Monthly Archives: June 2007

An Interview with Dan Piraro

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Bizarro's Dan Piraro talks about his quest to use fewer words, games he plays with his audience, and how he learned to write funny things in both the best and worst of times.

Dan Piraro

Image copyright (c) Dan Piraro 2007.

What do you think is the key to good cartoon writing?

I have this ongoing effort to create humor in fewer words because I’m very wordy. I always have been. I was that way in school. When a teacher would say to write a 500-word paper about something or other, I would write 750 just because I’m a wordy person. So something that I’ve done over the years, especially in recent years, is try to reduce the number of words in my cartoons just because I think it’s funnier to say things simply and quickly than to over explain. But my cartoons still tend to be pretty wordy.

One of my favorite cartoonists in the world is Sam Gross. He’s most notable from the New Yorker magazine. His work is just fantastic and he rarely uses words. And when he does, it’s almost never more than three or four. I’d love to be able to do that, but it’s just not the way I think.

There’s some kind of irony in somebody who feels they write too much creating a single-panel comic.

Yeah [laughter] I know. I actually started by trying to do strips and they just were too forced. And then I started doing panels, and bang, people just liked them way better.

Ever since I was a child, my favorite cartoons have always been single-panel magazine gags without regular characters, without storylines — a single glimpse of life, and your brain figures out what just happened before this picture or what’s about to happen after it. I love that kind of humor. And so that’s what I was best at.

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Category: Comics/Cartoons

An Interview with Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, Part 2

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Writer Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, talks about making the switch from poetry to prose and why he loves it when things are going badly.

Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony SnicketWelcome to the second half of this two-part interview with writer Daniel Handler. If you haven’t already read Part One, be sure to check it out to hear about making the switch from poetry to prose and why Handler loves it when things are going badly.

The plot for A Series of Unfortunate Events is incredibly rich. How did you approach plotting the series and how much of the plot was worked out before the first book was published?

Some of it was planned. And then more and more of it was planned the more I wrote. I’m a big outliner and note-taker, so I had a bunch of things [worked out in advance], but I also left myself room to improvise. I didn’t want A Series of Unfortunate Events to feel like a coloring book that I had to fill in for the next few years.

So I would think, “Well, the twelfth book is going to take place in a hotel, and it’s going to have this kind of revelation and this kind of action,” and then I would say, “Okay, that’s enough that you know. That’s five books ahead or four books ahead.” Every so often I would make a note of something specific that I wanted to put there. But I tried to discipline myself to be undisciplined. I wanted to get there and feel like there were all these vistas to explore, and not that it was a specific path that I’d already assigned myself.

Reading the last book in the series, which deals in part with the trade-offs between security and personal freedom, I wondered if what’s been going on in the real world was informing that?

Well, I would think it would have to…. But then also, while I was writing the books I went from my late twenties to my mid-thirties, and I got married and had a kid. And I think all that also makes you think of the world in different terms, and it’s impossible to separate that from what’s happening in the world…. You have a baby, and then you have this delicate creature and you spend at least the first year of their life sort of brainstorming about things in your home and things around town that can harm this child, even if you’re not a particularly paranoid parent, which I don’t think I am. And that’s most certainly going to color any work you do, no matter what work is….

It wasn’t as if I was shrieking about it, but I would just often think, “OK there’s a vase there, and we’re in the house of an uptight person, and that vase definitely can’t break, so what is the strategy there?” And certainly, I didn’t think that when I was twenty-two and I walked into the room. I basically thought, “Where’s the gin?”

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Category: Writing

An Interview with Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, Part 1

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Writer Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, talks about plotting A Series of Unfortunate Events and how real life influences his work.

Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket

Photo credit: Meredith Heuer 2006.

This is Part One of a two-part interview. Be sure to also check out Part Two to hear Handler talk about plotting A Series of Unfortunate Events and how real life influences his work.

Do you remember the first thing that you wrote that you felt, “Well, that’s something”?

By the time I was in college, I was writing a lot of poetry that was being published in tiny journals and was winning little student prizes and things like that. And I think that was probably the first time that I began to think of myself as a writer who was producing work that was of merit, at least for the age that I was.

I actually visited my high school literary magazine yesterday — I grew up in San Francisco. And they had found some of my old poetry on file and given it to me. And it was pretty interesting to read. It was lousy of course. But I felt like it still had some respectability to it.

It was two poems that I had written shortly after I had started having sex, and so they’re both about love and sex. And so of course they’re mortifying. But they have an air of detachment, I guess, and one of them rhymes. And it’s interesting to me that I was already trying to find an acceptable format for perhaps embarrassing ideas.

Do you still write poetry?

I still do sometimes. I don’t do anything with it. When I was in college, my poems started getting longer and longer and more and more narrative. And I have a very clear memory of talking to a poetry professor of mine who finally said to me very gently that there was actually a tradition of long, non-line-based narrative poetry called “prose” [laughter]. And it was like he just took me across the hallway or something [and said] “There is this thing you can do in which you don’t have to worry that your sentences are long and that you seem to be telling a story.”

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Category: Writing

An interview with John August

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John August

Photo credit: Jen Pollack Bianco

You’ve written an impressive number of scripts over the last several years. Were you always this creatively productive?

I’ve always written, but it wasn’t until I started approaching writing as a full-time job that I really felt any mastery of it. Sometimes I’m an artist, but mostly I’m a craftsman. I write for very specific purposes, and I can sort of switch it on and off. That came with experience.

I think “productivity” is a pretty limited concept. If you’re writing a lot, but you’re writing crap, that’s not particularly helpful. I think what I hit in my early-to-mid 20s was a sweet spot between Getting Stuff Done and Getting Stuff Perfect. My first drafts are pretty strong. They feel like the final movie. Some writers do what they call a “vomit draft,” which is long and messy, then edit it down. I don’t. I write the script that could be shot.

I labor pretty hard over each scene in its first incarnation. I play the entire scene in my head, in a constant loop, until I really feel I know it. Then I do what I call a “scribble version,” which is a very quick-and-dirty sketch of the scene, handwritten, which would be indecipherable to anyone but me. Then I write up the final scene from that.

In terms of the number of scripts with my name on them, that really comes from picking projects carefully. The frustrating thing about screenwriting is that you can spend a year working on a project that never gets made, and it’s like you never wrote it. I like to say that my favorite genre is, “Movies that get made.”

What drew you to screenwriting, as opposed to other kinds of writing?

I didn’t know what screenwriting was until fairly late in college. That was before the Internet, so the only scripts you could find in Des Moines, Iowa, were the occasional screenplays that were published in book form. I remember reading Sex, Lies and Videotape and being awestruck by how closely it matched the finished movie. It sounds naive now, but I really didn’t understand movies were written.

The screenplay form didn’t come naturally. I’m not sure it should; it’s pretty artificial and unlike conventional writing. The closest equivalent is certainly the stage play, which is pretty much just dialogue. The screenplay has evolved into this strange beast that’s meant to be a blueprint for the entire movie — not just what the characters say and do, but how the film is supposed to look and feel and sound. Most of the time I love it, but it has very frustrating limitations. I get sick of writing in the third-person present tense. I yearn to write about scents and textures and the inner thoughts of characters. One of the reasons I keep up the blog is that it’s a chance to write in my own voice rather than the detached, omniscient “screenplay voice.”

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Category: Stage/Screen, Writing