John Cleese On Writing

Once John Cleese lost a script he had been working on with his writing partner Graham Chapman. Later he discussed what he had learned from that accident:

' I was embarassed that I lost our work, so I rewrote it from memory, straight off in a hurry. Then I discovered the original and the one I'd done very quickly was better than the original. I didn't spend any time thinking about it, so how could it be better than the original? '

' The only thing I could think of was that my unconscious had been working on my sketch and improving it ever since I wrote it. I began to see that a lot of my best work seemed to come as a result of my unconscious working on things when I wasn't really attending to them.'

' I'm not talking about the Freudian unconscious but the intelligent unconscious. We can't control our unconscious but we can look to how we create the circumstance in which it becomes easier for us to work with our unconscious.'