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David Spark is a Senior Writer for ZDTV. He faces the challenge of providing informative and entertaining material for viewers. But that is not unfamiliar ground.

David has entertained and informed with his "Professor of Comedy" show. Reminiscent of a self-help course, "Professor" offers the very best in how to be funny…and when. He has kept the world up-to-date on computer technology in "PC Magazine." He has kept audience belly laughs loud and obvious in various stand-up routines. Want to get on his good side? Just ask him how he likes his coffee.

AUTEUR: What was your first writing job?

DSPARK: Radio comedy.

Listen to a wacky morning DJ, and you’ll probably hear him playing goofy commercials and song parodies. If you thought that he was being really clever and produced all those funny pieces himself, let me be the first to burst that bubble. He’s not. He’s probably playing a cut from a CD ordered from a syndicated comedy network.

In college, I wrote a handful of these bits for a service called Olympia Broadcasting. I was ecstatic. They paid me $300 for my first two scripts. "All right," I thought, "I’m going to have a huge comedy writing career." Then reality set in when they bought only one of my next ten scripts.

AUTEUR: How did your first writing job progress into a career?

DSPARK: It didn’t really until about five years later. I didn’t even think of having a writing career. I wrote a few more of those radio scripts for a few other services, but their pay dropped and I wasn’t getting as much feedback as I liked – positive or negative. Plus, they were butchering my work. For example, I wrote a song parody for Ice T’s controversial song, "Cop Killer." It was called "Crop Killer" about a farmer who loses all his crops to locusts. Well, the guy who produced it didn’t even use the music to "Cop Killer." He used some other completely different music and put my words to it. It was awful. On what planet would that have been a good idea?

The writing career didn’t happen until I heard about this presentation company, Live Marketing. They produced entertaining presentations at computer trade shows. At the time I was a systems manager at an ad agency and still doing some stand up comedy. This is perfect. All I had to do was convince Live Marketing. That was not an easy task. It took a solid year of harassing, but they finally hired me for contract work. After Live Marketing, the confidence to pursue other work increased - magazines, web sites, and Second City. That was the beginning of my writing career - two and a half years freelancing out of my apartment.

AUTEUR: How important is it to you to write to inform versus writing to entertain?

DSPARK: Entertaining is more important for presentations and TV than it is for print. For print, it’s more important to write a good headline to catch the eye. I think my print editors spent more time rewriting my headlines than my actual articles. When someone picks up a computer magazine, they want to read about computers. They pick and choose what they want to read. Like a web site, a person reads a magazine nonlinearly. So a sharp headline can determine whether or not an article will be read. Since TV and presentations are linear, you’re constantly battling to maintain your audience’s attention. That’s why the performance level of content on those two mediums is considerably more important.

AUTEUR: What challenges do you face writing and creating consistent material for ZDTV?

DSPARK: I just think about what interests me. I’m the perfect audience for ZDTV. I love cool new tech stuff especially if it applies to me personally. That’s kind of what we’re always thinking about, "What’s cool or new about it and how does it apply to our viewers?"

AUTEUR: How has entertainment writing prepared you for this step?

DSPARK: Stand up comedy made me a much better writer. Stand up teaches you to write tightly and get to the point, quickly. Audiences are impatient and will tell you in an instant if you’re on or off track. No other form of entertainment has that level of interaction. That’s why I believe it’s extremely important when I’m working with writers to give them feedback - good and bad. It’s the only way you get better, plus it can help with morale – assuming that they’re good.

AUTEUR: How has your technical writing prepared you for your entertainment writing?

DSPARK: It’s really the other way around. I became a concise technical writer because of my stand up. Man, I was a horrible writer in college. If you told me back then that I’d be writing for a living, I would have been shocked. I graduated with a degree in business and mathematics and thought I was going to be spending the rest of my life on the business side of advertising. A career in writing rarely if ever crossed my mind at that time.

AUTEUR: What landmarks do you use to assess whether you are doing well as a writer and when you need growth?

DSPARK: I’m decently self-critical. I know when I’ve written something well, and I know when I’ve screwed up. I see many writers that just look at the bottom line in terms of the hours they spend on a project and how much they get paid. And how they’re not willing to spend more hours on a project simply because it would mean less dollars per hour. I think it’s more important to concern oneself with becoming a great writer. One of my first print writing jobs was a dinky 200-word review in the back of the magazine. I must have spent over 7 hours rewriting that assignment. After that I got a few more reviews and in about two months I was writing features and cover stories. That and the fact that it took me considerably less time to write 200 word reviews were signs that I was going in the right direction.

AUTEUR: What goals have you set, in the past, which has gotten you to where you are today?

DSPARK: I’m always campaigning. I learned early on that nothing ever happens the first time you meet someone. You have to start a campaign to promote you. Constantly follow up with people. Tell them what you’re doing. You want your name always to be top of mind. So when a job does come up, they’ll think of you. It takes months, sometimes years before someone will hire you. The only time anyone ever hired me from a single conversation was Second City. That was a complete shocker. They’re notorious for taking years to move anyone up the ladder.

Goals are simply the next rung on the ladder. It never ends. Because once you reach the next rung you’re looking at the one beyond that. For a long time my sole obsession was just getting published. Then when that happened, I wanted cover stories. Then after that I wanted more comedy writing. And on and on and on…

AUTEUR: How have you followed through on those goals?

DSPARK: Maintaining the campaign. I see tons of more rungs higher up on the ladder. There’s plenty of bigger and better stuff awaiting me down the road, hopefully. I don’t know what it is, but I want to be prepared when it does come. And that’s kind of why I created my web site, davidspark.com (plug #1).

AUTEUR: What are your goals for your web site?

DSPARK: To promote "The Dave Spark Experience," if there could possibly be such a thing. It is hands down the most pompous self-interested thing I’ve ever done. It’s kind of ludicrous how much the site glorifies me. And for that reason, I have to give people another reason to come to my site. Heck, I’m not that interesting. Sure wish I was though. That’s the great thing about having your own web site. You can lie all you want. I just wanted something that was up so if anyone wanted to see my work, all I had to say was, "Check out my web site, davidspark.com (plug #2)." Man, there’s something so cool about that. I love it.

AUTEUR: How do you measure the success of your television programs? Your web site?

DSPARK: For ZDTV, being that the station does not have Nielsen ratings, we use other measures of success – visits to our web site, emails, and general buzz among employees at the station. Because if your coworkers liked something, chances are the audience did too.

As for web site success…

Three years ago at a trade show in LA, I bumped into four people that recognized me from my web site. That was wild. Plus, I’ve dated women who have read my web site before we had our first date. And it’s kind of strange when you’re doing that "So tell me about yourself" crap and she already knows everything about you. But ultimately I can analyze the number of people to my web site from a log file analyzer. If you don’t have one, get one. They tell you who’s coming to your site, where they’re coming from, where they’re going, and how long they stay. That kind of info helps you refine your promotion plus more efficiently redesign your site. You can see that report from my web site, davidspark.com (plug #3).

AUTEUR: What is the biggest difference between writing for a publication versus writing for a television program?

DSPARK: Writing about computers for print is considerably more technical than TV. You can’t always assume a certain level of knowledge with a TV audience that you can with print.

AUTEUR: What is the difference between working with a large company, like ZD, versus working with smaller companies or independently?

DSPARK: I don’t really yet have the sense that I’m writing for a large company because we’re a start up, and all of this is very new to a lot of us. The big difference though is that I don’t have to harass people about paying me. Geez, when I was a freelancer that was my least favorite part of the job, annoying my clients for money they owed me. Sometimes it would take as long as two to six months to get paid on an assignment. It drove me absolutely nuts.

AUTEUR: What can we expect to see from you theatrically in the next year?

DSPARK: I’m thinking about doing another run of my show "The Professor of Comedy" in San Francisco with major revisions and more actors. "The Professor of Comedy" was a show I wrote, produced and starred in at Second City in Chicago. It was a mock university slide show lecture about stand up where I played the part of the Professor, and my partner, Dion Stanley, played the part of the stand up comic. It was my first ever theatrical show and I learned a ton about writing, performing and producing. I want to go back and do it again, so I can fix all my mistakes.

AUTEUR: Through the grapevine I have heard that you are pondering your first novel...how true is this?

DSPARK: It’s not a novel; it’s a book about online chat. But being that I’ve been doing so much other stuff, I’ve never gotten my butt in gear to actually work on it. I think the idea is marketable enough though.

 http://www.davidspark.com

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