Dan Harmon's Blog, page 43
August 2, 2013
I don't know if you answer the questions but I just wanna try it... To be honest, I only know you from Community and I believe the most important thing about this show is the human side of it...) Alright this was not the question I wanted to ask... I want
Stressed but not depressed. I get depressed when I’m inactive creatively, which happens when nobody’s waiting for me to finish anything. That can be an unfortunate syndrome, if nobody’s waiting to hear from you, why say anything, if you’re not saying anything, nobody’s listening, slipping you deeper and deeper into a creative coma.
The way out of those for me is to trick my brain into having a genuine deadline, with a genuine pressure on it. That’s why Schrab and I created Channel 101, incidentally, to force ourselves and our friends to do things, anything at all. It doesn’t have to be “good," it just has to have a reason to be made (in fact, the desire to “make something good" is the biggest obstacle in our path to making things). One time when I was in a particularly slumpy slump, my friend Jeff told me he’d pay my rent if I gave him 30 pages of a script. That worked. Helped that he had that kind of money. You’d have to come up with your own trick, but it really has to trick your brain. When I hear writers talk about “setting deadlines for themselves" and “writing for a fixed amount of time each day," I have to wonder, defensively, if they’re any good at writing. But if it works for them, I guess I’m just jealous as hell.
I don’t know of any other way to write than under stress. I’m going to shift into an even more pretentious-sounding gear here, but I think of creative acts as having a source somewhere outside our minds, and I think that what we call “making something" is actually us being “open to something that made itself." Please forgive me, anyone reading this, I’m just being honest about how I feel. Anyway, the act of “being open" to these things it’s our job to channel is the agonizing part. You can open yourself to a single idea but as soon as you have one, your ego starts going “okay I’ll take it from here" and the channel closes. Staying open beyond a certain point, keeping your ego from spasming, is like standing on one foot or sustaining a fake yawn for 8 hours.
The odd thing I can’t figure out is why I don’t have to be stressed or pressured to write something like a rambling answer to a tumblr question about writing. I guess navel-gazing, ranting, pontification and overanalysis are some kind of stress relief for me. A chance to let my ego run around the yard between all-day sessions of it having to sit and accept that it’s not in charge.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity, and for keeping me from eating too many hot wings on lunch break. I have to read Tim Saccardo’s outline now. It’s gonna be a doooooooozy!
August 1, 2013
dustinmartian:
151 pre-orders to go to get our first shirt made...
151 pre-orders to go to get our first shirt made and only TWO WEEKS to meet our goal, Kickstarter style! tell the world you support Duncan Trussell, Dan Harmon, Chelsea Peretti, Todd Barry, Alie & Georgia and a ton more by sporting our trusty Blue Kitty Logo!
seriously, nothing lasts forever! help us keep moving.
http://teespring.com/feralaudio
July 29, 2013
July 27, 2013
Waiting to be Knocked Out
Tried to post this before i went under but it never went through. Waiting For an upper endoscopy. Still trying to figure something out about episode 501 of community. 502’s going to be great, 503’s going to be greater, 504 makes me cry sometimes…it’s really great to be back. It’s religiously, catastrophically, erotically great to be back. It was also not exactly torture to be gone, because, hey, less work. I was a better boyfriend and a better sleeper when I was a self centered knob in exile, free to mutter anything I wanted into my tumblr (and my tumbler). Now I’m a self centered knob that can let you down again, DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD THAT IS FOR ME just kidding.
If you’re a writer, you already know it’s as fair as it is pretentious to describe writing as a challenge. If you’re a writer. If you have an honest job, here’s an attempt to explain: Remember that moment on your first day of work, when someone asked you to change the tanks, tie down the patient or feed the squirrel, and you realized, “oh, shit, I don’t know how to do that part yet?" That low-stakes fight or flight panic that stiffened your neck and tightened your stomach, because you had to figure something out so you could stop feeling like a useless asshole and get back to work? When you’re breaking a story, that moment is 12 hours long. When you’re not figuring out how to screw around, your job is to press your head against a transparent wall, staring at something you want on the other side. The worst part is, the wall is your own stupid limitation. It’s where your brain ends. It’s the boundary between what you know - which is currently useless, or else you’d be done - and the only thing useful, which is what you don’t know.
Nurse is here. Gotta go. BYE
The sense of elation waking up. Already fading. I remember the sound of my hearf monit but felt...
The sense of elation waking up. Already fading. I remember the sound of my hearf monit but felt nothing during pprocedure…did i think anything? now am in rcrovery. Wanfed to transcribe it…asked for my phone they gqve it to me. “Lnurse said “he’s a writer, give him his phone." That was the n8cest thing anyone’s ever sa8d to me. Am I on twitter or tumblr. That was incredible. Where 8s er8n
July 25, 2013
July 21, 2013
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