Blogtober 7 – Performing vs Being a Performer
I love performing.
This week I’ve been in a shit mood. I’ve got a lot going on both personally and professionally. I had a good time writing at a coffee shop in downtown Davis the other day, and then I went to a poetry open mic. I did a new poem that I’m working on in a new way. I haven’t written it down. I don’t know if I’ll ever write it down. I’ve performed it twice now, and I’m enjoying the evolution of it as strictly A verbal performance piece. The first time I did the piece, people chuckled. Several of my longtime poetry friends told me they liked it. One of them texted me to say that it’s been lingering in his imagination. Cool. However, the second time was different. In that performance, people were openly laughing through the whole piece. It’s a wild piece of absurd surrealism inspired by a recurring dream. I’m looking forward to how it evolves as I get more time with it in performances.
This reminds me of one of my staple stories, Jack of the Lantern. I’ve been telling that one since I was 20 years old period Jesus. Literally 30 years period it’s changed and evolved a lot over the years. Two weeks ago, at the Folsom Renaissance Faire, I added a new bit to the end of the story that’s a call back to elements earlier in the story. It was inspired, and i wondered why I’d never done that before. (If you wanna know what I changed you’ll have to come see the show and see if you can pick it out.)
The point is, both the story and the poem have an evolutionary nature that I just can’t get with stories and poems that I write down and publish. I also can’t see in real time what parts of each piece are working, where people are engaged, and where people are checking out. Smiling or frowning, give me a live audience reaction over online reviews any day. I still prefer the smiles, and even if you smile at my performances, you should still review any of my books you’ve read. Pretty please. Also, tell your friends to come to see my performances. Unless they are allergic to awesome. Then tells them to stay home. Or tell them to buy a book. Pretty please.
I will also admit, for a long time, performance was a kind of drug for me I used it to bolster my sense of self-worth. Performing used to be such a vital part of my self-concept that I suffered an emotional breakdown in the middle of a show that wasn’t going well. What followed was one of the darkest times of my life. Now, after lots of work, I reached a point where I can recognize a bad show as a bad show and not internalize it as part of my value as a person. I’ve also been able to walk away from some performance opportunities because I needed to rest or figure they wouldn’t be worth the time or investment.
That may be the big takeaway here that ties back into the conversation I was having about the difference between writing and being a writer. When we start playing around with some sort of creative activity (writing, music, drawing, dancing, etcetera…), at some point nearly all of us dream about doing the thing we love for a living. When we start down that road, we need to find a way to separate doing the creative thing we love from the money that we hope to get by putting the creative thing into the world. This is vital for our sense of self-worth and our passion for this thing that we love to create.
Perhaps I found a good balance here between performing and being a performer. I perform at poetry open mics. I perform in various ways on my Twitch channel. Neither one of those really involves my desire for money, even though I occasionally sell a book at a poetry open mic or get a subscriber to my Twitch. When Twitch sends me a payout it’s a pleasant surprise rather than an expectation. The storytelling show is usually about me being a performer. That’s when I have money on the line. I could tell you easily more horror stories about trying to be a professional performer than I can about being a professional writer. Let’s just say, that’s why I came up with the saying, “I played Oregon Trail as a kid. People die from exposure.) Perhaps it’s because I’ve been doing the professional performer thing for so much longer than I have the professional writer that I have so many more stories, some of them terrible horror stories about being a performer. However, I managed to find a good balance.
Now I need to think of a way to create the same kind of balance between writing and being a writer.
Maybe I should write about that sometime.
