Nahnatchka Khan Quotes

I really like writing television, and I like the collaborative writers room feeling. It's ten people, and you're together every day laughing your heads off.

Stories often take their own course once you start to write them, especially when you have the benefit of a writers' room and a team of people augmenting and adding to the material.

There's no game plan when it comes to thinking up new characters; inspiration can come from anything - from a wig I've seen to an expression I've heard someone use.

Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.

If you take a few days to write an outline, you're just making up scenes that you think will work, that you think will be interesting. But as you write it, other ideas occur - better ideas that have to do with what you're writing.

I'll think of the idea and then I'll write something down, then within that there will be a joke or two which is the original thing which I thought was funny.

I was only ever part of 'Lost' - a very small part of an extremely talented writers' room, where as a writer, it's sort of your job to sublimate your ego and work in the service of the show and the show's voice.

The trick is always to write in pairs because if at least two people find it funny, you've immediately halved the odds of it not being funny.

I love bouncing my words off of someone else's, and the fact that writing a story with someone else guarantees you'll get something you never, ever would have written on your own.

At its core, 90 percent of my job is still sitting down in a room full of people, and breaking stories... and that requires virtually no technology.

I love discussing the ins and outs of the collaborative nature of writing.

So I had a ghostwriter, they call them, or somebody who is an experienced writer, to help. I've got the ideas in my head, it's getting them properly on paper.

The best way to renew thought is to go outside the human imagination.

I get verbal diarrhea in the writers' room. I just tell everyone a million anecdotes and stories and craziness, and we all double up on the floor laughing.

We don't outline, so we don't have prospective tasks to divide up. It's just, we start at the beginning and talk the first scene through, write it up, proceed to the next.

I used to write jokes with friends. We'd pick a topic and then think out loud, brainstorm.

I've been guilty of being in the writers' room and going too dark; other people have gone too wacky and zany.

There have been days where I've had two writers' rooms or three writers' rooms going, and you walk back and forth. And then you sort of throw yourself on the sofa, and you go, 'Just talk at me for, like, 20 minutes,' and my brain will catch up with this particular story. But I find that exciting.

Generating comic material can sometimes get the better of you.

I start with the joke line and write backward.

Sometimes I say working on a story in a writers' room is like saying the same word over and over and over again until it doesn't make sense anymore. Like, you say it until you don't know what you're saying.

The thing that I'm trying to accomplish is to tell the stories and my feelings in ways that are relatable. But at the same time, I'm so tired of hearing the same old crap. Bring some freshness if you can.

I think writing in a group, even though it can be a challenge - you have to be on your toes all the time - is the way the best comedy gets written. It's very, very collaborative. A lot of comedy writers are definitely introverted nerds.

If you're in the writer's room, in any writer's room in the world, before you pitch a joke or suggest an idea, you first think it's funny and decide to say it out loud. The next step is for the people around you to accept it or reject it, before it ever sees the light of day, on film or in front of an audience.

I'm always thinking about stories and ideas, and I have a few I'd like to actively pursue, but as much as I love them, I love the process of creation, and I want to go on and create things for myself, and create new things.