Brad isn't clever. 30 minutes. Unfiltered. Every day. Rinse. Repeat.

Perhaps I’ll save yesterday’s idea for a post for another day. I’m not feeling very inspired by it right now.

I’ve been experimenting with different environments for writing, and lately, I’ve found a combination of ambient music, relaxed seating and a distraction-free word processor on my laptop to be the best combination.

I had seen Lifehacker and a few other productivity blogs mention WriteRoom before, but I had never actually used it. I got in on one of those free Nano Bundles a while ago and one of the programs offered was WriteRoom. A few days ago, I decided to give it a try.

It’s nice. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the program functions like a simple text editor, but it blacks out the rest of the screen and presents a “computer terminal” sort of a feeling. The text is green against the all-encompassing black background and there’s nothing that gets in the way of your typing. In the past, I’ve found myself drifting to my browser window or various chat programs when my mind starts to wander. It can be nice for a 2-3 minute pickup, but my progress typically got derailed for a lot longer than that.

In the effort of truly adhering to “write for a 30 minutes a day, every day”, WriteRoom seemed like the best idea. This way, I can guarantee that I’ll plug away at this screen for however long my timer is set and I won’t drift off to check a look at my other open windows. Hell, I can’t even see the system clock, which is great. I’ve got a timer counting down from 30 minutes in the background. When it goes off, I stop. It’s as simple as that.

In the meantime, I just write word after word and string those into sentences, then paragraphs. It’s not too difficult, as one would expect. At the same time, as I’ve mentioned previously, it can be hard to keep those words coming. I find myself often at the end of a thought without another one in immediate grasp. I’ve just got to trust my instincts and keep writing the first word that comes to mind… every time. Not pretty, but it doesn’t have to be pretty.

I watched Raising Arizona last night. I liked it. I’ve heard many comedy writers refer to that as their favorite comedy film. If it’s not a favorite for some, it definitely winds up on their short list. One of my co-workers and I had a conversation about the film that inspired me to watch it. My co-worker told me she doesn’t like Coen brothers films upon first viewing them, and I could that vibe from Raising Arizona (I found myself liking O Brother, Where Art Thou? instantly however).

Luckily for me, I was watching Raising Arizona by myself. I could stop and rewind passages several times if I wanted to, which I did do on a few occasions. Sometimes, I have a hard time understanding accents at the beginning of films. My ear often acclimates to their speech patterns, but it SUCKS for the first 5 or 10 minutes. Nicolas Cage was a beating on my ears, and his character has some phenomenal one-liners that he mutters under his breath.

The film is pretty surreal and wacky, but I enjoyed it. Another friend recommended The Visioneers (or is it Visionaires?) with Zach Galifinakis last weekend. I’ll try to watch that soon. He described it as very “Brazilesque” and Brazil is one of my favorite movies. It’s dark, very weird, yet very poetic and beautiful. It’s surreal enough to throw people for a loop without totally alienating them. It’s like a waking dream, and that’s a perfect place to be.

Another tenet I remember from a few improv classes is someone telling me: “TODAY is the day this event happens.” Maybe it was Dave Buckman, but I can’t recall for sure. Some improvisers love to talk about future events or something their character is afraid to do. I love the thought that my teacher had… Whatever that event is, TODAY is the day we should see it. The audience wants to see it as soon as its mentioned and the other improvisers do as well. These characters people play on stage can lead completely normal lives for years and years… but today is the day that event happens. Today is the day they quit from work or divulge a very important secret or ask out the boss’ girlfriend. Those are the moments worth seeing on stage.

Part of it may be that whole, Theatre of the Fantastic stuff. Events people want to see on stage because they can never happen in real life. Perhaps there is some truth to that, but I don’t think it matters as much. Why should’t events on stage happen if improvisers have total and relatively unlimited control of the stuff that occurs on stage?

I feel like sitcoms exercise a lot of those events. TODAY is the day almost every episode for many shows. And that’s good. Sitcoms like Cheers and The Office would be boring as Hell if wacky stuff only happened once in every few episodes.

On the flipside, dramas would be just as awful if those crucial events didn’t occur on a fairly regular basis. Mad Men would be less of a drama and more of a documentary if nothing noteworthy happened every episode.

I know a part of my brain watches all of these shows waiting for those key events. Sure, character relationships are great and I love dedicating a majority of my attention to watching those develop… but events are a great way to get everything going in high gear.

I guess making the transition (not even a transition if one plans on doing both) from improv to sitcom writing has some good thoughts… It will be helpful to be able to generate a lot of content and to have lots of good ideas that I know I’ll be able to write about. The hard part will be the rewrites. Packing it all into one tight <30 ball. Episodes of Arrested Development are INCREDIBLY dense. There’s SO much going on that several repeated viewings of episodes can cause a person watching to notice something different or new each time. It’s a glorious thing, but it scares me in terms of all of the work that must have taken. It scares me in a good way. It would be like cutting open an old improv show and finding ways to make it even better.

I know that a lot of sketch shows from improv theaters or troupes tend to come about as the result of several improv scenes. I can see how this occurs: often the group collaborates enough through several scenes of a regular show to find themselves in some insanely hilarious situation that is the product of the group mind. I might not be able to see that scene develop if I’m just staring at a blank screen with green text and no other distractions. So, those scenes occur and of course, they’re not perfect. But, these sketch shows now have the base material… they start with the imperfect scene and work at making it better.

Sitcom writing has to be somewhat similar to that. It’s a matter of getting some excellent premises and just massaging them into a coherent, wonderful neatly-packaged product.

There’s got to be a way to make sense of all of that. I think it’s entirely possible, but I’m so new to the idea of actually writing that I get a bit discouraged. I’m going to have to listen to the advice of Hurwitz, Feig, and several others eventually. I’m going to have write some crummy spec scripts and deal with those. It’s the only way I’ll be able to get better.

For now, writing 30 minutes a day is a good beginning. It should be something I do every day, no matter how old or experienced I get. Maybe one idea in one of these posts each week turns out to be the crucial idea I need for a spec. It could happen, right?

I should hope so. I truly wonder, is anyone reading these right now? If you happen to get to this (near the end, I would thinK) part of my entry today. Shoot me an e-mail or a facebook message telling me that you read it. It would be interesting to see who is reading these. Again, I’m doing this for myself more than anything else. It is nice to have a public record though… because I feel like it’s physical evidence. It’s hard to lie to myself if I know anybody can check and see that the entry isn’t there for today. I think starting tomorrow I’ll try to put the date in each post so I can have a better idea of when I wrote everything. Today might be a good time to do it, too.

There’s one class I took in college about social science and the writings of people like Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, and others. One of the wacky, but neat, things we would do in the class is go visit the Blanton Art Museum two or three times a semester and find ways to apply ideas extracted from the writers to the pieces of art. I remember one of the exhibits we visited was a collection of Latin American artists… One of those pieces was this kind of crazy, yet kind of awesome idea. A female sculptor decided to make a series of brick-like objects. They looked like your average hardcover book in terms of length, width and depth.

Out of time. I’ll get back to that idea soon.