Fiction writing has been the great passion of my life. Twelve years ago, I wrote an inexplicably ridiculous short story about a misanthropic renter who kills his landlady by forcing a can of bug spray in her throat (Dostoyevsky sponsored by Terminix), and for whatever reason, I was hooked. A few failed novel manuscripts and a graduate creative writing degree later, fiction writing and me are old marrieds. We trust each other, and occasionally, when inspiration strikes, it feels like the warming of a light bulb in an otherwise empty and dark room. Not once have I doubted our relationship.

Until now. Until I met standup comedy.

I started taking standup comedy classes at the San Francisco Comedy College ostensibly to research my latest novel-in-progress, the protagonist of which is a standup. I’ve been a comedy nerd-lite for awhile now. Greg Giraldo, David Cross, and Dave Attell are like sports heroes to me. I admire their work, wish I could do what they do, and can’t begin to fathom how. Two drafts into the novel, I realized that I only superficially understood a comedian’s life. Obviously, most successful comedians spend most of their careers on the road, going from one shitty club to another. Yes, many of them find that they need drugs or alcohol to prop their spirits while they’re stranded in cheap hotels in small towns waiting for the sun to set, the bars to open, and the audience to buy their two-drink minimums. But I was looking for the experiential details beyond the standard storylines of the lonely, but ultimately redemptive and gratifying life of a comedian that one can find easily in movies like Comedian starring Jerry Seinfeld, memoirs like Born Standing Up by Steve Martin, and podcasts like The Nerdist or WTF with Marc Maron. I figured that the best way to get into the head of a standup was to try to become one.

Even the teachers at the Comedy College admit that the concept of teaching comedy is a dubious one at best. “You are the material,” and “There are no rules,” are the closest things to tenets you’ll learn. Most importantly, the college gives amateur comics almost unlimited access to stage time, the best and fastest way to find out if you can be funny under the bright lights, alone, on a stage, in front of an audience who more or less expects to sit politely while you bomb.

Like many writers, I’m an introverted fellow, an invisible man at parties. I wake every morning and silently trudge to my laptop and translate images, scenes and anecdotes to a blank and unresponsive page. Sometimes the process is exciting, and sometimes, it’s a wonky tedium of shuffling words, deleting them, and Googling the arcane and slowly dying rules of grammar involving em dashes and serial commas. Writing is not an extemporaneous art form. Books are meant to be consumed in silence, in bed, on planes, and at beaches. The microphone and the stage are not a writer’s natural ally. I most certainly do not consider the spotlight a close friend.

Consequently, I planned to leave the gift of stage-time wrapped for as long as possible. After a couple of classes, though, more than half the class had begun to perform open-mics at least once a week and being an Asian-American (Type A all the way!), I wasn’t about to be left behind. So I took the leap. Two hours before my open-mic, I crafted (liberally speaking) three minutes about breaking my toenail while standup paddling as a result of my reluctance to trim my toenails and the resulting hijinx and neuroses that ensued. Larry David’s job is safe. As I walked up on stage, I kept telling myself I didn’t give a fuck whether these strangers laughed or not.

It wasn’t art, but to my surprise, I got laughs. In those instances, I felt a rush, not unlike the lighting of the bulb between me and fiction writing. And in those instances, I wanted to chase that feeling again—the rush you get from an audience’s laugh—as soon as possible.

Since that first open mic, I’ve performed a few more times. Each time, I’ve sat in the audience, worrying over my material so intensely that I often forget to enjoy and laugh at the previous comics like I should. Comic karma is a bitch! You have to support your own! Each time, before I get on stage, I lie to myself that I don’t give a fuck whether these strangers laugh or not. Of course, you care whether they laugh or not! Laughter’s your sole measure of success.

Yes, I’ve bombed, but one good bit seems to make you forget ten bad ones. Besides, when I bomb, I try to blame the audience as quickly as possible, and then move on to the next bit (just kidding, I save the bit for the next unlucky audience; I’m supposedly “working on material” but really, I’m just being prideful and misanthropic). When I write a failed novel, I throw half-decades of my life in the paper shredder. When a bit bombs, it’s just a few bad minutes I can quickly redeem.

Almost every aspect about being a standup is the polar opposite to that of a writer. Most writers require a quiet environment. A standup works on material with audiences. Most writers need a stable home to do their best work. A successful standup spends most of their time on the road. Fiction writing is a game where a select few win big, but smaller wins, like publishing a short story in a journal, are few and far between. Standup comedy is a game where a select few win big, but there are hundreds of potential micro-wins every night. Every joke wins or loses. For a writer, not only does every sentence not win or lose, every sentence can be an eternal pain in the ass.

If fiction writing is the long-married wife, standup is the farm fresh mistress, never questioning my failures and always feeding the ego with an effortless grace. But what will I do when I wake in the morning? Won’t I need to silently trudge to my laptop? Won’t I miss the wonky process of working and re-working sentences? Won’t I miss the inherent joys of working on my office-ass at home? Well, let’s just say that before I started doing standup, I never had to ask.