Ambition and Acceptance with D.C. Pierson

First Draft Episode #202: D.C. Pierson

D.C. Pierson, comedian, writer, filmmaker and author of The Boy
Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To and Crap Kingdom, and
co-writer and star of indie comedy movie Mystery Team, talks
about getting more vulnerable with age, using his fiction to
explore the gap between what we expect of the world and what
turns out to be true, and being sick of not finishing things.
Links and Topics Mentioned In This Episode



Dan Eckman and Meggie McFadden are two comedians D.C. has
worked with for years, in part on an adaptation of D.C.’s
first book, The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To




D.C. loved the cover of his dad’s copy of Jurassic Park by
Michael Crichton




Rubber Soul was the one Beatles album D.C.’s family had on
cassette or CD




In conjunction with the documentary The Beatles Anthology,
detailed compilations of Beatles ephemera were released in
three double-CD sets: Anthology 1, Anthology 2, and Anthology
3. D.C. listened to these more than the regular Beatles
albums, which means he listened to a lot of alternate
versions of songs and random studio chatter. He credits that
with jumpstarting much of his curiosity as a storyteller.




While D.C. attended the Rita and Burton Goldberg School of
Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch Institute of Performing Arts,
one of his teachers was Charlie Rubin, who wrote for Seinfeld
and In Living Color, and was a showrunner for Law &
Order: Criminal Intent




Derick was D.C.’s improv group which formed at NYU, made up
of D.C. Pierson, Dominic Dierkes, Donald Glover, Dan Eckman,
and Maggie McFadden




Mystery Team was a fully independently-made movie that the
Derick Comedy group made, which had a screening at Sundance,
and led the group to move to Los Angeles




Upright Citizens Brigade improv theater is where D.C. honed
his comedy and performing chops during and after college




The concept for Mystery Team is basically: what if characters
from Encyclopedia Brown never really grew out of their
idealized, 1950s childhood, and kept trying to solve crimes?




Donald shared what he learned writing for 30 Rock (with Tina
Fey, Robert Carlock, Matt Hubbard, Kay Cannon) with his
Derick Comedy friends to help them write a tight script for
Mystery Team




Nathan Rabin, who wrote for The A.V. Club at the time, wrote
a glowing review there for Mystery Team that D.C. credits
with helping the movie gain momentum




A passing encouraging comment from comedian, actor, writer,
and musician Eliza Skinner gave D.C. the boost he needed to
start writing a book




Dianne McGunigle, manager and a producer of Atlanta, was D.C.
agent at the time that he wrote a first draft of The Boy Who
Couldn’t Sleep… and she read it quickly, a favor for which
D.C. is forever grateful




Gerry Howard, who edited David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of
the System and Girl with Curious Hair, as well as Hanya
Yanagihara’s A Little Life, was the editor D.C. worked with
for The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep… D.C. was starstruck to be
going to the offices where Sloane Crosley—essayist and writer
known for I Was Told There’d Be Cake, How Did You Get This
Number and her newest, Look Alive Out There—also worked.




The Los Angeles Times gave The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep… a
lovely review




D.C. was inspired by psychologist Carol Dweck’s book,
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success




One of D.C.’s favorite English teachers sent him Of Human
Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham provided a quote that summed
up what he likes to explore in all his writing




To me, Crap Kingdom is asking, “What if Lord of the Rings was
deeply uncool?”




Stephen King’s On Writing is one of the writing books that
has inspired D.C. in his fiction process




One of D.C.’s earliest imrpov teachers, Owen Burke, referred
to the following passage from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, on the
endurance of human thought and creation: “We shed as we pick
up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms,
and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The
procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the
march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can
be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up
piece by piece, or be written again in another language.
Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more.
Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have
their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of
Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of
Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”




D.C. sometimes teaches at Writing Pad, a writing program
offered online and in L.A./S.F.


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