Don’t let anyone tell you what a story is, what it needs to include or what form it must take. As an experiment, go out of your way to write a non-story. It will still be a story, but it will have a chance of being a different story. Our brains make stories. It is as basic to us as breathing; we cannot do otherwise. Free yourself – and by extension the rest of us – with your efforts. If you give yourself too specific an assignment you will keep yourself locked away from your work. Go where it takes you. If you say you want to write about homeless people, and in the end reveal their humanity, you’ll end up with something illustrative and perhaps instructive. If you say, ‘There aren’t words t...[Read more]

Storytelling is inherently dangerous. If you consider a traumatic event in your life, consider it as you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the one hundredth time. It’s not the same thing. A few components enter into the change. One is perspective. Most people think perspective is a good thing to have in a story. You can figure out characters arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it from a distance with understanding and context. The problem is that this perspective is a misrepresentation of the incident; it’s a reconstruction with meaning and as such bears very little resemblance to the event. The other thing tha...[Read more]

I’ll tell you this little story now, and I don’t know why I’m telling it but it’s interesting to me and it just seems like there’s something inherently cinematic about it. I run in my neighbourhood, and one day I ran past this guy who was running in the other direction, an older guy, a big hulky kind of guy, really struggling, huffing and puffing. I was kind of going down a slight hill and he was coming up the hill. But it was very slight, and he was wearing a headband and his sweatshirt. So he passes me and he goes, ‘Well sure, it’s all downhill that way,’ and I love that joke because it’s funny. And he made a connection and it was sort of a witty thing to say. So I had it in my head that...[Read more]

Well, I know how you DON'T tell a story saying the ending part first, because that's what my mother does all the time, and that's what people sometimes do in the audience, where they'll yell out "DO the joke where the thing at the end happens?!" You know how they always say a story has to have a beginning, middle and an end? Well, I find that if you have a beginning and an end, you don't really need a middle. Why waste time with a middle? Who ever goes "You know what part of the movie I liked? The middle.. That long part between the beginning and the end." That is no one's favorite part. Although I worked on the Middle and it was a fine show. ...And just because the other person is silent...[Read more]

I don’t think my personal story, what’s actually happened in my life, is that interesting to anyone, but I think the feelings we all go through that are universal to the human experience are stories that I’m probably interested in delving into. I think that we all become a little more attuned to the effects that our words have on other people. I think Between Two Ferns and my history with shows like Mr. Show [with Bob and David], we embraced button-pushing and trying to find where the line is, and the line continually moves, which is a great thing. I think as long as it has some sort of attempt at artistry in it, it can be good to kind of try to go up to that line or even cross the line, and...[Read more]

I wanted to do an episodic, non-serialized show. There's no real interest in that kind of storytelling on the Netflixes out there - they like continuing stories you can binge-watch. So the network made sense.

Well, I know how you DON'T tell a story saying the ending part first, because that's what my mother does all the time, and that's what people sometimes do in the audience, where they'll yell out "DO the joke where the thing at the end happens?!" You know how they always say a story has to have a beginning, middle and an end? Well, I find that if you have a beginning and an end, you don't really need a middle. Why waste time with a middle? Who ever goes "You know what part of the movie I liked? The middle.. That long part between the beginning and the end." That is no one's favorite part. Although I worked on the Middle and it was a fine show. ...And just because the other person is silent...[Read more]

I don't have any real alterations I'd make, like "oh, I put the threshold in the wrong place," but I do have a much simpler view of the circular story model, based on years of breaking well over a hundred stories with it...little tricks that make viewing a story even easier and I guess a little less out-and-out hero's journeyish in favor of something more fundamentally geometrical. I'm hoping to share these discoveries in some part of the book I'm writing for Doubleday, in the chapter between the shit from my childhood nobody cares about and the Chevy Chase stuff I forced everyone to care about.

Hmmm....I guess Terrance Mallick's stuff stands out...but not if you look at structure as, on a basic level, "descent, initiation and return." I saw Bad Lieutenant - the Harvey Keitel one - in the theatre when I was a teenager and I haven't seen it again but from what I remember it was decidedly unpredictable, as if the goal wasn't as much telling you a story as it was to put you in the shoes of a life that had lost all structure to drugs. I felt kind of delightfully displaced by The Dark Knight ...when it got to the scene where the Joker [SPOILERS] is in the interrogation room, something started to happen where the movie felt like it was well past what "should have" been a Batman movie but ...[Read more]