It [writing a speech] is very much like when I have a job writing a screenplay. I think I wanted to do something true and I wanted to do something helpful. What complicates it, in addition to the fact that that’s a hard thing to figure out, is that I also struggle with wanting you to like me. In my fantasy I leave here and people are saying, ‘Great speech!’ you know, and, ‘Not only is he a great writer but boy, I really learned something tonight, he really brought it!’ So as much as I know that this neediness of mine exists, I also have a difficult time extricating myself from it, or even fully recognizing it when it’s happening.
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plotting can be tough because you're never quite sure you're doing it right - it's usually kind of like an exploration. You try something, and figure out what it needs. For instance, one episode we were plotting last night, I felt like it was all things happening, and no emotional connection from our charaters. So we figured out what my own personal connection to the plot would be, and that actually helped us figure out the things that would happen more easily. It's also helpful if your characters can have opposite points of view about what's occuring.
To motivate, I would try to outline as much as you can before you ever start writing a line of dialogue. If you're having trouble plotting, ...
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.
I wish I could. i have a lot of journals with one page half written in.
I sometimes will write myself a quick email on my bb when I think of something.
It was actually really similar in the big creative ways: thinking about how to find comedy and surprise and emotion in the unexpected and the everyday.
The more you can do the better. Always write your own stuff. Most people aren't interested in writing for you. Beeleedat.
It's been a priceless experience with the people I've met in the writer's room, and that I learned how to write a script. It's just great to finally have something where I can actually write the lines. As you work your way up, you think to yourself (or lie to yourself) that you could write it better. And now I get to do that. It's been great.
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This is Harold Pinter: ‘A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that, the writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb, you find no shelter, no protection, unless you lie. In which case, of course, you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.’
Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope. It’s done so for me and I have to keep rediscovering it. It has profound importance in my life. Give that to the world, rather than selling something to the world. Don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work a...
When I talk about my cancer on stage, doing standup, it is a cathartic experience. And it is important to be honest and talk about things that matter, even dark and scary things. The special that we shot about my cancer helped a lot of people. Early detection is the key to survival. So if you ever feel sick, or that something may be wrong with your body. Go to the doctor, don't be afraid. It could save your life.
One thing that has helped me is to try to think as objectively as possibly when you're teaching them things or correcting them. One thing I ALWAYS do when I correct my kids is to let them know I did the exact same things they did. We all make mistakes, and that's how you learn and grow. I try to be as vulnerable in that regard as I can. I also tell them that I love them as much as life itself and that my goal in explaining something or correcting them is just to make them grow and develop into the happiest, best person they can be. Even though I'm not sure how much of that gets in at 3 or 4, I think if you keep explaining things that way eventually it becomes a standard idea in their little ...
I just find the more personal and brutally honest you are, the more people connect with your material - be it standup or narrative.
I am painfully conscious of the harm that occurs when participating in the media with unclear intentions. I do not want to be a salesman, I do not want to scream, ‘Buy me!’ or, ‘Watch me!’ And I don’t want to do that tonight. What I’m trying to express – what I’d like to express – is the notion that, by being honest, thoughtful and aware of the existence of other living beings, a change can begin to happen in how we think of ourselves and the world, and ourselves in the world. We are not the passive audience for this big, messed up power play.
We don’t have to be. We can say who we are, we can assert our right to existence, we can say to the bullies and conmen, the people who try to shame u...
I think the best way to begin to combat the systemic indoctrination is to look at intention. The aphorism, ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions,’ doesn’t ring true to me. I think intention is at the bottom of everything. My intentions are shifting and complex and often at odds with each other. And if I know what they are, and watch them closely as they slip and slide all over the place, I have a better chance of putting something honest into the world and this is my goal. My own Hippocratic Oath – I do not want to harm.
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I'd like it [his musical album entitled "Fear of Death"] to be Number One and the MOST talked about thing of the day, the week, the year! That's the insanity of making things.
No, it’s not. There are so many pitfalls when a movie comes out that it’s hard to enjoy it when it comes out. Obviously if a movie does well and is critically well received I like it, but I’m so needful of it, that kind of response that it doesn’t feel good. It just feels less bad, you know? Because it feels really bad when people say mean things. Really, it feels bad. And I kind of wish that it didn’t, but it does for me.
Your dreams are very well written. I know this, without knowing any of you. People turn anxieties, crises and longing, love, regret and guilt into beautiful rich stories in their dreams. What is it that allows us the creative freedom in our dreams that we don’t have in our waking lives? I don’t know, but I suspect part of it is that in our dreams we are not constricted by worry about how we will appear to others. It’s a private conversation with ourselves, and if we’re worried about it, this becomes part of the dream. I think if we were better able to approach our work this way, the results would be different.
It’s a tricky thing [delivering a speech]; no-one wants to come up here and bomb. It’s really, literally the stuff of nightmares. I’ve had that nightmare a lot of times, and I know you want to be entertained, so for me to calculatedly not entertain you in order to be true seems sort of selfish. So I find myself in this push-pull relationship with my opposing desires, which I think is a big part of what characters are and what characters do in real life – people in real life, characters in movies.
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