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3

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 too demanding.

Not only do they not produce usable results, but they tend to be discouraging. You find you can’t keep up the impossible pace, so you abandon your efforts with the excuse, “Well, I tried, but I couldn’t do it.”

Set goals or quotas that are challenging but attainable.

Specific: It’s hard to meet a quota if you don’t really know what that quota is. “I’ll write a lot of one-liners today.” “I’ll write jokes until I can’t think of anything funny to write anymore.” With these sorts of quotas, you don’t really know when you’ve achieved them. They’re too vague. How much is a lot? How can you be sure that you’ve exhausted all the “funniness” that’s in you?

Specify the quantity. Vow to write five jokes a day. Vow to write ten jokes a day. You determine how many you can write because it is your personalized quota, but do make that goal measurable. Determining to write a bunch of pages is not really a quota. Determining to write ten pages is. Determining today to write a lot of words in your novel is not a quota. Determining to write 2,500 words today is.

Goal-oriented: This attribute, too, has to do with being specific. Your quota should guarantee that when you meet it, you have product in hand. It is specific to say “I’ll work on my writing for two hours today—from 10 a.m. to noon.” That’s definitely specific, but it doesn’t necessarily generate any tangible results. It’s quite possible that you could sit at the keyboard for those two hours and produce no usable results. Nevertheless, you’ve fulfilled your promise. You worked for two hours.

It’s commendable that you are dedicated enough to sit at your keyboard for that long. However, it’s more commendable if you generate quality material while you’re sitting there. I’m pretty sure that when your boss hands you a work assignment he doesn’t say, “Work on this for a week.” He’d be more likely to say, “Have this on my desk by Friday.” Results are what count; not how long it takes you to achieve them.

You’re better served if you assign a specific goal to your work. It’s fine to set aside two hours to do it in, but make sure that your two hours of effort create a concrete product. If you reach that goal early, you can take some time off or keep going and produce even more results. If you don’t achieve your specific goal, maybe you have to stay at the keyboard a little longer.

Clients can buy only results, not effort.

Divided into reasonably short segments: We’ve already discovered that interruptions are momentum breakers. However, you can’t write continuously. Both you and your computer deserve a rest sometime. The trick now is to keep the interruptions from interfering with the momentum as much as possible. This is accomplished by keeping the work periods relatively steady. Set your quota for as short a period as is reasonable.

Strangely, there is a difference between resolving to write one act of my four-act teleplay this week and resolving to write all four acts of my teleplay by the end of the month. One function of your quota is to keep you turning out material at a fairly steady rate. Presumably, if you stick to your quota, you will do that.

But let’s look at this difference more closely. Resolving to write four acts of your teleplay by the end of the month means that if you don’t produce one act at the end of the first week, you’re still on quota. Right? If you still have nothing on paper by the end of the second week, you’re still on quota. If you continue to get no writing done, you’re still on quota at the end of the third week. Now you have only one week left to get four acts written. You’ve moved into the “unreasonable” area of your quota. In effect, you’re still living up to your promised quota, but you have destroyed the momentum.

However, if you determine to write one act of your teleplay each week, and you get nothing done that first week, you’re now off quota. You have to get yourself moving. So as we discussed earlier, it’s more beneficial to hit 20 golf balls a day than it is to put it off and hit 600 at the end of the month.

But again, this is your quota. You design it. You can set a schedule that demands daily results or you can set one that allows for results every other day. You can even set weekly goals. Going beyond that time span, though, may defeat the purpose of the quota system.

Another thing that setting shorter time periods accomplishes is that it maintains your interest and enthusiasm in your writing. Putting your quota off for months at a time is tempting fate. It’s too easy to lose passion and abandon your original goal.

Overwriting

The second concept is to overwrite. Overwriting doesn’t imply that you should add so much to your writing that it becomes poorly written. It doesn’t demand that you add bulk to your writing just to get more words onto the paper. What it does mean is that you deliver a little more than is required of you. Always deliver enough of an overflow to allow you or your client to select the best of your output. For instance, if a comedian needs two jokes for an opening segment, you deliver ten. If a sitcom script demands a new punchline on page 15, you jot five or six possible improvements in the margin. You, the producer, or the actor can then select the one that works best. If you’re searching for the next plot point in your teleplay, it may be nice to generate several possibilities. This permits you to consider them all and select the best option.

Overwriting is a fine habit for a comedy writer to develop for several reasons:

It improves the quality of your work: Obviously, by writing more you increase the quantity of your work. Are we suggesting then that in comedy quantity is more important than quality? No, but we are saying that quantity can improve quality. You have more to choose from so your final selections should be top level.

I often illustrate this point by recalling one high school in my hometown that was a perennial football powerhouse. This team was consistently so strong that it was almost a physical threat to many of the other school teams. Why was it so overwhelmingly powerful year in and year out? One reason was that the team had a student body that was five times larger than its competitors. With more students to choose from, the coaches could pick players with more size and bulk. The talent pool was larger so the team usually had more skilled players, too.

Similarly, if you have a client who needs five good jokes and you furnish twenty-five, he or she will be able to pick the five best. That improves the resultant quality.

It helps you to go beyond the obvious: With many humorous premises there are some easy jokes—the references or the punchlines are predictable to practically everyone. There are some jokes that everyone writes—especially nonprofessionals. These are the obvious gags. Often these are the cheap jokes.

Just as these jokes immediately pop into the heads of nonwriters, they jump into the minds of professional comedy writers, too. Only by sticking with the premise and looking for more references and ideas do you come up with jokes that are unique, unexpected, surprising, and funnier.

Those are the jokes that you want to write, but if you don’t resolve to work a little further into the project, to give more than the bare minimum, you may never reach the brilliant lines.

It ensures that you have thought through all of the possibilities: Consider Jeff Foxworthy’s signature routine “You might be a redneck if . . .” That premise feels quite limited. If you were assigned to write punchlines based on that setup, you’d have a difficult time coming up with ten to fifteen solid gags. Yet look at what that setup has produced. Foxworthy, I’m sure, has done hundreds of variations on that line from the stage. He has published books that probably list thousands of solid, funny punchlines based on the redneck premise. And as many as are out there today, thousands more will be written and published in the future. The possibilities are endless.

Yet the temptation is there for us comedy writers to say to ourselves about any subject, “There is nothing else funny about this topic.” However, more, and many times better, lines are still available. By writing a little bit beyond what we feel is our limit, and by vowing to do a little more than what is required of us, we may be able to find more interesting, different, and funny lines. At least we know that we have explored beyond the average amount of possibilities.

It prevents us from quitting too soon: To me, this is one of the biggest faults of comedy writers—we quit too soon. We give up much too early on both the premise we’re working on and the specific joke we’re working on. Our tendency is to say, “Well, I’ve written a joke, now I can start writing the next joke.” But is that joke you’ve written in the best possible form to extract laughs. Would a word change improve it? Would a more well-defined setup line help the punch? Would a different payoff be funnier?

This advice to write more applies not only to the quantity of writing but also to the quality of your writing. If you give each joke a little more thought, you may provide better jokes.

We may also quit too soon on a premise. If we’re writing a sitcom, we may assign action and dialogue to the characters and then move on. But might there be different actions the characters could take in this situation? Are there different words they could say? All of this is worth a little more consideration.

I’ll repeat these ideas again because they will be useful in teaching yourself to write comedy and because they will be extremely helpful to you throughout your comedy writing career. Write to a quota and overwrite.