Seriously Ridiculous #4: One Quest ends, and other begins

Story fiend. Word nerd. For the comedy curious.

Author

Danielle Krage
August 02, 2025

What’s Up?

Well hello there. How goes it?

Let’s start with a quiz called… 2 of these things can be found in my garden, and 1…not so much. Yet. Which is which?

Correct answer:

I have flowers and a fox in my garden.

The fox is only getting an extra feature here so I can zoom in on his expression. He’s a particular soul. But very gentle. Early one morning, I saw him hanging out with the neighbour’s cat.

The mulberries on the other hand are not from my garden YET. They’re from a tree in my nearest city. There is currently a cutting sat in my bathtub, so one day…!

Comedy Craft / Story Fiending

Look what arrived in the post! A copy of The Complete Comedy Script Toolkit, written by 2 x Comedy Masterclass guest, Chris Head. I read an earlier draft of this book and it’s so fun to see it in print.

It’s fantastically practical, while also being underpinned by Chris' immense comedy knowledge. It’s packed with tools, how to apply them, and brilliant examples from a wide range of shows.

One of Chris’ tools that I love helps us think about our mix of characters, and the dynamics between them. Do you have a boss, a striver, a foil and a fool? Chris introduces this concept in this podcast episode. And in the book he relates it to shows including Friends, Fleabag, Parks and Rec, Veep and Succession. I know! So fun.

 That’s just a sliver of the awesomeness. I highly recommend it, and not just for people writing scripts. (Waving to all my fellow novel writers.)

Where are you stuck with your comedy writing right now? I bet Chris has a tool that could help.

The Flip

Ok, for those of you who enjoyed the last one, Write Club returns. An almost silent podcast where you get: a quick settle in with me, 15 minutes to write, and then I’ll high-five you at the end.

How did it go?

Stash: things I love

In a non-creepy way, I have to include the spirit of Ray Bradbury in my Stash (things I love). I’ve recently completed my 1000 Nights Challenge, inspired by Ray—to read a poem, a short story and an essay a night for 1000 nights. (2.7 years).

I’ve received a lot of questions about this one over the last few years, so I wrote a wrap-up post about completing it—things that made it doable, resources, and a few favourites.

I’ll leave the magic of why it’s worth doing it to Ray. Thank you, Ray, for all the zest and gusto!

Dare Bears

Part way through my 1000 Nights, I started to feel like calling it a ‘Challenge’ didn’t do justice to the adventure. So, I switched to calling it a Quest.

I’ve been defining my own philosophy around creative Quests ever since—my own rules of the game, so to speak. What works, what doesn’t, and why. For me.

There are two new things on this front:

1) I started a new creative Quest this week. I’m calling this one 100 places (300 pages). I explored a bunch of different options before deciding. But I picked this one out of my messy musings…

I’ve been designing it alongside an intrepid pilot group of people who wanted to make their own creative Quest. (Very fun!) I shared this thought process with them:

 I like the idea of going to 100 places….

And writing 3 pages…

2 pages that is detailed description, just about place (not the people).

And 1 page that is that place filtered through the POV (point of view) of a character.

100 places, 300 pages. (I’ll know when I’m done.)

It could have been a sprinty Quest—100 places in 100 days.

But actually, I want to spread this out…100 places, 300 pages. (It might take me a year? It could take me 2?)

I can start close by and ‘ordinary’ (My local Spar, which is the village shop. But maybe at night…? What does it look like lit up?). I might decide that there are some types of places that I really want to put on the list: a cryogenic lab (are they even a thing?); a space station (hello Elon? My husband’s brother does work at NASA though); five forests (how are they different?); a ghost town; a haunted house; inside an Amazon warehouse?

I can already smell the adventure! But also, writing 3 pages outside my local Spar would be a net positive for my day! And would change me.

It will be an adventure—one that I can fit into my weekend, as fun and play. While at the same time giving me a chance to build one of my weaker writing muscles…setting. You can read about day one here.

2) It turned out that the people on the pilot loved creating and completing their own Mini Quests and found it quite a unique way of working—different to how they usually set goals. So, I’ll be doing more Questful things with people this year. Fun.

I’m going to leave you with a quote from the utterly marvellous Lois McMaster Bujold:

“The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.”

Until next time,

PS: Thanks for reading my Seriously Ridiculous letter. All feedback is welcome, as I only want to do this if it’s useful or fun for you to read. You can hit reply and it will wing its way to me.

PPS: If you know someone who might enjoy this newsletter, please feel free to forward it to them. They can hit subscribe here and join us.