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AE: It must be quite different writing a TV script from writing a musical play.
JK: Actually, they're more similar than you'd think in that both musical books and TV scripts have to be extraordinarily economical. A musical book is like a play, but half of what you're allowed to do is given over to the songs, so you have to cover plot points very quickly, very economically, very effectively, in order to get to the next song moment.

And TV scripts are very similar in that, at the end of the day--this is what I like the most about the medium--every story you tell has to fill the exact same length: at that time, 23 minutes, now more like 21 minutes because they keep adding more commercials every year.

And so you have to tell your story in the swiftest, most economical way possible, while keeping it as funny and getting as many jokes in it along the way [as possible]. TV writing [for a] multi-camera comedy, which is done in front of an audience, is closer to theater writing than any other form of filmed entertainment.

In a way, it was sort of an inevitable career for me, in that growing up, before I ever wrote [novels], I'd been writing plays for years, since I was seven or eight years old and [all through] college. And I wanted to write comic plays…and [the heyday of comic play writing] all kind of died off. I mean, who at this point is making a living as a comic playwright, producing a comedy and having it done on Broadway every year?

I mean, that entire career option has gone away, so if you like writing plays to amuse people, the sitcom, particularly the multi-camera sitcom done in front of a live audience, is your only real option--if you have a desire to make a comfortable living and not be forever scrambling, as middle age draws an eye upon you and you want a certain level of comfort and not always [to] be worrying, ceaselessly, about how you're going to pay your bills.

AE: It sounds as though you've come full circle, in that the TV pilot you described sounds like it's found a new form in your new novel, My Lucky Star.
JK: Certainly, there are some similarities. I've always enjoyed writing about actors. The things in human nature that I find the funniest, among them vanity and self-importance, are nowhere as evident as they are among members of the acting community. Not to say that I don't like actors, or look down on them. I'm enormously fond of actors, and I've had the great privilege of working with some of the best in the business -- Kelsey [Grammar] and David [Hyde Pierce], Stockard Channing and Henry Winkler.

But most of the kind of actors I like to write about are not people I've had the actual misfortune to work with. But they just exemplify some of the funniest traits of human nature, writ large because they just work on a bigger canvas, and they have a great deal to lose, which makes them desperate. Fame is something that affects people in interesting ways, because it gives them everything they want, but at the same time, it gives them so much to lose that their behavior in holding on to that fame is bound to be interesting.

AE: And that's certainly the case in terms of your two characters in the book My Lucky Star. They are frantic not to lose their tenuous place in Hollywood.
JK: Yeah, [in the book] there are two interesting drives [that motivate the characters]. There's the silly romantic fantasy of somehow winning the affecting of this completely unattainable, staggeringly self-involved movie star, [Stephen Donato]; whereas Stephen's huge drive is to hang on to his mega-stardom he's worked so hard to achieve. And their different drives collide disastrously. [Events in the plot] lure [both Philip and Stephen] into the den of an extraordinarily malicious and inventive blackmailer.

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