Megan Amram Quotes

I think sketch writing is a good spot for everyone to start because it requires you to develop characters, have a beginning, middle and end and have a bunch of jokes in a short amount of time.

If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn't really count as narrative.

The hardest thing to write is sitcom.

Writing a whole series was a crash course in screenwriting, which is a very different muscle to standup comedy writing.

With sitcom writing, you're trying to write stories.

Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.

You can't improv off of bad writing. Then you have to actually create your objective, which is really hard to do in an element without the skeleton to go off of.

Because I was a television writer for many years, I write very conversationally. I put things straight, and with a lot of humor.

The elegance of a really good screenplay, I admire it. I can't do it.

You know, 'The Golden Girls' was a very unusual show to start on. I was young, and it was a show about old people, and it was a very traditional show, but it was also an amazing training ground for a joke-writer. It forced me to learn those skills.

I feel like I work on scripts for comedy as well as dramatic stuff the same.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

If someone said, 'Sit down and write a 'Community' episode,' I would be panicked.

Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.

I studied screenwriting at film school and was constantly learning how to construct three-act dramas.

When I teach sketch writing, there's still a beginning, middle and end.

My preference is for good writing. It doesn't matter if it's for film or TV. Whatever. It starts with the writing. Even though I've had problems with writers, it doesn't matter how great of an actor you are. If the writing is bad, you're going to struggle.

I believe in three-act structure. When I say that to novel people, or people in the world of books, they go, 'Well, that's a film thing.' However, even a good joke has three acts.

I write small and weird. Romcoms are not in my skill set.

I'm crazy about 'Breaking Bad,' but I wouldn't know how to write an episode of it.

What I love about sketch is that the writing of it is idea-based. It's not story-based. It's like, 'This is a behavior, and we're going to write, in a small sample, the funniest way to heighten this behavior.' Sitcoms or movies are about story.

It was really fun to start writing movies because you could actually take characters whose voice you enjoy writing in and have actual things happen to them for more than five minutes. It was really fun to thread it together.

In school, I used to write scripts and all that good stuff.

A lot of the time, a comedy script is just dialogue, and that's the main thing you have to worry about.