WIDE AWAKE DREAMING

[nevver]

Art Oracles

[extramadness]

Ease your soul here

[dreamingawakewide]

[fayandreas]

[danharmon]

Could you explain your story breaking process?

Start with random IDEAS.  Ideas can be anything - Poop is an idea, America, pickles, the number six, a raccoon, anything.

Some ideas will reveal related ideas, i.e. you may think, upon thinking about raccoons, that you have more than one thought about raccoons.  Clouds of related ideas that your mind recognizes as related in any way are potential story AREAS.  Look for areas that make you laugh and cry.

Draw a circle to symbolize your area, because your story will take the “reader” through related ideas in a path around a central idea.  You don’t have to know what the central idea is.  It’s probably dumb.  For God’s sake, you’re writing about raccoons.

Divide your circle into a top half and bottom half and ask yourself what those halves might be.  Like, your raccoon area might become divided into “positive thoughts about raccoons” and “negative thoughts about raccoons.”  If the division doesn’t feel charged for you, pick something else, like male raccoon thoughts and female raccoon thoughts, or biological raccoon thoughts and storybook raccoon thoughts.  At some point, you will divide your area into two parts that create a personal “charge” for you, like a battery.  "Ooo, I like the idea that there’s a difference between biological raccoons and storybook raccoons, that tingled when I drew that line, I want to know more.“ <– that’s my impression of you nailing it.

Divide the divided circle down the middle and pick another charged dichotomy for left and right.  For instance, biological/storybook raccoon area could get divided into dishonest/honest.  

Now you have four quadrants to your circle, going clockwise: biological dishonest raccoon, storybook dishonest raccoon, storybook honest raccoon, biological honest raccoon.  Any point at which you stop feeling charged, go back a step or start over.  Maybe you had to get this far to realize you don’t give a shit about raccoons.  Please note that at this point, people around you will start to express confusion and frustration, because they thought the idea was fine already.  Depending on your mood and standing, these people are called hacks, traitors, parasites, scabs or successful colleagues.

When you find an area that yields four charged quadrants, experiment with protagonists.  Easy answer first, maybe I’m a raccoon.  So once upon a time there was a dishonest biological raccoon that became a storybook raccoon, which lead to him becoming honest before finally going back to being biological again.  Cool?  If not, go back or start over.  Again, please note that many people will not want you to go back or start over.  These people will one day drown in their own blood while you point and laugh with God.  Or maybe they’re good people and you just have Asperger’s.

Then you keep dividing the pie, adding "curvature” to the protagonist’s path with the 8 point story structure you can find me blathering about elsewhere online.

Create more characters as needed, give them their own stories as needed.

Repeat every day until rich people give you money to do it for them.  Buy a house, become one of them and hire poor people to do it for you.  Somewhere in there try to get a dog and a funny girlfriend or it’s all pretty pointless.  Speaking of which, I just realized I’m the only one at the office. Thank you for this question.

[dreamingawakewide]

Thanks Dad

[dreamingawakewide]

The Nucleus: Crash Course Chemistry #1

Hank does his best to convince us that chemistry is not torture, but is instead the amazing and beautiful science of stuff. Chemistry can tell us how three t...

Yeah dawg. Have been meaning to brush up on my knowledge of chemistry for awhile. Finding the ‘Crash Course’ Youtube channel to be a great resource. Check it out science brohz and brohzettes.

[superchthonic]

The place where Justin and I overlap in sensibility is that we both think that the funniest thing in the world is the least funny thing. Justin loves to really go to the most brutally violent and sexual place. That appeals to the crazy anarchist little kid in you. “Yeah, who says that this episode of ‘Mork & Mindy’ shouldn’t hang a left here and end in a horrible blood bath?” We overlapped there, because I think the funniest thing in the world is tragedy. That’s why we need comedy. That’s where it comes from. Life ends in death, and it’s such a horrible, inescapable thing, and that’s why we spend so much of our lives laughing. Not to run away from that, but to wrap our arms around it and defeat, and own it and laugh in its face while we kiss it. It comes naturally to both of us. When we’re both laughing out loud, it’s because the episode has taken a distinct 90-degree turn, and it almost starts to feel like the television is broken.“

Dan Harmon, HitFix Interview  (via havingchanged)

[danharmon]

Don’t listen to people that tell you what they think audiences like. There’s a reason they’re not just saying what they like. They’re ashamed, intimidated or they don’t know. There’s no crime in being stupid, wrong or unsure, but it’s a costly crime not to admit it, and unforgiveable to let people who refuse to admit it run the world.

Stephen Hawking (via danharmon)

Note to self: don’t be ashamed or intimidated to say what you like. And when you don’t know, figure it out.

[danharmon]

Things They Might Never Tell You 001

Thirty seconds after it gets easy, you will forget how hard it was.

Time does not advance 1 second per second.  It advances 1 important moment at a time.  You have less and less of these as you get used to them, therefore, the older you get, the faster time goes.

[I assume] you can jump out of as many airplanes as you want, and the above fact will never change.  The reason for this is: every time you jump out of an airplane, it becomes JUST a little more forgettable that you’ve done so.

You can make fun of it all you want but you will always be generally relaxed by New Age music.  They’re not trying to blow your mind.  They’re trying to make you go to sleep.  If you fall asleep listening to New Age music, they nailed it.

The person you are actually capable of loving will always be out of your league, and everybody in your league will either stop loving you or stop being loved by you.  In other words:

Love is not a real thing.  It’s an itch you can’t scratch.  It’s greener grass.  It’s a mirage.  In reality, we huddle together, or we stand alone, and in either case, we will always have to wonder: 

“What if I wasn’t doing this?”

[danharmon]

Dan Harmon,Being a (in my opinion) very succesful and skilled writer, what advice would you give to others who aspire to write a TV series comedy, and just write in general? You have incredible talent for comedic timing, wit, and clever story arcs, I'm working on writing in that degree, and as I greatly look up to Community, I would love any "wisdom" you might have to impart on me, and all writers out there.Keep being streets ahead.

This is a very good question.  There are several important things you need to do.

First, you need a round hole in your chest that goes all the way through you.  I can never stress enough to the kids, it has to be a perfect circle, about the diameter of a drinking glass rim, it has to be in the absolute center of your chest - like where a heart would go on a plumber or a woman - and it has to go clean through you.  If you’re standing in front of me and I can’t see the wall behind you, you’re never really going to write much more than a dream journal, recipe book, or maybe one of those manuals that tells people what writing is.

A lot of people say “what about my heart, what’s going to pump my blood around,” which brings us to step two: you have to be made of something other than flesh and blood.  I prefer to be made of mud, because it keeps women and children away from me.  Other writers are made of dirt, or excrement, the choice is yours, it just can’t be anything that anyone would want in their bed and it has to be a substance that adheres to itself but nothing around it, so that you can keep a generally human shape for as long as possible.  Appearing human-like is important to the next step.

Sit or stand in front of paper or a computing device and turn your back to everything, which will incite it to attack you.  Everything preys on humanity and goes for the heart, so hold still, arch your back and it should shoot through your hole and onto your keyboard.  As it passes, it will be tainted and scattered by the inside rim of whatever you’re made of, which some would call your “voice” but which I call “filth."  The more there is, the more people notice you’re "a writer” and the more you’re doing it wrong.  Your job is to be a heartless piece of dirt, a puppet, a necessary but largely unremarkable conduit of something better than you, something lovable, something with purpose, and your one redeeming act before it finishes with you is to find the angle at which you barely affect its path.

If none of this is possible, you could always become an assistant of some kind on Glee and I’m sure eventually you’d just get to write one.  Good luck!

[danharmon]

Hi Dan. My wife and I love Community, and can't wait for Season 3. I've been craving to ask you something. I went through a phase studying Campbell, Voegler, and Truby, and your tutorials were incredibly helpful. I feel confident about structure. But I don't feel that I can write character's with enough depth to keep up. Is there anything as pragmatic as the monomyth to help teach character depth? Best wishes, and please disregard if this is a nuisance.

Get out your cell phone and scroll through the contacts until you come to a name that provokes a reaction inside of you.  Joy, rage, confusion, fascination, embarrassment, fear, frustration, infatuation, anything.

Ask yourself why that person’s name caused that reaction in you.  Don’t try to make it an accurate answer, make it your honest, personal answer.  Make it a thousand overlapping micro-answers.  Don’t find categorical terminology for any of it, just dump the marbles of emotional memory all over the floor, flood the room with them.  You were infatuated with Rebecca because she wore Chuck Taylors and played bass and tasted like cigarettes.  

Now play with the marbles.  Experiment with eliminating them, cross referencing them…didn’t Tracy also taste like cigarettes, and didn’t you hate that about her?  What if Rebecca had tasted like Scope, would you have been less in love with her…?

Sooner or later - and fight it for as long as you can, but let it happen when it can’t be fought anymore - some overall categorical conclusion about this person is going to fuse most of the marbles.  Let it be elegantly and ambiguously simple.  One word, the simplest word possible, it only has to mean something to you and you don’t even have to be sure of what it means.  Rebecca was dirty.

Let that be her nucleus and let any leftover, seemingly contradictory marbles orbit the clump, like electrons, but don’t let them mean as much as the nucleus.  

Put your Rebecca atom, with her three marble dirty nucleus and her one vegan electron, aside, and go back to your phone.  

Make a bunch of atoms this way.  Some of them might end up fusing into molecules (if you’re living right, Rebecca’s not the only dirty woman in your phone).  Some will remain independent and inert.  All of them will be simple characters with real, human growth potential.

Write your pilot before you know everything about these people.  Let the story establish little pieces of them, don’t fill your script with facts about fictional strangers, fill your script with things happening to fictional strangers.  Bring the atoms into collision and let your audience get glimpses of their nuclei as they repulse, neutralize and bond with each other.  If you are capable of knowing exactly who these people are by the end of your pilot, you are probably writing a bad TV show.  The good news being, I predict much success for you.

But if your goal is to create a TV character with depth, it’s the same as if your goal were to create a tree with height:  you’ll have to be patient and surrender a lion’s share of your control.  God doesn’t make a tree with hammer and nails.  He makes a seed.  Likewise, actors and audiences and time are the things that are going to give your characters depth, the best you can do as the writer of a pilot is provide the reader with evidence of that potential.

If you scroll back through this tumblr, I think I answered a similar question about character once, and talked at great length about my belief that every character should have something about them that will never change.  That might be a helpful thing to read, too.  And if it’s not helpful, hey, listen, YOUR REFUND IS IN THE MAIL, HOW DARE YOU. WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE QUESTIONING ALL THIS FREE INFORMATION ON CREATIVITY?!  Sorry I snapped at you.  Good luck.

[danharmon]

I'm picking my year 2 modules for Uni, Film & TV production right now and I don't know whether to pick scriptwriting or not because I used to love to write but lately it's like all I feel is frustration and anger whenever I try to write anything and I just end up staring at that fucking blinking curser for an eternity. Should I just abandon writing for now or would you be able to give me any blank page saving tips that would make a scriptwriting course bearable?

While I’m sure all bad writers probably have a hard time writing, I’m equally certain that not all people having a hard time writing are bad writers (thank God).

The term “writer’s block” is, itself, the beginning of a self-defeating syndrome.  The idea that something is “in our way” presumes we know where we’re going, which presumes “we” we are responsible for our failures and successes, which only paralyzes us more.

I won’t presume to call writing “art,” but I will say this:  if it’s science, we’re the rat.  We are not the one with the plan or the map, we are down in the shit, learning through mistakes that are not our fault, cruising for rewards which are sadly therefore not to our actual credit.  But let’s not get nihilistic right when I’m about to activate you.

A rat would never get through a maze if it thought a rat’s job was to know which way to go.  The dead end is not the problem in need of solving, the hunger is, and the way to solve the hunger, the way to get the cheese, is to respect a wall for a wall.  To receive each obstruction as a message from the laboratory:  "You’re not going this way.  Period.  Change direction.“

This, of course, is not the trademark thinking that got primates where we are today, so we have to use tricks to suspend our penchant for lateral thought, or at least to downgrade our ego to rat level.  Here are the tricks I’ve learned, in no necessary order:

Alcohol lowers your inhibitors across the board.  The same magic that sometimes enables you to start crying about your Dad for no reason can also enable you, briefly, to admit that you hate what you’re trying to write and why you hate it, and what you would therefore love to write.  And if you can write down these epiphanies in the sweet spot between euphoria and blackout, ten percent of the time you’ll have a new approach to your current job.  Booze, however, is the Agent Orange in the war against writer’s block.  It’s graceless, it’s ungodly and it’s not just foliage you’re damaging.  There’s prices to pay.  Forever.

Cutesy games, like iambic pentameter or "begin every sentence with the next letter of the alphabet,” can distract the logical part of your brain and let the creative side operate free of supervision.  I used these for most of my twenties, but there’s something pretentious about it.  Especially when you get frustrated that nobody noticed your iambic pentameter, because then you have to start pointing it out, and you become a huge dick.

Being behind a real deadline - one that involves you actually getting yelled at by rich people who might not pay you - works really well, but you won’t have that luxury until someone’s counting on you.  And no, “setting your own deadlines” doesn’t work.  Never has for me, anyway.

But here’s my favorite, and it seems like the most healthy one:

If you’re ever going to be a good writer, then you probably tend to be afraid you’re a bad writer.  Instead of trying to prove you’re good, try to prove you’re bad.  At least the ball will start MOVING on the field.  I always tell young writers, “start proving to yourself how bad you are.”  Make a joke out of it.  Write a draft that you know you’re going to throw in the garbage, or show to your friends for a laugh, a profanely irresponsible piece of shit draft that in which you absolutely fight for the team that you REALLY believe in - the one that says you stink.  Pretend your Mom keeps asking you “why don’t you just finish something,” and write the thing designed to shut her the fuck up.  THIS is why I don’t just do it, Mom, because it would look like THIS, this thing that SUCKS.  Show her.  Don’t even waste time on it, the faster you go, the more it will suck and the more you’ll win the fight against yourself.

Because the truth is, we do suck…because “we” is our ego, and our job is to get that ego to stop blocking us.

I hope that helps, it’s the best I could type while listening to network notes.  I think they even just busted me not listening, but this seemed more important at the time.  Godspeed to you, child, and all sympathy to your parents for not having raised an air conditioning repair person.

[danharmon]

Untitled

Laying in the bed part of a bed and breakfast in North Carolina. Wondering if good writers wonder if they’re bad more often than bad writers do. Wondering if that’s something only non-writers wonder. Wondering if I have anything left.

It seems a good writer’s head should be like a sponge, constantly soaking in and oozing out. Right now, mine’s a rock, perhaps corrupted, perhaps completed, in any case taking and giving nothing. I cling to a hope that sponges can feel a bit like rocks when they’re dry. If that’s the case, what’s the water. Is it other people, is it God, is it a thing inside or out.

Please, God, don’t let it be inside. I’m sick to death of myself, sick of my name, my face, my voice. I’ve given myself ego poisoning and am throwing it up. I need nutrition and hydration and either I haven’t gotten it or I haven’t been able to keep it down.

Three years is a long time to work with the same characters. It’s a long time to not have “created” from scratch. For three years, it was “I have an idea for this” and “can we do this” and “let’s move this in this direction.” Now it’s back to “what’s this.” I’ve been here more often than the other place but that doesn’t make it familiar. I’m stepping away from a skyscraper erected with 200 people back over to a drafting table. I can see the imprint of my fat ass on the tiny stool. But I also see a lot of dust. I see a photo of myself at 36. Yes, that’s right, I kept a framed photo of myself next to my drafting table. It wasn’t just to help the metaphor. I was really into myself back then. I could afford to be. Nobody else was. There was no skyscraper. I toiled in darkness. I threw a thousand bottles into the ocean, each containing a self-indulgent essay or a cry for help or a movie about my asshole. I was the guy that did stuff for himself and by himself.

Then I wanted a house.

Now I have one.

So now what. Write a pilot about a guy that has a house?

There is a common spiral creatives fall into, shaped something like:

What do I want; I want what the audience wants; what does the audience want; they want what I want; SO WHAT DO I WANT.

Ad infinitum. Yes, a good writer wants to make people happy but that’s like saying good meals come on plates or on tables. The question of what’s for dinner can’t be answered with a question. Not if you really want to feed somebody.

I guess it starts with someone putting on an apron. Especially in a kitchen which, while empty now, will be teeming with cooks soon enough. And that’s if I’m lucky. Community wasn’t “created,” it was developed, like all good TV. It always starts with a writer but that writer isn’t doing his job if he thinks the job is to make a TV show.

I need to start blogging again. I have to stop caring about what my job is and whether I’m doing it right and how it will impact my audience and my allies and my enemies. That’s showrunner stuff, politician stuff. a writer has no enemies or allies, no audience. A writer rolls in mud and tracks it in.

McGathy’s awake. Time to head to Charlotte’s Heritage Fair. Can’t start blogging again if I’m going to worry about how to end entries.

EDIT: Erin just read this and said “we are nowhere near Charlotte.” We landed in Charlotte, we’re in Madison, NC.

[danharmon]

Do Androids Dream of Electric Cool Ranch

I think my unconscious got insulted by my description of yesterday’s dream as hacky because I just woke up from a really unmarketable one.

I was a French detective, maybe private, maybe municipal, some kind of investigatory agent. I had been hired to solve a growing problem that had something to do with a new advertising campaign.

I think it was the future, this was never explicitly established but I’m saying it while remembering the dream, because in this world, TV, movies and video games had become the same thing, and all entertainment had fused with reality, and advertisement had taken the form of real-life events designed to capture our attention. One such advertisement had gotten out of control, there were extreme “flavor storms” happening (nobody called them that but I’m calling them that), in which basketball-sized globules of a new snack flavor were raining down on public places, destroying property and killing people because they were like acid, eating through metal and flesh. I was certain it was a new Dorito flavor but my job was to prove it.

The noirish complication was, the more I watched myself walking around asking bystanders if they’d heard about this new extreme flavor causing so much havoc, the more I began to wonder if my investigation wasn’t actually just another layer of the promotion. I’d been set up.

I had this young female partner and protege that looked kind of Aeon Fluxy, and she was asking me a lot of questions about the discipline of detaching oneself from reality..I kept telling her, just watch what I do, I can’t explain it, you have to observe. I have to observe. And I remember having her call up every old TV show she could find in which the protagonist had become detached enough to investigate his own investigation.

In this future-ish world, you could play any pre-existing entertainment in your head; you could watch five old TV shows at once while having a conversation and it would all be in your head…this is why I had become so suspicious about my case - new entertainment had become reality and old entertainment had become something we watched without watching, so who was to say my reality wasn’t something someone else was watching? I knew there had been countless movies and TV shows in the past that had played with this concept, so why not pull those up. I continued my investigation while watching an episode of Diff'rent Strokes in which Arnold and Dudley go to Los Angeles and visit NBC (dreamer’s note: I think there is an episode of Diff'rent Strokes where the Drunmonds visit the set of Knightrider but this episode wthin my dream was different). I found some kind of geographic/psychological connection between the places Arnold visited and the places where Extreme Dorito Storms were killing people, so I kept retracing his steps, and the storms kept getting worse.

There was a lot of cool business I can’t remember but toward the end of the dream, I leapt from the roof of my hotel onto a platform halfway up the Eiffel Tower, which was splashed by Dorito acid, and there were holes in the structure and I became siezed with vertigo as I looked down at a city of tiny houses through the assailed iron mesh. I couldn’t move. And at the same time, in my playback of Diff'rent Strokes, Arnold and Dudley had ended up on the Warner Brothers water tower, and were peering out over Los Angeles at a skyscraper with the NBC logo on it. The audience laughed and applauded, and the Eiffel tower started creaking. I ran and jumped off the platform and was able to grab a nearby curtain on the way down, because, luckily, as it turned out, the Eiffel Tower was inside a giant shopping mall.

I rode the curtain down to the floor level. I realized I had lost my cigarette and shook it out of the curtain before it caught fire.

My Aeon Fluxy protege was waiting for me and asked what she should do if I ever really fell.

I told her that if I ever really did fall, it would be a “cataclysmic event for her.” Why for her, she asked. “Because I’m dreaming,” I said.

And then I woke up, which is a bummer, because I was a French Detective in the future chasing Dorito storms for fuck’s sake. Put me back!

[danharmon]

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

[dreamingawakewide]

time to be me

[dreamingawakewide]

I'm concerned we’ve become too sassy to take anything serious, but ourselves. And we’re too serious at that.