After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job is to not break the chain.

It comes to me. Part of my leaving the media on all day is a way of…my mind has trained itself to have a very sensitive system of radar about certain words, expressions, topics, and areas of discussion that come up. There are things that interest me more than others, and then there are things that jump out. There’s one thing I learned about the mind as a young man, when I quit school. I read a book - half of it, anyway - called Psycho-Cybernetics. The author said that the brain is a goal-seeking and problem-solving machine, and if you put into it the parameters of what it is you need or want or expect, and you feed it, it will do a lot of work without you even noticing. Because the brain doe...[Read more]

Question: how do you organize and develop your material and various jokes? Do you have notebooks full of detailed notes and jokes, or do you just sketch them out and wing it on stage? Answer: I believe in detailed notes and jokes, and also winging it onstage. But, not for your first open mic. For your first open mic, my advice to you would be to make sure you have what you're gonna do memorized, to the point that one of your friends can gently slap you across the face, and you'll still be able to get it out of your mouth.

The best thing you can do is write, write, write, and write. And read. A lot. And fail. The more you fail the better you'll get. At SNL you could have an amazing show and then just BOMB the following Wednesday at the table read. Stay tough. Don't compare yourself to other people. Just follow your path and have fun.

I get up early and write before i have a chance to remember that writing is hard.

It's like talking but without the immediate regret afterwards

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.

Writing a script is different because you have to write from different perspectives other than your own. I had to write lines for my fictional wife, Leif, Artie [characters in his HBO show Crashing]... you have to imagine more than just your own opinions. A very good excercise just in general!

I finished writing my book, and I started writing another book, because I think I like writing books. I'm writing a children's book, Victoria, and it's about a boy, you know how all little children are different? You know how the beautiful thing is about little children are all being different? Well this is about a little boy who is the same. That's what the book's about. And I think there's a bidding war right now, but I believe it will be either Harper Collins or self-published. So down to us two.

9am. Wake up, turn on some music I like, put on a pot of coffee, and sit down to start writing! A few productive hours and then a break for lunch, and then a couple of more hours if possible: sounds like a plan! 9:15am-4:30pm: Read, text, look up stuff on the internet, read, text, look up stuff on the internet, in a trance cycle 4:30pm: Think "Jesus Christ, have I really done NOTHING all day?!? The day is almost fucking over! I am really fucking worthless." 4:30pm-7:30pm: Write like a maniac. 7:30pm: Decide, "okay, at least I got SOMETHING done today. Tomorrow, I'm going wake up early, be at my desk by 9, and really make up for lost time. REPEAT

With a screenplay you’re creating a world; consider everything, every character, every room, every juxtaposition, every increment of time as an embodiment of that world. Look at all of this through that filter and make sure it is all consistent. As in a painting, every element is part of one whole composition, just as there is nothing separate in the actual world there should be nothing separate in the world you create.

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]

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]