The Avoidance of Normal
By Bryan Cohen
During the winter of my senior year of high school, I lost 31 pounds to get into an open spot on the wrestling team. Even though I had fallen into a captain role by seniority, it was going to be nearly impossible for me to beat the wrestlers at 152, 145, 135 and 130, so I pushed myself to “suck down” to 125. This had me dieting 3 weeks before the season even began. A normal person might have relegated himself to being a second string, but I was hardly normal.
After a crazy back-to-back schedule of four classes in a row one Friday during my freshman year of college, I stepped into a crowd of over a hundred people watching a cable-access show film what looked to be a Jell-O wrestling match between an adult entertainer and an innocent onlooker. Of the many spectators there, nobody wanted to risk the embarrassment in the middle of their college campus messing around with a scantily-clad woman in a kiddie pool. I was the only one who bought a raffle ticket to be chosen to be the guy. A strange experience for sure, but I was never what you’d call normal. When I stepped into the real world, my first mistake was trying to go about being an actor and a writer the normal way. First I tried temp jobs and then eventually I worked as a barista at a coffee shop. The pay and the hours were bad and I didn’t feel particularly inspired to go hunt for acting and writing gigs. I produced a few shows here and there, but once they were I was back to the regular actor/writer grind.
(Bryan Jell-O wrestling)
While traveling in Israel with a group of wonderful people, I told the entire tour bus of my weird exploits and I remembered myself. I wasn’t the kind of person to go about the motions. I needed to find my calling and it wasn’t going to be through these normal part-time job channels. As soon as I returned home, I quit my job as a barista and figured that I would do whatever came my way until it felt right. I struggled as a freelance writer for a few months before taking up what I thought would be an amazing job at a theater two friends of mine ran. It didn’t work out quite as planned and I was back to freelance writing for the next six months.
After half a year of mind-numbing assignments, I could feel these gigs wearing on my brain. I yearned to go back to the normal, easy, but unchallenging life of a barista, but I knew I couldn’t give up on finding something weird for myself to pursue. My Hail Mary pass was to write a book called 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts. If the book didn’t work, my next step was to find a regular office job that might suck me up for the next five to ten years. I prayed and dreamed of the book becoming successful. I wanted to be something interesting and weird and a freelance writer and author was certainly that in spades. As a couple of months went by and the book brought in a little bit of money but not a lot, I started to apply to jobs at nearby companies. In December, my lack of normalcy finally began to pay off.
I was staying at my girlfriend’s parents’ house in Chapel Hill and I happened to check on my book sales for Christmas week. Out of nowhere, due to some Christmas/Hannukah miracle, my sales more than doubled. I checked every few hours to find that another sale had gone through when it usually took days for two or three to register. My sales doubled again in January and then once again in February. My first self-published work had become the little book that could!
With the extra money, I spent more time writing and published another couple of books. While they have yet to catch on as much as my first book, the proceeds have given me the freedom to let my freak flag fly and keep myself from needing the normal job I dreaded. Now instead of saying I’m a barista or a temp with aspirations to write on the side, I can truly say that I am a writer; plain, simple and weird. My good fortune may not last forever, but I know that ever since I let myself be weird again like I had in high school and college, life has gone much smoother. If you are strange and you have talent, let it loose! Don’t bottle it up in a regular job. Find a way to do something you love as often as you can. The world has a way of rewarding people who do.
**Bryan Cohen is a writer, actor and comedian from Dresher, Pennsylvania. Since graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill he has written four books (1,000 Creative Writing Prompts, 500 Writing Prompts for Kids, Sharpening the Pencil, and Writer on the Side), several plays (Something from Nothing and Chekhov Kegstand) and he was the head writer for an un-produced Web series (Covenant Coffee). His writing and motivation website “Build-Creative-Writing-Ideas.com” has had over 100,000 visitors since it was founded in December 2008. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.” Follow Bryan at “http://twitter.com/#!/buildcwideas
GIVEAWAY
Bryan Cohen is giving away 100 personalized writing prompts to one giveaway entrant chosen at random during the blog tour. Personalized prompts are story starters that cater specifically to a writer’s subject matter, strengths/weaknesses, etc. Cohen will create the prompts to cater exclusively to the winner. He is giving away free digital copies of his book The Writing Sampler to everybody who enters, which includes excerpts from each of his four books on writing. The book contains essays, writing prompts and tips and tricks to enhance your writing skills. In addition, for each of Cohen’s books that reach the Top 500 on Amazon during his blog tour, he will add a $50 Amazon gift card to the drawing (up to six $50 cards in total)! To enter, simply post a comment to this blog post with your e-mail address. Entries will be counted through June 2nd, 2011.
Very cool. I'm not a writer but I bet this will help lots of folks.
ReplyDelete(not an entry)
Thanks Juju, I hope so!
ReplyDeleteAnd thank you to Tina for featuring me on your blog, I really appreciate it!
Sincerely,
Bryan
Very interesting. I volunteer at my library with the teen events and they sometimes use random prompts for their Writer's Club
ReplyDeletelauren51990 AT aol DOT com
I love writing, but I know that I could improve tremendously! So, I hope I win!
ReplyDelete[email protected]
I love to write and I will need to be able to write for several different venues. I also volunteer at the library and have a blog. edysicecreamlover18ATgmailDOTcom. Thank you for being so generous!
ReplyDeletewhat a generous offer, bryan. thank you. i enjoyed this posting very much.
ReplyDeletekarenk
kmkuka at yahoo dot com