A Conversation with Pat Hazell—Part 3

Rick Alloway Author

01/28/2021 Added

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Pat Hazell is a former writer for "Seinfeld". During part three of his interview with Rick Alloway, he talks about the process, discipline and best practices when it comes to writing.

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[00:00:06.688]And for anybody who follows you on social media
[00:00:09.250]you write several times a day on social media
[00:00:12.080]sometimes just a couple of lines.
[00:00:13.570]Sometimes it's sort of a joke.
[00:00:15.320]Other times they're long flowing pieces about
[00:00:19.910]just what's going through your head.
[00:00:21.210]And is that cathartic to you?
[00:00:23.650]Is that also how you're helping keep your
[00:00:25.588]writing chops going?
[00:00:27.240]What do you personally get out of that?
[00:00:29.520]Well, there's a few things, I guess.
[00:00:31.140]First of all it's a part of the discipline.
[00:00:33.484]To me, a writer is somebody who wrote today.
[00:00:38.150]If I don't write today
[00:00:39.180]I don't get to tell you I'm a writer.
[00:00:40.689]I know that sounds like it's strict
[00:00:43.000]but it's just like going to the gym.
[00:00:46.970]You know, you gotta keep that muscle flex.
[00:00:49.950]The exercises that I do
[00:00:51.620]let's say that are more of an essay
[00:00:53.140]or something like that
[00:00:55.160]have a little bit to do about authenticity, right?
[00:00:57.460]So I'm trying to find a a perspective that I can share
[00:01:01.583]that is vulnerable or that is heart driven, or, you know
[00:01:06.220]I kind of have a philosophy with social media.
[00:01:08.230]I know what it is.
[00:01:09.064]I would love it not to be so addictive to all of us.
[00:01:13.650]And I would love us not to be so dependent on it
[00:01:16.280]when we're bored and all those things.
[00:01:18.350]But I say, well, if I'm gonna be in it
[00:01:20.210]I may as well be it's going to be an open scrapbook, right?
[00:01:24.220]If I'm gonna share something with you
[00:01:26.090]it's not gonna be a secret
[00:01:27.390]and it's either gonna be humor or heart or humanity, right?
[00:01:31.010]At this time I felt like the comedy writing
[00:01:34.788]was superficial in the pandemic.
[00:01:37.690]And so I started to try to balance it.
[00:01:41.140]And also, you know, it
[00:01:42.830]I didn't wanna write an empty, in empty thoughts.
[00:01:46.520]So, not everything I say is for everybody.
[00:01:50.202]And sometimes I say to people that I'm writing this for me
[00:01:55.300]and you can read it over my shoulder.
[00:01:56.950]So I kind of know what it's for,
[00:01:58.480]but which is, that I'm not there to create an argument,
[00:02:02.400]you know, And also if you like it or don't like it it's not,
[00:02:06.060]I don't need that at the end of the day.
[00:02:08.180]What I need is to wake up and clear my head.
[00:02:11.317]It's something Leonard Bernstein said
[00:02:14.717]that he got up in the morning
[00:02:17.130]and wrote three bad songs to get them out of the way
[00:02:20.890]so he could write the good ones.
[00:02:22.480]And that literally, if he didn't get that
[00:02:24.300]stuff out of the way, there was no room for that good one.
[00:02:27.010]Now that may or may not be true,
[00:02:29.840]but it rings true to me in a way that I go,
[00:02:33.077]"Oh, okay, so if I have other thoughts,
[00:02:35.730]if I have things to complain about,
[00:02:37.160]or I have something that I need to not think about,
[00:02:39.600]I may as well, you know, take it out of the junk drawer
[00:02:42.580]and dispose of it, you know?"
[00:02:44.070]So, you know, it's, it is a little bit of that.
[00:02:46.526]I also have so many friends that are creatives
[00:02:49.920]that are singer songwriters, that are actors
[00:02:52.830]that are producers that are whatever,
[00:02:54.420]who are going through this.
[00:02:56.300]And I do spend a lot of time on the phone
[00:02:59.445]with people personally.
[00:03:01.050]Not as a therapist or a consultant,
[00:03:04.100]but I I feel that if I'm open in my social,
[00:03:07.720]I can take care of all those people in one statement.
[00:03:11.900]If that moment gives them 24 more hours
[00:03:15.420]of thinking something positive instead of negative.
[00:03:18.800]I mean, I try not to be overly syrupy or, you know
[00:03:23.156]cloying about it, but I lean towards the positive
[00:03:28.210]and I feel like you are what you eat, right?
[00:03:31.930]Like if you don't, if you're a person
[00:03:34.560]that's a negative person,
[00:03:35.650]if you spend all your time barfing stuff back out
[00:03:38.566]that you hear on the news or whatever, you know
[00:03:40.860]your day is gonna be shitty.
[00:03:42.342]You know, I don't know what the educational rules
[00:03:45.100]are on that word, but that's what comes,
[00:03:48.423]when you push into the sausage machine is what comes out.
[00:03:51.310]It's just in a casing on the other side, you know.
[00:03:54.632]A writing friend of mine says
[00:03:56.700]if this makes you feel any better,
[00:03:58.750]a writing friend of mine says,
[00:03:59.797]"You're gonna write a lot of shitty scripts
[00:04:00.972]you might as well get after it."
[00:04:02.990]Right.
[00:04:03.823]Just get those out of the way
[00:04:04.656]that's what Bernstein was saying as well.
[00:04:05.880]Get the other stuff out of the way
[00:04:07.186]and get to what's important there.
[00:04:09.160]There was a mentor of mine named Bill Idelson.
[00:04:12.049]And Bill Idelson was an old timer writer.
[00:04:14.420]He wrote on Mash and Andy Griffith show
[00:04:17.240]and all that love American style stuff
[00:04:19.153]he was sort of behind.
[00:04:21.010]And he was telling us once in class,
[00:04:24.543]it's a couple of things, but one of them
[00:04:27.670]somebody was saying how a cream rises to the top.
[00:04:31.769]And he said, well, but shit also floats.
[00:04:34.470]So like, you know, don't, you know
[00:04:37.410]don't live on that kind of thing.
[00:04:38.650]And, and when we would participate in the writing class,
[00:04:41.750]he would say, you know, you couldn't,
[00:04:45.160]you weren't allowed to come to class
[00:04:46.840]without writing something.
[00:04:48.040]Like you couldn't participate
[00:04:49.788]and you couldn't hear your stuff read between anybody else
[00:04:52.660]if you didn't have anything.
[00:04:53.580]Like you needed to be active at that.
[00:04:56.270]And then he was pretty good.
[00:04:57.810]He was harsh about things,
[00:04:59.030]but you remembered the lesson.
[00:05:01.530]And one of them, when we were reading somebody's,
[00:05:04.480]the opening of somebody's thing,
[00:05:06.190]there was like a 15 minutes into it
[00:05:08.050]there was a pause and he said,
[00:05:08.997]"Okay, that's not writing, that's typing
[00:05:13.040]that we just witnessed."
[00:05:13.980]And I was like, what?
[00:05:15.270]And he's like, "Well, the story didn't start till just now
[00:05:18.180]when I interrupted you.
[00:05:20.090]I don't care what they had for breakfast.
[00:05:21.560]I don't care that they had a plaid shirt.
[00:05:23.170]I don't care like,
[00:05:24.492]you have to do that work before you start your story.
[00:05:27.970]And then when there's a, when the life is in crisis
[00:05:30.388]and there's some like, this screenplay starts on page 13
[00:05:35.700]I'm sorry to tell you,
[00:05:37.060]but I don't care until the guy loses his job.
[00:05:39.870]What he did, you know.
[00:05:41.040]And if you're gonna tell me that,
[00:05:42.580]then you can tell me later in a flashback
[00:05:44.290]if it matters or something."
[00:05:45.320]But, you know, knowing when to get in and out of a story
[00:05:48.120]is a good part of how to tell a good story.
[00:05:50.671]Well, that leads in really well to the assignment
[00:05:52.760]that our students will have
[00:05:53.870]which is to create a comedy scene
[00:05:56.655]of two to three or four minutes in length on any topic.
[00:06:01.380]It can be a monologue.
[00:06:02.530]It can be a dialogue.
[00:06:03.670]It can be whatever they want it to be.
[00:06:06.690]So best practices.
[00:06:07.850]How should someone approach an assignment like that?
[00:06:10.170]Because a lot of students tell me every semester
[00:06:11.682]I don't know if I'm funny or not.
[00:06:13.601]I don't know how to be funny.
[00:06:15.220]So how do they,
[00:06:16.140]Well, the first thing is, don't worry about being funny.
[00:06:18.321]Like don't write and demand your be funny,
[00:06:21.590]but, you know create a scenario, create a situation.
[00:06:24.912]This, I'll step back to that
[00:06:26.860]love American style assignment idea.
[00:06:28.850]Because one thing Bill Idleson did
[00:06:31.030]was he gave us old premises for American style.
[00:06:35.170]And without us having ever seen it
[00:06:37.030]and then he would say,
[00:06:38.176]"This woman was like the one that teaches
[00:06:42.450]apes sign language in Africa and gets bonded with them.
[00:06:46.420]She comes back to America and she's in her apartment
[00:06:49.230]with her fiance and a gorilla comes to the door, right?
[00:06:54.190]Who's become attached to her.
[00:06:56.420]Write that scene for next week.
[00:06:58.180]And we go away and we write it.
[00:07:00.270]And most of the students write the dialogue
[00:07:03.230]between the fiance and the woman in the room
[00:07:05.480]and the gorillas banging on the door and the whatever
[00:07:07.315]and he said,
[00:07:08.927]"You've gotta invite this gorilla into the scene."
[00:07:11.020]Like you have to take your biggest obstacle
[00:07:13.680]and put it right in the middle of the scene.
[00:07:16.040]And that's comedy comes from that dilemma.
[00:07:19.510]It's if you keep things outside the door,
[00:07:22.200]if you go, well I'm not gonna talk about my addiction
[00:07:24.390]or I'm not gonna do whatever,
[00:07:25.920]then in many ways you're keeping the thing outside.
[00:07:29.440]So I would say for all writing,
[00:07:32.447]but particularly in stuff like comedy, you know,
[00:07:35.860]face the hard stuff, face something that,
[00:07:39.180]you know, is difficult.
[00:07:40.820]Something you can relate to
[00:07:42.340]because that's the most interesting thing
[00:07:44.700]that's gonna happen.
[00:07:46.260]Like when somebody tells a story off the cuff
[00:07:49.010]when they come into a room and say,
[00:07:50.817]"Oh the weirdest thing just happened to me",
[00:07:53.720]That's the weirdest thing, right?
[00:07:55.390]That's why we're listening.
[00:07:56.890]Oh, this funny thing happened on the way to work.
[00:07:59.320]Oh, you tell me we'll be the judge of it, right?
[00:08:01.398]But that's how a star,
[00:08:03.600]that's how we get kind of hooked on it.
[00:08:06.810]So I would just say, you know, even if you,
[00:08:09.810]if it's real or not,
[00:08:11.110]if you choose a ridiculous premise, you know
[00:08:13.767]embrace the premise and try to write it
[00:08:17.250]in the most truthful way.
[00:08:18.710]I think when you're not writing in a truthful way,
[00:08:21.320]then it kind of smells bad, you know?
[00:08:23.750]So, you know, there's a lot of funny, weird stuff happening.
[00:08:29.470]It's not wrong to use things that happen in real life
[00:08:32.980]because you know how uncomfortable it is.
[00:08:35.260]You know, I don't have a comedy routine about this
[00:08:39.626]but I was asked by an improv group to come
[00:08:43.031]and they do a long form of comedy where
[00:08:45.950]they invite somebody to tell a story
[00:08:47.857]and then they turn it into a whole half hour of improv.
[00:08:52.210]If you've ever seen these guys on Netflix
[00:08:55.900]what are their names?
[00:08:57.140]Two really funny names.
[00:08:58.160]I can't remember what, Oh, I'll come up with it.
[00:08:59.810]But anyway, they just interact with the audience
[00:09:02.800]for a little bit, and the next thing you know
[00:09:04.090]they're doing a half hour scene about it, right?
[00:09:06.530]So I was asked to do that once.
[00:09:09.380]And they said, we, we don't,
[00:09:10.650]it doesn't have to be your standup act.
[00:09:11.930]It just has to be some quirky thing that happened to you.
[00:09:15.356]Well, I was divorced and my kids had a hamster,
[00:09:19.340]and I didn't want to be like co-parents of the hamster
[00:09:22.010]and Christmas comes up
[00:09:23.790]and my ex-wife asked
[00:09:25.630]if I would take the hamster for the holidays.
[00:09:28.120]I was like, no, like get a neighbor to feed it.
[00:09:30.590]Like, and instead of doing that, she took it on the trip
[00:09:35.510]to new Orleans on the drive
[00:09:37.150]where it was already listless and something.
[00:09:39.590]And it wasn't feeling well.
[00:09:42.260]And then she suddenly was calling me about what do we do?
[00:09:45.176]And I'm like, I don't, I don't know,
[00:09:46.520]like I was in this weird spot.
[00:09:48.130]What she ended up doing was taking it
[00:09:50.630]into an emergency room in Baton Rouge
[00:09:53.640]like not a veterinary place, but a, there was $110 bill
[00:09:58.570]for looking at a hamster that I, as a dad,
[00:10:02.880]I'm like, I will pay up to $7.
[00:10:05.940]The cost of two full hamsters.
[00:10:07.390]Like I'm not, you know, and I began to tell this story
[00:10:11.600]and then I began to imagine the hamster,
[00:10:14.510]the hamster didn't make it right?
[00:10:17.010]So then I was like, oh, well, do you bury it in Baton Rouge,
[00:10:20.230]or do you, you know, whatever.
[00:10:21.260]And I was, you know, when I was a kid
[00:10:24.510]we had Popsicle sticks for a cross
[00:10:26.250]and we'd put in a shoe box and that was the end of it.
[00:10:28.430]But, but anyway, when this group took that story
[00:10:32.620]suddenly there was the hamster family
[00:10:34.980]standing around the grave of the unknown hamster at, right?
[00:10:38.330]And I'm just saying the truth of that first story
[00:10:41.760]led to a series of other things,
[00:10:45.200]you know, about the hamster, you know
[00:10:48.724]the legacy of it, you know, the great trip to Baton Rouge.
[00:10:53.530]Like most hamsters never get out of the wheel.
[00:10:56.230]And this one, you know, made it that far kind of thing.
[00:10:59.540]So I used that as an example to say
[00:11:02.230]exaggeration is allowed, you know,
[00:11:05.830]but really anchoring it on something
[00:11:08.500]you understand, or you know.
[00:11:10.220]It's okay to be obtuse
[00:11:12.580]and take a left turn and all of that.
[00:11:14.990]But at the core of it,
[00:11:16.117]don't try to out-clever the armature of the story, right?
[00:11:20.510]Find a simple story.
[00:11:23.100]It can be a love story.
[00:11:24.670]It can be a something.
[00:11:26.130]But find something that at any length of a short thing
[00:11:30.370]if you're writing a feature film,
[00:11:31.970]if you're writing a sitcom, if you're writing a commercial,
[00:11:34.270]if you're writing a 15 second webisode, what is the story?
[00:11:38.540]What does the main character want?
[00:11:40.300]What are the obstacles that get in the way?
[00:11:42.370]You know, and what is the result, how do they change
[00:11:44.560]when you get to the other side of it, right?
[00:11:46.765]Tremendously simple idea.
[00:11:49.560]Hero, goal, obstacles, right?
[00:11:52.180]No obstacles, no story, right?
[00:11:55.600]If the Titanic didn't hit the iceberg
[00:11:58.210]we wouldn't be talking about it, you know?
[00:12:00.010]So it's not like, "Hey, this boat left on time
[00:12:02.840]and it arrived on time and everybody had a good trip."
[00:12:05.730]You know what I mean?
[00:12:07.197]That was a little American style pilot.
[00:12:09.012]Yeah, there you go.
[00:12:10.930]But, I think that example at least helps people understand,
[00:12:17.240]you know, look at some ridiculous thing
[00:12:19.190]that happened in your life.
[00:12:20.330]Some awkward moment, you know, because it is those moments,
[00:12:24.230]it's the proposal, it's the quitting your first job,
[00:12:29.640]it's the, whatever those are the moments where
[00:12:32.970]comedy and tension arise.
[00:12:36.760]And, you know, you can find comedy
[00:12:39.310]in almost nothing, you know
[00:12:41.130]but you just have to be able to find a point of view.
[00:12:44.050]And I don't know, I think personally
[00:12:46.910]for inexperienced comedy writers
[00:12:49.370]that it's easier to write in dialogue or in a scene
[00:12:52.810]than it is as a monologue,
[00:12:54.384]because sometimes it's hard to
[00:12:56.511]get that singular point of view out
[00:12:59.900]from one person, you know.
[00:13:02.380]In that case it's almost more of a commentary.
[00:13:05.900]And if you're,
[00:13:07.110]when I used to write commentaries for NPR, you know,
[00:13:09.940]it was often about how many ways can I approach this?
[00:13:14.304]Like going into the holidays
[00:13:16.110]I wrote a commentary about eggnog
[00:13:18.690]and what is eggnog and why do we only nog eggs?
[00:13:22.910]And why is it only good for 30 days a year?
[00:13:25.400]Like if I want eggnog on 4th of July
[00:13:27.290]why isn't available?
[00:13:28.850]And why does it all go bad on January one
[00:13:30.890]of the following year?
[00:13:32.410]And what happens to bad egg nog?
[00:13:34.100]Like, does it get, you know,
[00:13:35.820]take it to the back of the grocery store
[00:13:37.640]and relabel buttermilk and then
[00:13:39.140]paraded back to the dairy section, right?
[00:13:41.160]Like it's what you have to be able
[00:13:43.520]to flex the muscle of perspective.
[00:13:46.440]Where do I stand?
[00:13:47.490]Do I like eggnog?
[00:13:48.340]Do I not like egg nog?
[00:13:50.210]You know, why don't they make veggie nog?
[00:13:52.340]Why don't they make, you know, nacho cheese nog?
[00:13:54.960]Well, I don't know, right?
[00:13:56.460]Why don't they make a home nogger?
[00:13:58.040]Why don't, you know Bob get Mercy and the kids
[00:13:59.990]were nogging tonight, right?
[00:14:01.330]Like you gotta find a way to give yourself permission
[00:14:05.810]I think to explore the ridiculous in that.
[00:14:09.470]And another thing I would say that I find
[00:14:11.840]always very valuable, is if you start keeping a notebook
[00:14:15.568]and just writing things down.
[00:14:17.490]Not just thoughts but you know, when we were out and about
[00:14:21.070]or we were at an airport
[00:14:22.640]or a class or whatever, you overhear conversations
[00:14:26.765]in progress where you don't know the backstory.
[00:14:29.840]And it, if you really wanna know more
[00:14:32.970]that means a good story has started.
[00:14:35.200]You know, I've overheard people,
[00:14:38.640]somebody at an airport and said something like,
[00:14:40.807]"Well, if he wasn't just getting out of prison,
[00:14:42.470]I wouldn't even talk to the guy."
[00:14:43.640]And I'm like, what?
[00:14:44.950]Like, why was he in prison,
[00:14:47.570]and why are you interested now?
[00:14:49.220]Like what happened, right?
[00:14:51.300]That's what you want your reader or listener is,
[00:14:54.420]what, what happened?
[00:14:56.825]Let this unfold.

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A Conversation with Pat Hazell—Part 3

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