Comedian Jeff Foxworthy doesn’t practice his stand-up routine in front of a mirror.

He doesn’t worry about what his routine looks like when he performs because he thinks about how it is written. He views himself as a writer.

“Writers aren’t writers, because we want to be writers. We write because we have to write,” Foxworthy said.

He said writing is never easy, and comedians don’t come on stage and tell jokes as they come to them.

“I guess maybe people think you just walk out there and think of it on the spot, but you don’t,” the comedian said.

Foxworthy noted aspiring writers should read Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott. He said she tells about her writing routine and how she gets her words onto a blank page or empty computer screen.

He said writing also can be cathartic and gives a writer a sense of accomplishment when he knows he has written a good sentence or a good paragraph.

“And you’re like, ‘Dang, that’s good. Yeah, that’s, that’s good.’ You’re a writer, that’s what God put inside of you. And you go to get it out,” he said.

Also, Foxworthy said, writing can be intimate where a writer can wrestle to get words on a page. When a writer crafts his sentences and paragraphs to the point where he knows that they are good, then the writer knows he has conveyed what he was trying to convey.

The comedian splits his time between writing books and his stand-up routine. According to his website, jefffoxworthy.com, Foxworthy is one of the most respected and successful comedians in the country. He is the largest selling comedy-recording artist in history, a multiple Grammy Award nominee and best-selling author of 26 books. Widely known for his “redneck” jokes, his act goes well beyond that to explore the humor in everyday family interactions and human nature.

“My wife said if I don’t do something creative, I’ll implode,” he said. “So I’m always doing something creative. So it’s almost like, wherever the moment kind of takes me like, if I get an idea for a book or a game, then I get hyper focused on that one thing for a while. And so that’s where I go.”

He said his creativity keeps him busy working on projects. He will start to work on some comedy material (bits) and maybe try them out at a local club to gauge how funny they be. But then he will try to refine the material. And that may take a few days, he said. His wife has a picture on her phone of him sitting at their kitchen table working on his material. He has note cards. He has typed notes, notebooks, as well as notes on his phone.

“And so it’s me sitting at the kitchen table writing and I didn’t even know she took the picture,” he said. “She said, people would be shocked, like in The Wizard Of Oz, to see what goes on behind the curtain.”

And even if his table may look like it’s full of clutter, he knows exactly where each piece of information is, so to him, it is organized.

“If anybody ever came in organized it (the table), I wouldn’t be able to find anything,” he said.

Foxworthy invented a game called Relative Insanity where players hold punchlines about relatives in their hands. One player then throws down a setup, he said, which may be something like, “Right before daddy walked me down the aisle, he leaned over to me and whispered, blank.” So players respond to the setup by throwing down punchlines that they think will get the most laughs.

He said once he formulated the game, he began writing.

“I literally sat there and wrote 1,000 punch lines. I opened the computer, and they didn’t even have to make sense, necessarily, (they were) just things that sounded funny,” he said.

Foxworthy thinks all comedians have a giant glass bowl full of words.

“And in that, the object is to pick through them and put them in the right order.”