i just started watching tons of pilots and reading pilot scripts. i also read a book called "save the cat" which is an excellent way to learn the math of writing tv and movies. i got note cards, a cork board, the whole thing! I'm a dork but i couldn't afford classes or anything on it. watch your favorite tv pilot, write out the math of it, and follow that template.
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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.
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 felt compelled to share my mental health challenges to help take the shame and stigma off it, but i couldn't do it on stage-was just too insecure and nervous. i wanted to write the book that i wish had been available to me when i was suffering--self help books are usually very boring and i wanted to write a cool, funny one! i also wrote about getting my ear getting bitten off and almost getting arrested in guatemala which i couldn't really do while making eye contact with humans
I just find the more personal and brutally honest you are, the more people connect with your material - be it standup or narrative.
I don’t go, “I’m gonna write a joke.” I just go through the world and see stuff. It’s like I exercised the part of my mind of noticing things, to the point where I’m now noticing things without even trying to notice them.
The more you can do the better. Always write your own stuff. Most people aren't interested in writing for you. Beeleedat.
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...
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Another night to remember: Around three a.m., [30 Rock producer and writer Robert Carlock] and I were leading a rewrite in my living room and realized that we had both fallen asleep while talking. When we woke up a few moments (or hours?) later, the other writers were just sitting politely, awaiting further instruction. That is a dedicated staff.
Every character on that show fulfills a different part of what’s fun to write for comedy for. Writing for Tom gets to fulfill the douchier quotient, and writing for Andy, you get that dumb, big Labrador retriever, and Ron is the weird libertarian… I mean, he’s Ron. Oh, my favorite character to write for is Kyle at the shoeshine stand.
TV was an accidental detour from what I thought was going to be a feature writing career - it started when Ben Stiller asked me and Schrab during a movie pitch meeting if we had any TV ideas...a very long story later, we ended up doing Heat Vision and Jack with Stiller and although FOX didn't pick it up, I had already gotten a taste of how much more empowered writers were in TV than they were in features and ended up sticking around for a few decades.
Oh. Well I thought a Minute with Stan Hooper was the best thing I ever did outside of stand up comedy. But Fox didn't stay with the show. It was a show that was intended to turn very dark, like at the end of the first season, it was set up like a homespun show, and then at the end of the first season my wife was going to be slaughtered by the town barber that we'd come to love as a kind of a funny old fella. Anyways, turned out he was a psychosexual sadist. but they never let us get to the end. So you never got to see my plan.
And I'm not saying anything against psychosexual sadists. I just think oftentimes you know, they'll slaughter innocents and I'm no fan of that.
read a book called save the cat, watch every great pilot, read as many tv scripts as you can, watch you tube videos on great writers processes
It was pretty crazy. I already had a whole rhythm to my week as a writer, so it took a while to change it up and focus more on performing than on writing. Here's what helped a ton: Rob Klein and Bryan Tucker took over most of the Head Writer job and they're two of the funniest writers I've ever met. Rob and Bryan and I write a lot together for the show. Also Dennis McNicholas who used to be one of the head writers with Tina Fey and Adam McKay started producing WU last year and that was awesome. And our WU writers are the best and made our jobs a lot more fun: Pete Schultz (Leslie calls him "Franklin), Josh Patten (Leslie calls him "Clarence"), Katie Rich (Leslie calls her "Rachel"), and Mega...
Very fun. I got paid to travel across Canada and stay in fancy hotels and all I had to do was come up with lines for the host like "The temperature may be ice cold here in Winnipeg, but things are really heating up in the judging room."
There is no line that I know in terms of what's "too far," whether that means too sentimental or too ...I don't know, controversial or confessional....a "boundary" is an artificial construct, we have to create boundaries when they involve other people, precisely because it makes empirical something that would otherwise be frustratingly subjective (like that neighbor that just kind of 'feels like' their yard extends into yours, in which case you have to go to city hall and pull out a map with lines on it). In matters of creativity - when you're sitting and writing dialogue by yourself, there's no lines needed because you're not having to function in cooperation, your job in creation, I think,...
Each year I'm getting more and more joy out of the process than the outcome...that may be because I've been fortunate to have great outcomes and are taking them for granted but I like to think I'm remapping my neurology and interpreting certain experiences differently. I like talking to other people about how to tackle a story. If I were a character in a movie, my "arc" would definitely have something to do with a journey from isolation to collaboration. In other words, as I near my retirement, my real joy has become exploiting younger writers.
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