On Tuesday night, GalleyCat hobnobbed with socialites, authors and celebrities at the annual Moth Ball at the classy Capitale on the Lower East Side. Moth GrandSLAM winners read one minute stories and Deborah Allen-Carr received the $5,000 MothShop Community Scholarship Award.

We caught up with some of the attendees to get author reading advice. Moth GrandSLAM winner Brad Lawrence had this suggestion: “One of the most valuable things at The Moth is the time-limit. It makes you hone things, there’s never a wasted line. There’s never filler–because you don’t have time for that. It’s very valuable–making every word count.”

Moth Ball host and author Jonathan Ames had some short and sweet advice: “Keep it short–no more than 15 minutes. Pick something funny.”

Calvin Trillin, a New Yorker writer and honoree of the evening had the most gloomy advice for the writers in the audience: “Go into software sales. That would be my advice. I think people are always going to write. I don’t think it’s a matter of technology or anything, it’s always been [like this]–God certainly didn’t intend people to make a living this way. I would say software sales is the path to follow.