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Today we’re going behind the scenes to look at an extremely rough draft of Luke’s piece “When I Invited All of You Over to Watch ‘The Big Game,’ I Assumed You Knew I Was Talking about Human Chess." After that, we’ve got a joint recommendation for a movie podcast we both greatly enjoy.

Behind the Scenes: When I Invited All of You Over to Watch “The Big Game,” I Assumed You Knew I Was Talking about Human Chess

Luke here! If you’ve ever taken a workshop with me, or have asked me about my humor writing process, or have given me even the smallest opportunity in the middle of an otherwise unrelated conversation to pivot to talking about my humor writing process, you’ll have heard that I like to have a pretty clear sense of my premise, form, and narrator before I go into a draft. Once I start drafting, even if it’s just a rough draft, I find it very easy to get caught up in the minutia of making sentence-level tweaks to my prose, so before I dive in, I like to get a head start thinking about the big-picture elements of a piece.

To that end, I start by doing some extremely low-pressure writing. My goal at this point is simply to get a bunch of material down on the page. I’m not worried about spelling or grammar, or about having the paragraphs flow in any kind of order, and if I get even the slightest bit stuck, I make myself move on, even if I’m in the middle of a sentence.

I think this can be a very helpful exercise, especially if you find that you’re struggling to make choices about your premise, form and narrator. However, I often hear that people are unsure about what these kinds of notes actually look like, or feel they don’t understand how to go from these types of rough notes to a final product. To give a sense of what I’m talking about, let’s take a look at the notes for my “Big Game” piece, with all the gaps, typos, and TKs left in.

(Here, once again, for reference, is the final version of the piece.)