Dirty Money

Most of us writers like getting paid for what we do. And at the opening stages of the game, it almost doesn’t matter what that work is, be it word problems for math textbooks, sports reports from the world shuffleboard championships, or obituaries. If someone’s rewarding your wordsmithing with cash, then bully for you.

But some lucres are filthier than others. I recently answered a promising call to write humor for a startup social networking website aimed at college students. The hourly rate wasn’t bad and writing jokes sounded fun. What the hell.

A couple of writing samples later I was given my first assignment to write for the website’s dating game. It functioned like an online version of television’s old Dating Game, and my job was to write clever questions that the inquisitor could use to elicit revealing or witty responses from the field of potential dates. Okay, I thought, I’m helping web surfers break the ice, what’s wrong with that?

The head writer sent me some sample questions to get me started. Here’s where I sensed trouble: “If I were a latte, would you add milk and sugar to me? Or would you just drink me down straight and hot?”

It occurred to me then that the cardigan of Love Connection had been stripped off television’s hard, eager body years ago. The age demographic for romance game shows had shifted downward, and in Chuck Woolery’s Old Spice-scented vacuum arose cultural travesties like Elimidate, where a group of camera-hungry college girls make out with a glazed dude in progressive single-elimination rounds of clothing removal until one so-called love interest remains.

I considered my moral position. Not all the sample questions were racy and obvious. Most were innocent and even a little clever. But I couldn’t avoid the sobering fact that this website seemed to be in the trampled, sodden field of the VH1 generation cash cow. Had I thrown my literary lot in with the MTV mindset that everyone’s okay as long as everyone is under thirty and hot, sexuality should be worn outside your pants at all times (“So we can check,” to quote Bananas), and irony is best left to steel mills? Surely not. This website just wanted to connect people with a few jokes, right? Either way, I’d been given a job, and the call of paid publication was strong. I let it lead me.

At first, my high-minded disdain followed. My questions attacked both the questioner and respondent for being so degenerate as to participate in this mockery of romance: “First kiss: is the amount of tongue proportional or inversely proportional to the number of dates it took to get there?” Take that, vapid swinger, if you can even untangle its wicked barbs! I did a couple more like that, but they gave me no satisfaction. I knew snide crap like that wouldn’t sneak past the head writer unnoticed. Worse, I recognized those questions for what they were: bad writing, bad not because of their theme but because they were products of an uncommitted writer squaring off against his own subject.

So I tried again, doing what any good fiction writer would: getting into a character’s head. What kinds of places would college daters go? What music would they listen to? What material and emotional things would they flaunt or hide? The more I wrote, the more I admitted that most kids watching Elimidate and dousing themselves in Axe body spray every Friday night aren’t morally corrupt, they just like to be entertained. Besides, the ones asking these questions from the safety of their computer desks are probably as romantically timid as anyone; maybe they need a little help breaking out of their shell. The ones that don’t are already at the bar.

To my satisfaction, the writing became an intriguing exercise, an wild hunt for the elusive one-liner. By hour two I’d slipped into the edge of that coveted zone where your own voice fades and is left in the mouth of your character. Mine was by turns curious, clichéd, cautious, and bold. Oh, and randy. By hour three I detected patterns in my own writing process: how long I would stick with one topic before getting bored, how my own sense of humor interfered with what the assignment demanded, how long I’d fight with awkward wording. And I started to understand how damnably frustrating it is to be pointedly funny over and over on purpose.

Around hour four I hit the wall and started sliding. But by the end I’d cranked out ninety questions in varying degrees of wit, sensitivity, and raunch. And I had a new-found appreciation for the art of comedy writing.

Am I proud of penning the words, “If you cooked me dinner, how would you spice it up?” and sending them to another conscious human being to read? Certainly not. In fact, I’m counting on his good judgment to banish such stink bombs. No, the only line I liked enough to tell anyone besides the head writer (until now) is a suggested title for the online dating game: “Total E-Quips of the Heart.” It’ll never make it on the site, I know. But hey, at least I got paid for it.