A Quote by Louis C. K.
There’s a need to perfect things in a writers’ room, and that can take a lot of fun out of a show sometimes. It’s a struggle. It depends on your personality. Some people love working with a writing staff. I had a great writing staff on Lucky Louie, but it sometimes felt like Congress or something.
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We have a lot of women on the staff, obviously. It's a predominantly female writing staff and we hire the best people. It's not like we go we need more women or we need four women directing.
When I create a TV show, it's so that I can write it. I'm not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people - experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they're not writing scripts.
Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.
Opening for Louis C.K. during his "Hilarious" tour was a great experience for me. He is the generation just ahead of me, because he started so young. So it's like he's sort of a senior and I'm a junior, in terms of the business. He's done so much - from writing on Conan and Chris Rock to writing and directing movies, having his own HBO show, "Lucky Louie," and now having "Louie" on FX.
The hierarchy plays out in the writers room, and you, as a staff writer, need to know your place.
When your show keeps coming back, year after year, you have a responsibility because your fans know your show sometimes better than you do. You can't play games with them. You have to be really focused and concentrated, and play at your best in every department. The writing staff has to be fantastic. Our director line-up has to be great. Everything has to be better and better. Your fans keep track of the details.
I basically wake up at five in the morning and grab coffee and just get to the studio. And I have a list of things I need to get done every day. Sometimes it's just mixing, sometimes it's actually writing, sometimes it's writing, recording, and mixing. It all depends on what is necessary that day.
Comic scripts are full-on collaborations, not only with your artist, but your editors and colorists and letterers and PR folks, etc. Writing comics reminds me of my days as a journalist, working on a staff of fun, smart people.
Sometimes you get involved in a film because you just love making movies and you want to keep working. Sometimes you're lucky enough to find something that you really care about. Therefore, now I'm emphasizing developing my own projects and writing my own screenplays, so that I can do exactly what I like to do.
I like auditioning. I like working on material. I just love working. I like the chance to work on material. Sometimes it helps to not be going into a room cold and to know people. I've spent a lot of years getting to know people in the business, and that really helps. It depends. You can have some pretty terrible auditions.
I love working and writing new songs. But sometimes you need to wait, to have something in your mind, and then you can let yourself play music.
Every so often, it's time to make a change with a showrunner. You evaluate the creative and how the show is run and how the writing staff works, and sometimes you want to freshen the show. We just decided that it was time to do that on Community, and no disrespect to anyone.
Sometimes I take a movie that I know is not great; it's not great on the page, but I need to work. Sometimes I need to make the money. I need dough. I want to work, and so I'll take something that is compromised in some arena. But it's like, actors gotta act.
Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.
I do a lot of brainstorming with my editors. Sometimes it just comes out in the writing. I'll get an idea as I'm writing the chapter. I try to go for maximum surprises in PLL, stuff you don't see coming. It's a lot of fun!
But I think writing should be a bit of a struggle. We're not writing things that are going to change the world in big ways. We're writing things that might make people think about people a little bit, but we're not that important. I think a lot of writers think we are incredibly important. I don't feel like that about my fiction. I feel like it's quite a selfish thing at heart. I want to tell a story. I want someone to listen to me. And I love that, but I don't think I deserve the moon on a stick because I do that.
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