No Dikkering Around

Hello from the Hinterlands. It’s time to check in and see what we’re getting done. This weekly post is a great way to stay productive. All you have to do is leave a comment and let us know what you accomplished. As for me, I worked on my novel, coaching, my apps, and took a couple of days off. My grand plan was to blow through five chapters a day, reading through my rough drafts and editing them well enough to make for a first pass legible enough for beta readers.

The third and final comedy genius as part of Comedy Inspiration Weekend is Garry Shandling. Shandling started out writing for sitcoms like Sanford and Son and Welcome Back, Kotter. He aced his first appearance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and became a frequent guest host. Despite talk of him becoming a permanent successor to Johnny, Shandling instead c…

Try to find Tina Fey ever not being funny. It’s hard. A comedic take on life oozes from her pores. I happened upon this talk she did at Google a long time ago. She has fun and fields a lot of dumb questions from doting fans. But in her answers, a serious picture emerges of a comedy genius who struggles with the same things we all do. She came up spectacularly, succeeding on the stage and TV, then in movies and books (with her monster best-selling debut, Bossypants).

Creating comedy is lonely work. Even if you work in a group, at some point you end up alone, typing, editing, or wrapping up a project at 2AM the night before it’s due. These lonely times are easier to manage when we at least feel like we’re not alone. We’re really not. All comedy people have been there. They all face the same struggles. And they’re with us…

Ready to be accountable? Post a comment with all the work you got done this week. Then do the same next week. And the week after. And so on. You’ll be astounded at how productive this makes you. It works because it’s embarrassing to show up here empty-handed week after week. Avoiding that embarrassment is a powerful motivator to get things done. Social pressure is powerful. I’ll go first. You reply in the comments. I finished the rough draft of my other screenplay this week.

This is the weekly post where we show up with all the work we got done in the week. You can join and use social pressure to be more productive. It really works! Here’s what I got done: My goal for the week, which I set in the August 3 post, was to finish the rough draft of my novel and finish the mid-stage revision drafts of two screenplays. I cleared my schedule and was totally alone all week, which was wonderful. But how did I do?

Welcome to the post where we check in with a report on everything we got done in the last 7 days to see how we’re measuring up to our creative goals. This kind of accountability and social pressure is one of the best ways to increase productivity and make big dreams happen. I’ll go first, and I invite you to post your progress in the comments.

If you’re funny and you like to perform, or even if you just like to write funny things and read them aloud on occasion, you might have had a fleeting thought: It would be fun to do professional voicework for cartoons, commercials, video games, or the like. And why not? In the “Behind the Mic” course presently in session, one of the things we talked about …

This is the weekly post where we let the world know what we’ve been working on in the past week. It only takes a minute to post. And then you’re paid back in top-notch accountability, peer support, and super-productivity. I’ll start. My focus this week was my alt-history second-US-civil-war novel, Nothing Civil About It. Wrote 7 chapters. Not as many as I wanted, but it’s the most chapters I’ve written in a week so far. These horribly rough chapters are copied below.

No Dikkering Around is not a political blog. The topic here is all things comedy—writing performance, productivity, and creativity. But sometimes comedy and politics collide, as they’ve certainly done so many times in my career. Today I share with you a little skit I did on the radio today playing Mitch McConnell. Enjoy. We’re talking about doing this sort of thing (doing voices on radio shows) in the “Behind the Mic” course in session now.