Comedy Writing Self-Taught. Gene Perret
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the only option. Comedy writing classes, unless you live in show business cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or Las Vegas, are not readily available.
Of course, there are classes offered through the Internet, but the costs may be prohibitive. One thing you can be sure of—if you’re teaching yourself, you can’t beat the tuition.
Although this book is dedicated to teaching yourself to write comedy, that’s not to condemn any formal education, classes, workshops, clubs, or seminars. If you’re interested in writing comedy, get as much information as you can from wherever you can. At the same time, though, continue to teach yourself. Keep observing, analyzing, studying, and practicing. The secret to success in any endeavor is to become good at what you do and then to keep getting better . . . and better . . . and better.
And, of course, to have fun while doing it.
Two Concepts You Can Teach Yourself Immediately
Many of the exercises in this book require considerable time to complete. A few of the lessons require practice and patience in order to acquire the skills they’re teaching. That’s understandable. No one learns to play the piano adroitly after only one or two lessons. It requires commitment and dedication. Try swinging a golf club—even after a good instructor tells you how—and you realize that it requires practice.
The concepts presented in this chapter, on the other hand, you can understand and use immediately. Not too many other segments of your training will be as instantaneous. That’s because these are disciplines that you accept and apply rather than knowledge that you must acquire or skills that you must perfect. Following these recommendations requires no study or preparation. It’s like resolving to walk a mile every day. Either you do it or you don’t.
You’re both the instructor and the student in this self-taught course. These practices will aid you in both positions. Committing to these disciplines will help you, the instructor, teach more effectively. They will also assist you, the student, in learning your lessons more quickly. Consider them both teaching and study aids.
Before we note them and discuss them in more detail, I would like to add that, if practiced regularly, these suggestions will be a tremendous benefit throughout your writing career. They will help you write more quickly and more professionally. They will guarantee that you always present your best material to clients, producers, and whoever may be interested in hiring you.
These concepts are:
•Writing to a quota
•Overwriting
Writing to a Quota
Writing to a quota is essential to teaching yourself to write comedy. The more you do something, the easier and more comfortable it becomes. An example of this is the routine that you repeat each day when you drive. You go through a series of actions when you first start up your car. You probably can’t even recall what those specific moves are, but you do them each time you settle in behind the wheel. Similarly, you go through a series of actions each time you turn your car’s engine off. You perform them so consistently and so frequently that you’re now so familiar with them that you hardly know what they are or that you’re doing them.
When I bought a new car that had a hand-pulled parking brake, I spent several months turning off the engine and then stomping my foot against the floorboard. Why? Because my previous auto had a parking brake that was activated by pressing a floor pedal with my left foot. I was so accustomed to stomping my foot on the pedal that it took me several months to unlearn it.
The more consistently you perform an activity, the faster the learning curve becomes. It’s more profitable to hit 20 golf balls a day than it is to hit maybe 600 once a month or, to take it to the extreme, 7,300 golf balls one day each year. You’re hitting the same number of balls within the same span of time, yet the resulting benefits are quite different. You’ll gain more with consistent practice.
When the practice is relatively steady, the learning becomes cumulative. You build on the practice that preceded this one. When the practice is sporadic, you have to relearn much of what you learned before in order to build on that knowledge.
Consistent writing develops momentum. You get in the groove. Your writing develops a rhythm, and any new writing you do seems to flow more readily. You see the value of momentum often in watching sports. A team will get on a roll and will capitalize on it. When they feel the momentum, more things seem to go right for them. The ball seems to bounce in their favor. The breaks seem to come their way. And what do the opponents do when they notice this happening? They try to interrupt the course of the game. They’ll call a time-out. They’ll fake an injury. They’ll try to slow the action down. They’ll do anything to destroy the steadiness of the contest. They want to destroy the momentum, and they know that interruptions can do that.
Interruptions can destroy your writing momentum, too. So try to keep the action flowing. Make sure the keyboard keeps humming and new words keep appearing on your monitor screen.
Writing to a quota also helps you build up a body of work. Obviously, if you keep producing, you’re going to build up product. When it comes time to send out samples of your work, you’ll have a good supply to select from. This will be beneficial in trying to entice new clients or in sending out samples of your work for possible employment.
Now let’s look at what your quota should be:
Personalized: Notice the sentence above said “your quota,” and that’s what it should be. It should be designed by you to accommodate the kind of writing you intend to do and geared to the skills and the writing speed that you have.
The quota you determine should reflect the type of writing you do. It would be silly to say “I’ll write ten jokes a day” if you’re trying to write a humorous novel. Vowing to write one act or one scene each week wouldn’t be too helpful if you were trying to create a stand-up comedy routine. You have to figure out what sort of production will best suit your specific writing goals.
Challenging: To get the best results you should get out of your comfort zone. Force a little bit of exertion into your quota. To illustrate the value of this, imagine a golfer who wants to improve his putting so he decides to hit thirty putts each day. That’s commendable. However, suppose he puts the ball down in each instance only eight inches away from the cup. That’s not going to produce worthwhile results. It doesn’t challenge his skills, so it won’t improve them.
Likewise, you as a writer must devise a quota that has some bite to it. Your quota has to be demanding enough to be beneficial. A comedy writer who says “I’ll write one joke a day” or a novelist who says “I’ll write thirty words of my novel each day” will not produce significant results.
As they say with physical exercise, “No pain; no gain”; you have to crank some pain, some discomfort into your personalized quota.
Reasonable: Just as there is no value in designing a quota that has no challenge to it, so there is no benefit in devising a quota that is too demanding or even impossible. The idea is to work steadily toward a goal, not drive yourself to a nervous breakdown. Let’s return to our golfer who practiced faithfully, but only on eight-inch putts. Now let’s imagine that he goes out every day and hits thirty putts that are all over fifty feet long. What’s the point? Putts that long do require some skill, but mostly they demand pure luck. You can’t practice, nor can you perfect, luck. This practice time, too, is wasted.
It would be just as silly and nonproductive for a writer to pledge to write two hundred one-liners each day or to write five half-hour sitcoms each week. These demands are—well, they’re