7/24/2023 0 Comments Simon rich authorI don’t think it’s changed my style, but it’s certainly changed my subject matter completely. ![]() Has becoming a father changed your writing? At the time, though, as an 18 year old it was super encouraging. Somebody had written “very funny” on it with an exclamation point. I remember I got a really nice rejection letter from Playboy when I was a sophomore in college. I started sending stories to magazines when I was still in high school. I submitted to them for years, along with many other magazines, before getting anything accepted. ![]() How did you start writing for the New Yorker? I started writing short stories and then placing them in magazines. The stories also could be any length, so you never felt like something was being padded out just to serve marketplace realities. It allows writers to write in very unusual voices and to take absurdist leaps that a reader maybe wouldn’t tolerate for a 10-day read, but would for a 10-minute read. What I loved about short stories is they allow writers to take really big swings that wouldn’t necessarily be sustainable for 300 pages. His stories - even the most fun, sinister, dark ones - had elements of humor. My favorite story writer ever is Roald Dahl. When I was growing up, I really wanted to be a short story writer more than a comedy writer. When did you realize your passion for humor writing? That’s the whole fun of it, getting a chance to collaborate with other people instead of just sitting in your room writing all day. You want them to have as much creative freedom as possible. I always try really hard to come at everything clean because the whole fun of adapting the stories for TV and film is that you get a chance to collaborate with talented people, and you don’t want any of them to feel tied down to source material. I’ve run a couple of TV shows that were based on my fiction, and I really tried my absolute best to not let the source material override our creative instincts as television writers. What’s the key to adapting something you wrote as a novel or short story into a new medium, like film or television? My mind goes to escapist entertainment, if I’m forecasting the next 10 years. Out of curiosity, I was looking to see what kind of films were made in the years following the 1918 flu, and I think it was more more of the Busby Berkeley variety than hardcore flu-related realism. What is the role of art during a pandemic? Are we going to start to see a bunch of movies and TV show about coronavirus and quarantining? Variety spoke with Rich about the joys of humor writing and what post-pandemic entertainment might look like. In between, he’s finishing up his third novel and churning out more short stories. His comedy series “Miracle Workers” was recently renewed for a third season, and he’s writing the script for “Unicorn Executions,” a movie based on the the illustrated children’s book. ![]() Up next, his New Yorker short story “ Everyday Parenting Tips” - a satirical guide to navigating parenthood - is being adapted into a feature film at Universal Pictures that’s set to star Ryan Reynolds. But it’ll often take 10 or 15 years by the time they reach the screen, so it’s best not to think too much about anything but the story that you’re working on at that exact moment.” “I’m always thrilled when any of my stories gets adapted at all. “I’m more inclined to read reviews of my books,” he suggests. Rich says he doesn’t read appraisals of his stories once they take on a new life in Hollywood.
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