joshua chamberlain

Category: creativity

  • steal around

    In conversation with Brian Koppelman on The Moment, Paul Schrader talks about the elements he stole from a variety of films to make his 2018 film, First Reformed. “The secret of stealing is that you have to steal around,” Schrader says in reference to the various sources of his material.…

  • you are enough

    I suppose there’s an irony to the fact this is first on my list of “rules to live by,” as it’s something I’ve struggled with for much of my life. We could blame parental trauma. We could blame late-stage capitalism. We could blame debilitating insecurity, creative resistance, the desire to…

  • rules to live by

    When I was twenty-four, I started working at a theater company. In an attempt to remind myself of where I’d been and everything I’d learned along the way, I made a list of twenty “Rules to Live By,” and taped it up inside my locker at work. While some of…

  • on being the portal

    I’ve written about how the best art acts a portal, transporting us somewhere else entirely. Be it a story that takes us on a journey with its characters or a painting that swallows us whole, we engage with these works to get outside of ourselves. But what if we’re the…

  • not trying hard enough

    The last few days, I had this wild idea for an art piece that involved stenciling silhouettes, painted canvas, and melting crayons with a hairdryer. However, when I went to melt the crayons, the gust of heat from the hairdryer not only didn’t melt the wax, it detached the stencils…

  • finding the medium

    I’m currently working on a novel high school kids in revolt and a play about comic book writers building a universe–two different stories with different characters, engaging with completely different worlds. A friend asked this week, “how do you determine which stories are books, which ones are plays, and which…

  • rearrange yourself

    When I was a kid, I’d rearrange the furniture in my bedroom every summer. Sometimes, it was a simple as switching the placement of the dresser and the bookshelf. Other times, I’d slide the bed across the room, reorient the posters on the walls, and move the light fixtures from…

  • do what you’re doing

    While I was in college, I had the opportunity to meet Alan Zweibel, one of the original writers for Saturday Night Live. He told a story about how he got the job at SNL: he’d been writing jokes on his own, collecting them and refining them at open mic nights…

  • hitchhiking

    I absolutely loved Marc Maron’s recent interview with Neil Gaiman. While I’ve never been a huge Gaiman fan, I found myself enamored with his insights into comic fandom, TV production, and his writing process. My favorite bit though, is when Gaiman describes the process of beginning his Sandman comics, and…

  • thoughts from a detective

    In a recent episode of The Moment with Brian Koppelman, writer-director John Hamburg (Along Came Polly, I Love You, Man) touched on a few things that I’ve been turning over in my mind lately. Referencing advice from his therapist, Hamburg says of writing, “Be a detective, not a judge.” I’ve…