Monday, October 25, 2010

Yes. Like that.

Mark Evanier is a writer, one I've been vaguely aware of for a very long time, but couldn't have told you what the heck he wrote. I assumed he did a year of Marvel's Fantastic Four, or maybe one of those horrible early-90s X-books where everyone had too many cargo pockets on their spandex suits. It turns out he actually was a TV guy as well as a comics guy; he story-edited "Welcome Back Kotter," scripted a bunch of Sid and Marty Krofft shows, and his biggest and most famous comic writing is for Groo the Wanderer, a book I have never ever read.

Anyhow, dude's got a blog, and he explains here how he approaches writers' block. It's a good read. It resonates with me because I am right the hell THERE with Dorothy Parker, who famously said she loved "having written," but wasn't keen on the actual work of, y'know, writing.

Evanier is not especially sympathetic to that point of view, but that's cool. He's right. Totally right. And he has made a perfectly cool career doing something he loves and is good at, for 41 years and counting.

On the other hand, while I have written a fair amount of crap, most of it stayed in the drawer, and nobody will associate me with the MacLean Stevenson Show or Pink Lady and Jeff. I feel pretty okay saying that the small amount of creative output I've released into the wild is better than some - just some, mind you - of the stuff Evanier got paid pretty decent money to do.

What I can't decide is how to feel about that.