Methods to Gather Information

This is the chapter where we will let our brain loose and let it come up with as many elements to combine as we can. You will encounter several exercises designed to get words on paper so your brain can combine them and make leaps of combination you wouldn’t have come up with otherwise.

Remember: There is no wrong way to do it when it comes to these exercises. There are not here to produce an end-product but exist to trigger your brain into making interesting connections, to keep you engaged with the topic, to make you see from an “outside” perspective. Ideally they will let you put things in vicinity that your brain normally stores in completely separate categories.

The Questions

Ask where, when, who, why, what, who and how?

Writing without borders

Writing without borders basically means you give yourself a topic, set a timer for about 5 minutes and then you write about it without stopping until the timer sets your free.

It doesn’t matter if you repeat yourself, make mistakes or just sound stupid: The important thing is to not stop. Just keep on writing.

Associations

Take a piece of paper and fill it with associations to your topic. That’s it.

Structured associations

What places, famous people, sayings, emotions, things, animals, events are associated with your topic? Get at least five associations for every column. And then write down the opposite of every association you had.

Mind maps

You know what a mind map is: Put your topic in a the middle of a sheet of paper. Put a circle around it and then write down associations around that circle, connect them back to your topic-circle. Then outwards you write down associations to your first associations and connect them back with a line to the origin of the association.

Fill the piece of paper.

Because you also are looking for associations to your associations the MindMap helps you find things that are loosely associated with your topic which might get you an “in” to your topic that you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

The Paperclip Strategy

In the book “Atomic Habit” the author James Clear writes about a salesman who everyday takes one hundred paperclips, dumps them on his table and for every sales call he makes, he puts one paperclip back in the container.

It doesn’t matter if he actually sells something. The important thing is, that he makes the one hundred calls.

But by calling a hundred people everyday, he increases his chances of making a sale dramatically.

He successfully identified the ONE most critical task he does and found a way to make sure he repeats it enough that he became the most successful salesman of his company.

He found way to make his progress visible, physical and measurable.

Let’s adapt it for our purposes: Get yourself some paperclips, low-value coins, dice, rice or something similar.

Now set yourself a goal. I started out with 15 dice a day. And every time I had an idea, a thought or joke, I would write it down and put one dice back into it’s cup. And then I celebrated Tiny Habits[ See Chapter: The Hero we need and everybody deserves] style. Repeat until no dice are left.

The next day I would do the same and at the end of the week I would have 75 thoughts about my topic that I could work with.

I specifically decided to limit myself to fifteen dice a day so I wouldn’t feel overwhelmed and could and would do it even when I didn’t feel like it. Sometimes I’d do more but fifteen is what I can do everyday. It’s basically another way to ensure that I can maintain my writing habit.

A dollar, a joke

If you want to be a little more hardcore: Send a friend of yours twenty dollars. Now you have a day to come up with new jokes and for every joke you send him, you get a dollar back. If you don’t have enough jokes at the end of the day, he gets to keep the remaining money.

If you are lazy, this is also an excellent way of making new friends.

The John Swartzwelder Method

In a “The New Yorker” interview the Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder said the following:

How much time and attention did you spend on these scripts? Another “Simpsons” writer once compared your scripts to finely tuned machines—if the wrong person mucked with them, the whole thing could blow up.

All of my time and all of my attention. It’s the only way I know how to write, darn it. But I do have a trick that makes things easier for me. Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.

That’s interesting. So create an imperfect world and then improve it?

That’s the way I do it. The Interiew

Zoom in, zoom out

See the chapter about Methods to come up with a Topic.

What happened before? What happened afterwards?

See the chapter about Methods to come up with a Topic.

Break your story down into aspects

You feel like your topic is squeezed like a lemon for a Rum and Coke? Your angle on the topic is all joked out?

Well then, we should talk about Aspects.

What is an Aspect?

It’s an idea that I got from a Pen and Paper role-playing game called FATE. And there, an Aspect is described as “a phrase that describes something unique or noteworthy.”

For example if one of the players of the game sets fire to a tree, the tree now would have the Aspect “on fire” and thus become unclimbable. And definitely unique in the forest. It would also make it noteworthy. I mean… it’s on fire. At least I make it my policy to note every tree that is on fire.

I hear you asking: What does that have to do with comedy writing?

Well, what are the noteworthy Aspects of your story? Write’em down and then treat each one of them as a subtopic worthy of its own MindMap and Paperclip Strategy Session and Associations…

Quick example: When I was fifteen I tried to impress a girl I hardly knew with a cardtrick I specifically designed around her name.

Cringy? You bet it was.

Good for comedy? Yes… her friends laughed.

And I did too!

Years later.

Some Aspects of that story were:

Oily (How did it smell in the Cafeteria after they offered Pizza that day)
About half a dozen onlookees (How many of her friends where there when I performed the card trick?)
My shaky hands (My nervousness)
Flared pants (How she was dressed)
Right after we had sports (Time of the day)

Now I can identify which Aspects help me paint a picture, help set the scene most effectively and which don’t and then write jokes about it. Jokes about how shaky my hands were. How my crush was dressed in flared pants and how everybody wore them at the time.

Aspects help me find asides that I can turn into funny asides. They are a way of breaking the story down into details and then giving them more importance and texture.

And you know what? It’s totally fine to just invent Aspects if you think they can lead you to a good joke.

Why not make it a rainy day instead of only a foggy day, if it is funnier?

Speaking without borders

Another good exercise is to record yourself speaking about your topic without stopping for a given amount of time. Say five minutes.

And during these five minutes you are allowed to repeat yourself, to stumble, to backtrack and even to literally grunt your way to the end if you have run out of things to say.

But you need to keep making sounds for the whole time. Again, the idea is not to be funny, although if you can, please be, but to gather information, phrases and ways of thinking that can be turned into jokes.

There are ways to vary this exercise:

1. Imagine you are in front of a crowd and you do a five minute stand-up set.
2. Approach the topics with different emotions. (Sad, angry, happy, annoyed, excited, etc.) The more you exaggerate, the better.
3. Talk about the opposite of your topic for five minutes
4. Do it in front of your writing partner(s)

If you don’t want to listen back to yourself, you can also try programs that transcribe speech to text. For example Google Docs has a function called Voice Typing you could try.

This means, this means, this means…

Another writing exercise that you can do in just five minutes.

An example: “My sink is broken. This means I need to call my landlord. This means I have to find his number. This means I have to clean out my desk. This means I will probably find some bills I need to pay. This means I’m going to have to fire up my laptop. This means I have to look at my cluttered desktop. This means I’m going to be frustrated with myself. This means I will eat a whole lot of ice cream. This means I will open my freezer. This means I will need to look at my frozen freezer. This means I will want to thaw my freezer. This means I will need to put my frozen peas in the sink. My sink is broken.”

Naturally you don’t need to come back to the starting point at the end. This was just a happy accident I left in.

Mood Ring

See the chapter about Methods to Come Up with a Topic.