Be a High Agency Writer

A high-agency writer shows up daily, writes like a professional, hones their craft, finishes work consistently, and ships it.

Comedy for All workshop replay video

Before we dive into today’s writing tip and Q&A… Thanks to all 400+ of you who attended The Comedy for All workshop on Saturday that I co-taught with Scott Dikkers. Scott and I had fun going through the ideas, deconstructing some comedy pieces, and riffing with each other.

I’ve been learning from Scott for the better part of a decade, and to be able to co-teach a workshop with him was a real trip for me.

It was especially interesting to analyze two humor piece drafts together and see how Scott and I viewed the strengths and weaknesses of those drafts and what we’d recommend the authors change on a second draft. Thanks again to readers Jessica and David for sending those drafts in and letting us dissect them in public!

Good news: we have a workshop replay video, workshop slides, and some other cool bonuses for you.

These will be available for paid subscribers of Comedy Bizarre and

No Dikkering Around

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I’ll post the following bonuses for you next week (the week of March 31), in a paid post:

• Bonus #1: The Comedy for All workshop replay video.

• Bonus #2: The workshop slides.

• Bonus #3: Google doc links to both workshop case study humor pieces with our inline notes. See how Scott and I mark up and deconstruct humor pieces.

• Bonus #4: This one’s awesome. Digital (PDF and eBook) copies of all four (!) of Scott's How To Write Funny Books. (How To Write Funny, How To Write Funnier, How To Write Funniest, and How To Write Funny Characters). How To Write Funny is my single favorite comedy writing guide, and it's the book the helped me most when I was a beginner. The complete HTWF series is an entire eduction in comedy writing.

• And… Bonus #5: If you’re not already a subscriber get a 15% discount on both of our Substacks, good through the end of today (Monday).

Scott and I both sustain ourselves through our teaching and writing, so we appreciate the support. Here are the discount links:

comedybizarre.substack.com/cfa

scottdikkers.substack.com/webinar

I’m way stoked to offer all four HTWF books as an extra gift for all of my subscribers. (The links to the HTWF books will only be up for one week after I post them, as I want to respect Scott’s work and generosity here.)

Make sure you look for those next week! Now onto today’s main post…

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Short and specific comedy writing tip: Be a high agency writer

It’s a hard truth: Nobody gives a flying flip about your work unless you make them care. To do this you have to put out really good, original stuff.

Of course, that’s hard to do. And because of this, comedy writers face plenty of rejections: Rejections from editors or gatekeepers. Rejections from audiences who don’t notice us. And most of all, we face rejections from ourselves.

The answer to this is to be a high-agency writer.

Agency is a concept from philosophy and psychology that means “the ability to act and produce effects in the world.”

Being a high-agency writer is a choice you make over time with your habits and your thought patterns. A high-agency writer shows up daily, writes like a professional, hones their craft, finishes work consistently, and ships it.

Here are some things high-agency writers do:

• They consciously choose which drafts and projects are most promising and they keep chipping away until those drafts cross the finish line.
  

• They ship their work. When a publication rejects their best work, they send it somewhere else. They self-publish stuff that doesn’t otherwise find a good home.
  

• They use other comedy writers’ good work as inspiration. Work they consider poor or unfunny they ignore, other than as an occasional teaching example of how not to write.
  

• They are internally focused on the ideas that excite them. This gives them intrinsic motivation. And this intrinsic motivation is an inexhaustible fuel.
  

• To the extent they are externally focused, it’s mainly an external focus on the feedback of a few selected people they trust.
  

• They use rejections, to an extent, as useful feedback about what certain gatekeepers or audiences like, and how their craft presently stacks up. But they don’t fixate or place too much stock in any one publication, gatekeeper, or outcome.
  

• They’re resilient toward the inevitable plateaus and brick walls inherent in a creative life. They realize it’s all part of the game. They treat obstacles with some degree of philosophical detachment or even bemusement.
  

• When it comes to their work, they are relentless.

Here are some things low-agency writers do:

• They accumulate lots of half-finished drafts of various degrees of promise, and they don’t ever get much across the finish line. They have lots of writing that sits in limbo.
  

• When they finish something, they occasionally ship it out or self-publish, but one or two rejections is enough to make them say, “Oh, I guess this is is crap” and give up on it. Their shipping and publishing habits are overall a bit random or scattershot.
  

• They let rejection affect their work routines, and they feel dissuaded by it. They fixate on rejection.
  

• They go through endless cycles of writing and not writing, but this happens rather emotionally. They often feel burnt out and “need a break” but these breaks are determined more by their feelings of inadequacy rather than being determined by the natural rhythms of work and seasonality. (All human beings do need breaks.)
  

• They are pre-occupied with the accomplishments of other writers. They may indulge in gossip and shit talk about writers they dislike or envy.

Being “high-agency” or “low agency” comes in degrees. It’s not binary. We all sit somewhere on the agency spectrum with our creative work. And agency varies from domain to domain. You can be really high-agency at your job or in your friendships or in your sex life or whatever, but pretty low agency as a writer.

Ask yourself these questions…

• What are your most high-agency and low-agency writing habits and mental patterns?

• How do each of them serve you or not serve you?

• How could you be more high-agency in at least one area of your writing?

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Reader Q&A: On organization

“A newb question that relates to diligent practice: how do folks organize their work and drafts across multiple projects? Do you use Google docs with a file for each project? A tracker for keeping tabs on progress and action items across tasks and projects? I'm using a chaotic mix of physical notebooks, Dropbox, and Google Drive, and it's starting to drive me bonkers. I'd love to be better organized and also get that quick hit of accomplishment from seeing progress.” - Lindsey T.

I’m happy to tackle an occasional writing productivity question like this. Not having your writing projects organized can easily drive you bonkers.

Let me first give you a few ideas I find helpful, then I’ll tell you about my own system.

1. I want to deliberately and consciously choose which writing projects are active. “Active" means that I’m working on it this week, or at least this month. If a writing project is inactive, I don’t want it in front of my face distracting me. I also don’t want my active projects mixed with my inactive projects. Being burdened with too many projects, files, notes, ideas in your immediate purview—all mixed together—is cognitively overwhelming.
   

2. If I have a writing commitment or an active project (whether that commitment is self-imposed or something I’ve promised someone) I want that commitment tracked and recorded externally in one—and only one—place that I check regularly. Writing commitments should not just be floating around in my head, giving me vague background anxiety.
   

3. I want my brain to trust my system. This means I feel confident that I’m tracking everything and nothing is falling through the cracks. A good system is one you trust implicitly and otherwise don’t even think about. A bad system—e.g. just putting all current and past writing in one huge, disorganized folder—is one that creates extra cognitive strain.

I think you can use those principles to create a system that works for you. Your system will be different than mine. You want a writing system that suits the kind of writing you do and the idiosyncrasies of how you work.

Here’s how I organize my humor writing. Each of these is just a folder full of text files—technically an iCloud folder of Mac Pages files.

Humor Writing — Working: This is my folder for pieces I am actively writing. Typically 3 to 5 humor pieces, plus (possibly) short stories or other writing. This is how I keep active pieces in front of my face. It’s also a focused way of signaling my commitment to finish these specific pieces.

Humor Writing — Hibernating: This is where I keep all the pieces that I think have some promise, but I am not actively working on them. I like everything in this folder (at least somewhat), and while I don’t want to lose this stuff, I also don’t want to look at any of it right now. “Out of sight, out of mind,” as the thought-leaders say. I might keep 10 or 20 or more pieces here at any given time. I review this folder a few times per year, visually scanning each piece and deciding whether to keep it in here, bump it into “Working” status, or send it to the graveyard.

Humor Writing — Graveyard: These are all of my unfinished pieces/stories—or failed drafts— that I don’t want to publish or work on anymore. Why not just delete? You could. However, having this folder tells my brain, “Hey, it’s fine to give up on this piece. See, look, we’re not even deleting it! We’re just storing it in the graveyard. Calm down, brain.” Death is natural, and a graveyard is a good thing. If you’re not killing lots of ideas, you’re probably being too precious or timid with your writing, or you’re just not writing enough.

Humor Writing — Ready: My finished but unpublished pieces. I keep them in one spot so I’ll remember to get them out there in the world, whether that means sending to a publication or self-publishing.

Humor Writing — Published: My published stuff, for reference. I can glance here when I’m feeling a little discouraged and pump myself up: “See, look! Past Me wasn’t a failure!” It’s also nice to see the folder grow over time.

That’s how I organize all and only my humor writing. For example, I keep Comedy Bizarre drafts in a separate folder system. That division works well for me. Here’s how I handle the other issues:

Collaboration: I use Google docs and Google drive for everything that’s collaborative: drafts I’m getting feedback on, drafts I’m giving feedback on, anything I’m co-writing or planning with another writer. The Google docs collaboration features are great, and it’s all “free” ( I guess you pay for it in how they monetize your data. Shrug!) Does this mean that a few of my pieces are double copied in two places? Yes, it does: One collaboration copy in Google docs, and another “working” copy in my iCloud folder. But this isn’t big deal. If I get comments on a piece in a Google doc, I make my revisions on my main personal file (the Mac Pages file). The Google doc is just where I get the notes. Not a big issue.

Tracking Projects: I use Mac’s Things 3 to track all my projects and commitments. It’s robust and can do a lot, but it has a kind of minimalist, clean look that I like. I dislike To Do tracking apps that are overly complicated or have a “dense” UI.

Notes/Joke ideas/Brainstorms: I use both Mac Notes (synced to my phone and computer), and one physical journal.

That’s it. Your system could be more or less complex than mine depending on your needs, but feel free to steal any of these ideas you find helpful.