I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn’t like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.

Colbert frames his earliest writing as intensely social and performative: he wrote not for publication but to amuse and impress a specific audience. The anecdote also shows how adolescent desire can shape creative output—his “almost every day” stories are less about violence than about courting attention through escalating invention. The darkly comic premise anticipates his later comedic persona, where transgressive material is delivered with a straight-faced, confessional tone. At the same time, the quote hints at writing as a way to process power dynamics (student vs. disliked teacher) by giving the admired girl imaginative control and catharsis through narrative.