A few weeks ago, I talked to some very funny writers about the process behind writing their favorite satirical headlines (read it here!). I absolutely loved taking that peek behind the creative curtain, but I wanted to expand the format so that it wasn’t just tied to headlines - it could be anything! Articles! Reviews! Videos! All that to say, I’ve once again asked some brilliant creative people how they do what they do. Here’s that!
Anuska Dhar on how to respond to a parasocial, meta internet critique with a parasocial, meta internet critique
After watching Bo Burnham's special, “Inside”, I read a lot of the reviews from big publications and remember them all focusing on how this special was essentially the "quarantine masterpiece" for the zeitgeist of today because it had mapped our everyday inner turmoil throughout the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. While I agreed with that take, I felt like the special also spoke to a larger evergreen idea of our parasocial relationship with artists, and the context of the pandemic (where the internet was our main mode of communication) served to highlight this idea. That’s usually how most of the essays I write are born: because I feel like I have a specific perspective or lens to analyze a piece of work through that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
I wrote, recorded, and edited the entire project in a week, which is definitely not the norm for me, but I think really captures how passionately I felt about the film and my take at the time. It felt even more pertinent to adapt the essay to video form and share it on YouTube not only as a cheeky nod to the beginning of Burnham’s career, but also because of the meta nature of the content; I was responding to this dilemma of the insatiable desire to connect online and through art by adding to the noise of the internet, which of course is a catch-22. I was desperately searching for a space for discussion and community after I had watched the special, and I feel like I generated a launchpad for that in the comments section of my video. That being said, I also had to step back when the video really took off and I couldn’t keep up with the comments, effectively creating a parasocial wall of my own with the people watching my video. I guess in this case life did indeed imitate art, but in my opinion, if you have something to say it’s only human nature to try and express it externally, even if it’s ultimately just for yourself.
Jenn Knott on how to make the beloved Real Housewives franchise more equestrian
I love playing with characters and my humor definitely tends to go big and absurd. So when my dear Belladonna co-editor at the time Allie Rubin threw out "horse drama" as a writing prompt, my wheels started turning. I immediately imagined horses being ridiculous assholes to each other, and I saw them on their own reality show. I am not a huge consumer of reality TV but was definitely familiar with the Real Housewives franchise, so after watching I think four episodes of The Real Housewives of Atlanta (as many as my husband would tolerate), I figured there were enough absurd details going on in that universe that it could easily be mapped to a horse stable full of some saucy, rich fillies!
The main challenge of this piece was figuring out the correct format: I originally wanted to just write a bunch of dumb dialogue chock full of horse puns, but short humor pieces that consist of dialogue alone tend to work best — in my opinion — if the characters and world are already known entities to the reader. I knew I had too much world-building to do here, so I figured pitching the show would be the best way to go (and I still got to write some terrible one-liners). I'm currently in the writer's room for a new (German) Amazon comedy show, and I worked on a pitch last year for a show for Disney + which ended up getting accepted, so I felt confident I could pitch a Bravo reality show — albeit a fake one — in 800 words. I like to do a bit of research for a piece like this, so after a good read through the "horse" entry on Wikipedia plus a look-up of some other pertinent details, I wrote the first draft! My kick-ass writer's group gave me great notes, I cut about 200 words, et voila! I more or less had the piece that got published.
Inexplicably I have still not heard from any Bravo execs wanting to make this thing, but if any are reading this, the pitch is still available...
Lillian Stone on how to get out of your own way and write a McSweeney’s masterpiece
The best writing advice anyone's ever given me is to just get the page dirty. For me, that means embracing the god-awful flash draft: a draft that is pure humiliating garbage, but gives you a jumping-off point for future drafts. I make a flash draft for everything I do—articles for my day job, screenplays and pilots, sketches, humor pieces—and don't usually spend more than an hour in that initial paper-dirtying stage. If I get stuck, I'll write a placeholder joke or make a note to come back to a specific section. ("Joke about butts here!") This especially helps when you're feeling intimidated by a big project, which makes it so easy to procrastinate. A dirty page is much less intimidating than a blank one! Just start barfing stuff onto the page. You'll be surprised by how much of it ends up being salvageable.
Gabrielle Saydee on how to make a Y2K-dreamscape lyric video for Queen Naijao
One of my favorite lyric videos I've done is for an artist named Queen Naija, who has a song with Ari Lennox called “Set Him Up”. A lot of times, artists want their lyric videos to match their official music video, and this was one of those cases. In the original music video, they have separate scenes and present the song is a conversation on the phone. Queen Naija's scenes are purple and Ari's scenes are pink. The aesthetic was very Y2K, so I had to translate that same aesthetic. For the lyric video, I had to set up bedroom scenes so I made different floor backgrounds for cellphones from the early 2000’s to display the lyrics on. In the music video, their conversation is verbally on the phone but for the lyric video, I have them texting on the cellphones as they are singing the lyrics. Just like in the music video, I have purple phones/scenes for Queen Naija and pink phones/scenes for Ari. To make the scenes look realistic, I had to collect assets — rugs, beds, lamps, jewelry, vinyl records, moving shadows, and more. I had an After Effects camera movement going throughout the video and swiping transitions going from scene to scene. This video took a lot of time and hard work and I am so proud of it!
Matt Wille on how to write a New York Times (!!!) book review
Writing the first draft of my review was intimidating only for the first few minutes. I jotted down specific aspects I wanted to praise and highlighted quotes along the way, so by the time it came to draft it was mostly a matter of weaving those points together. I went to the nearest park (for the romance), laid out my materials (e-reader, Notes app, PDF copy on my laptop, a blank Google doc), and wrote it up in about two hours. I re-read it twice and sent it off with a lightness that felt impossible, like was it really that easy?
Here the narrator jumps in to remind me that, no, it's not that easy. Editing ended up being the part that really twisted my brain in knots. My editor pushed me to really bring more of myself to the review, to resist the urge to just use a default New York Times-y voice, and I found myself confronting this question of like...what does my critical voice sound like? In the final draft (there were four rounds) I finally realized Twitter would be the perfect starting point for the piece because that's where I first learned of JP and because Twitter is such a weird omnipresence in my life and my reading. So then I tried to carry that weirdness throughout and it kind of cracked the code for me.
Also I had to cut a quote about masturbation because apparently it went against New York Times standards. Sigh.