I Will Start Now! I Mean Now! Surely… NOW!

You are now in your cozy writing space, you put your phone away, you know how long or how much you are going to work today but something is still not like it should be:

You have been sitting in front of your blank page for over five minutes.

And your pen hasn’t moved an inch.

Well, you are in good company.

Starting something new (even it it’s just restarting something from the day before) is the hardest part of the creative process. Except for the middle and the finish. (I know I said that before but it bears repeating.)

Because even if you are about to finish something you need to start finishing it.

Starting something is often scary and we put it off because we don’t know if we are capable of doing it or we don’t know if we want to commit so much time and effort to one thing. Maybe it is because we don’t like doing it.
And a lot of times we don’t know where to start.

When it comes to writing jokes one of these things is easily managed: You don’t like writing jokes then stop writing jokes. Seriously. It is a very hard thing to do but most of the time it should be a lot of fun. If it isn’t fun try to figure out WHY it isn’t fun and fix that part. If you have realized you don’t like doing it at all or it has stopped being fun then you should stop.

You have only but this one short life and you should be doing something that makes you smile at least once a day. And to be honest: There are a lot easier things that are better paid than writing jokes. So go do that and don’t feel bad about it.

Next thing: If you don’t know if you are capable of writing jokes there are several things you can do about it.

First of all: Do it anyway. You don’t know what you can do before you have done it. And writing jokes is easier to do than most things and you don’t have to do it in front of people like for example asking someone out or brain surgery.

Keith Johnstone wrote in one of his books about improv, that why do we expect to be able to do something, why are we nervous of trying something if it is the first we are trying do it? Nobody expects us to be good at it the first time so why should we demand it of ourselves?

I’d wager it is the same for trying it the second, the 100th and the 1000th time. After all, comedy writing is all about creating something NEW every single time.

And last but not least: If you don’t know where to start let me pre-load your choices.