Jul 22, 2026

We tend to avoid anything we won’t be instantly good at. Richard Sparks has spent forty years proving that instinct is wrong.

Richard is a writer who has spent 40 years bouncing between comedy sketches, TV scripts, opera translations, and now fantasy novels. He wrote for a young Rowan Atkinson before anyone knew his name, then somehow ended up translating operas with no background in the form.

In this episode, Richard shares why he never expects a first draft to work and how that same patience helped him build a fantasy series after decades of writing scripts.

We cover:

• The strange side job that taught Richard he could actually get paid to write
  
• What happened the first time he watched an actor perform a sketch he wrote
  
• The one thing Richard tells every young writer about a bad first draft
  
• Why he walked away from decades of scriptwriting for something he’d never done before
  
• A story structure mistake he says ruined the ending of a hit TV series
  
• The line from Mel Brooks that reframed how Richard thinks about comedy vs. tragedy

Resources

Get free chapters at: https://richardsparks.com