So I sit down, I turn on the really loud music, incredibly loud. I have my own studio apart from the house so no one can hear it. I light incense. I drink tea. I turn off all the lights except for the glow of the computer screen and I write. And I love seeing what happens. Now what ends up happening by about page 80 is by page 80 you go I don’t know where I am in this book. This better go somewhere.
Like there’s a lot of risk involved, because it’s a high wire act. If you fall, there’s no net. If you’re at page 80 and there’s nothing there, you’re stuck. But I picked this — I started this book with nothing. So I thought well I better get something. This is really loose. So I did basically the movie script structure. I hung five clothespins effectively.
The open, the end of act one, the middle of act two, the end of act two, the end of act three. If I know those five points, then I’m not — then the train has some direction. And then what I would do is, okay, so here’s the end of act one which is page 70 in my book. I need to have Timmy here. So I just have fun, have fun, have fun, but make sure by then you’re there.
I think it’s a lot like Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO. I think it’s how he does — like to me, that’s a really funny comedy. But if you look at the script — so a half hour television show should have a 30 page script, right, a minute per page. His script is like eight pages, so all it is for the scene is by the end of it you have to know Jeff’s buying the car. And then have your conversation. Talk about the Dodgers, talk about whatever you want.
But at the end you got to get that. But he kept that loose so you could have the spontaneity, which I think a lot of comedies do that now. So I’m doing the same thing but with books. One time — I’ll tell you this — quick story because it’s funny. Makes me look like a bit of an idiot. I was at the UCLA book festival, or USC, one of the two, and they made the mistake of putting me on the stage with these other writers, one of whom was a professor of literature at UCLA.
And the question was how do you prepare to write your books. So the professor just looks like a professor with the tweed jacket and the whole bit. He takes the mike and he goes I begin by writing 10,000 pages, 10,000 pages of notes on the characters. I know what they eat for breakfast, I know where they were when they were six, I’m not going to use that in the book, but I know everywhere they’ve been. It’s about a two year process. When that’s up and I know everything, I begin writing the book.
And so the answer was a lot longer than that, but that’s the gist of it. So they hand the mike over to me. I turn on really loud music and type as fast as I can. He thought — he must have looked at me like God, why am I on the stage with this guy? I make fun of it but I think he’s losing something. I think he’s losing something. There’s so much to be said for spontaneity. You’re so much funnier like that than you are when you ponder it and ponder it. You kill jokes that way. You overthink them.
My least funny jokes are the ones I think about too much. I also will swing and miss completely when I do it that way. But I do hit some homeruns. I don’t know. That’s my theory. I’m sure there are many ways to do it, but that’s how I do it.