes of panic. Very typical. And I was aware of it by the time I was writing situation comedies. I was aware of how much time I spent worrying about the bad outcomes. Where I am now as a writer, I’ve kind of flipped it around, about four minutes of productivity for every one minute of worry. But the worry is not gone.
As a writer, I’m always second guessing and obsessing and feeling like I’m not making the choices that I want to make. So fear, dissatisfaction, never goes away. Over time, it gets less and less.
So, in theory, I’m much more of a productive writer than I used to be. In practice, I don’t do that much writing anymore. It’s been about 10 years now since I started investigating art, and I found that my artistic practice meets my current needs better than my writing practice does.
The writing that I do is writing for me. Like I said, my memoir John Vorhaus Year By Year because the writing that I’m doing now is more for me because it can be for me.
I don’t know if I told you this, when poker was hot, I wrote 10 books on poker. I just swallowed up that market and wrote the crap out of poker. Then the market dried up and I stopped writing about poker which is fine. The market for my work is such that it’s really hard for me to know what I can bring into the market that will make a difference in the market. So when I weigh the question, do I want to spend a year writing the words that will comprise this book with the fair expectation that the book won’t move the needle? By which I mean it won’t change my brand substantially. It won’t go viral. It won’t be a New York Times best seller.
All of this is not pessimism. This is reality. The things that I would need to do in order for those outcomes to transpire, I don’t want to do. I’m not going to do them. I don’t have to do them.
Query letters to agents, a dozen different book proposals in circulation all at the same time. These are the crafts of a working writer. For me now, I’m a hobbyist. No, I’m going to put that in a different way. I am an attempted retiree. I have a lot of trouble with retirement because I’m a person of doing. I define myself by taking action.
So, what does retirement look like for me? I’m going to sit at my computer and create. That’s all I want to do anyhow. Turn my brain into outcomes. But because of where I am in my life, I don’t need to write and sell books. And because of where I am in my practice, I find that there are other parts of my practice that I’m more interested in exploring than writing books. But who knows, I’m going to wake up next week and look at my desk and say, I got nothing to do right now. I better find something to do. Maybe I’ll write another book. And I’ll take myself by surprise and start writing another book. And all of these thoughts about there’s no point in writing another book because I…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
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BIO:
John Vorhaus is best known for his comedy-writing classic, The Comic Toolbox: How to be Funny Even if You’re Not. He has taught and trained writers in 37 countries on five continents at last count, and created TV shows of his own in Nicaragua, Romania and elsewhere. His writing credits include dozens of teleplays and screenplays, plus seven novels and some two dozen works of non-fiction. His latest book is the little book of STANDUP. Vorhaus is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the Writers Guild of America. He lives in Southern California and secretly controls the world from JohnVorhaus.com.
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