What? You don’t listen to Writing Excuses? Bad you. But if you still don’t here is a very useful chunk of this week’s.

Howard: *And sitting down and analyzing what you do reflexively is how you improve. It is the principle of focused practice versus just work. And I was just working. I was just grinding away, doing what I always do, but thinking about this in the context of the podcast about being a good writer, forced me to start analyzing what I was writing.

I started looking at punch-lines and thinking “What kind of punch-line is this?”. And then I started looking at the structures. Now understand that this didn’t change what I had been doing. It forced me to look at what I had been doing and see what had been working.

And when I sit down and write a week of scripts and that week focuses on a given theme, sometimes that theme is situational. But situations run dry real fast. You can get one or two punch-lines out of them, then whoop, we’re done. When I really milk something for a week it is because I have setup a satirical environment here I can look at something. I can look at it in a couple different angles, add a couple different angles, from a couple different angles and I can explore them and tell jokes on all of them.

And when I made that discovery, the structuring of my stories became easier because I could take the big building blocks, the medium sized building blocks and the giant building blocks and refine them all down by saying “the gaps between the building blocks are going to be filled in with commentary on X”.*

And then a bit later…

Dan (at least I think it was Dan): I think there is a plateau you can hit when you don’t understand what you are doing. And to get past that plateau, you will have to study, and analyze and a break-down “What am I doing well?”, “What am I trying to accomplish?” and that’s hard. And it can run you into problems at first.
Howard: And you sometimes have to go to and expert who understands this better than you do and can look at it and say “Oh. Oh oh oh oh. It’s this thing right here.”.

Have you analyzed what it is you do and what works and what doesn’t? Do you have a network you can take the things that don’t to for assistance? Hopefully you have done both. In order to be as successful as you can be, both are absolutely necessary.