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!