Martini Shot

Having a baby is hard, I'm told, but it can't be harder than working with a baby.  And I don't mean that metaphorically, either.

The great thing about laughter – and the big reason most of the writers I know got into comedy in the first place – is that it's involuntary.  It erupts – that's what we say: the audience erupted into laughter – from some reptile part of the brain...

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Writers in Hollywood, as I might have mentioned once or twice before, get a lot of notes. From the studio. From the network. From the producer and the director and the actors and even, when they're stupid enough to ask for them, from their spouses and friends and colleagues...

It's pilot season – maybe you've detected the joy in the air?  It's come a little late this year – writers have been a little slower than usual with the rewrites and the drafts, mostly because for the past two weeks, any two writers together has meant at least two hours of conversation about Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno and Jeff Zucker and NBC and if you multiply that out – two writers times two hours times hundreds of projects all across the television industry – you end up with what economists might call “intrinsic inefficiencies...”

At some point in its creation, every writing project – a feature film script, a TV pilot, a four minute radio commentary, whatever --  is about twice as long as it should be.  And after you've played with the margins and fiddled with the font size, you eventually have to figure out what to cut...

Writing is supposed to be a solitary thing. A lonely life. Not in the television business. Writers for television are positively surrounded by people. Executives, producers, actors – we’re never really able to achieve that ratty-sweater-coffee-mug kind of arrangement. Sure, there’s a week or two when we’re left essentially alone to bang out a draft, but within a few hours of turning it in to our paymasters, we’re on the phone, getting notes and questions and requests for revisions...

Here's what it's come to. I take a simple kitchen timer – this one is shaped like a tomato – and I set it for 25 minutes. And then I sit in a chair and I work – mostly, I write – continuously focusing for 25 minutes...

One morning, a few years ago, when I had a show in production, I got a call from an executive at the studio.  He was calling to tell me that he couldn't be at the runthrough that afternoon, but he had a question about a certain line...

Writers, like farmers, can find the bad news in any kind of weather. When it rains, a little too much, farmers complain about the bumper crop, which means over supply and collapsing prices.  When it rains a little too little, they complain about  parched soil, no crops, lower income...