Our doctors into priests, our hospitals into cathedrals of miracles.

For many people lowering the lights, lighting candles, putting on soothing music and in other ways ceremonially creating a calming environment helps significantly. But is it overdoing it? Putting too much emphasis on the process?

Is it useful ceremony to mark the movement from “ordinary life” to “creating time”? Aren’t we creating all the time?

You might use an incantation like “I am completely stopping” in a ritual or ceremonial way to help you move from the rush of everyday life to the quiet of your creative work, repeating it a few times so that you actually do stop, grow quiet, and move calmly and effortlessly into the trance of working.

Maybe you already have a subconscious ritual that gets you there?

A secret ritual you’re not even aware of?

Something good happens, and then something bad. Then something even better than before, and then something even worse than before.

And then better yet.

And then some.

And then, with the irony that cloaks us against utter nihilism, we think, if only we were living in more interesting times!

And that is the confounding thing about it, isn’t it? That we stand on the nodal point of a great, creaking, crunching change in historical direction, at the beginning of cataclysmic planetary collapse, at the dying of civilization, at the rising of new empires, at our own meltdown, as a million stories bloom out of the earth like wildflowers in the spring and we think, gee, uh, if only there were some good stories to tell.

I began to see what was happening to Berlin. The small incendiaries were going down like a fistful of white rice thrown on a piece of black velvet. The cookies-the four thousand pound high explosives-were bursting below like great sunflowers gone mad.

And then, as we started down again still held in the light, I remembered that the dog still had one of those cookies and a whole basket of incendiaries in his belly. And the light still held it, and I was very frightened. I looked down, and the white fires had turned red.

They were beginning to merge and spread, just like butter does on a hot plate.

There were perhaps a 150 of them, all so thin that their skin glistened like stretched rubber on their bones.

Some of the poor starved creatures whose bodies were there looked so utterly unreal and inhuman that I could have imagined that they’d never lived at all. They were like polished skeletons, the skeletons that medical students like to play practical jokes with.

At one end of the pile a cluster of men and women were gathered round a small fire. They were using rags and old shoes taken from the bodies to keep it alight.

Try to use old words, words that reach into the very core, the very oldest part of the language. They have the most impact.

Beware of adjectives. This is a rule I keep breaking and I have to exercise great vigilance to rein myself in. Adjectives are fine in moderation and when they genuinely add to the meaning or clarity of the image being conveyed.

Paramount executives view the 1998 French farce “Le Diner de cons” and basically laugh their asses off. It’s light, it’s frothy, its funny. But it’s in French with subtitles so no one in America will ever see it. They buy the remake rights and team up with Dreamworks to make the English-language version.

One screenwriter after another is brought in to adapt it. Every versions seems to get less and less funny. Paramount brings in David Guion and Michael Handelman to work on it.

Guion and Handelman’s draft was fussed with three times by sets of other writers, then tweaked three more times at comedy roundtables, where groups of writers gathered to suggest new bits and jokes.

Last summer, the script was given a two-week polish by Roach’s writing partner, Larry Stuckey, and revised one last time by Guion and Handelman, before finally being turned over to a cast skilled in improv with Guion and Handelman on set to suggest more alts. (And presumably take a million notes.)

Ahhh yes, the serious business of comedy.

Nowadays it takes a village to tell a joke.