Audience feedback and finding ideas
On Sunday I did a reading of the play I’m writing. I get together every couple of weeks with some actor friends and we usually read a play but this week we read some things that I’m working on (it’s nice being the only writer in the group). And it got a really nice reception and lots of laughs. Which is a relief because I’ve spent a lot of time on it and the longer you wait without exposing it to an audience, the more I start to feel the weight of doubt about its viability.
If I go long enough without feedback I start to go insane, so thankfully I have an easily accessible audience of friends willing to read my work. And during the reading I realized that it’s still only half-finished and needs a lot of work, specifically with building out a full story structure that will support the comedy and the characters.
Anyway, the reading serves as a thermometer to see if there’s heat in what I have so far and to see where it stalls. If there’s heat then I can keep developing it with enough positive feedback to keep me going. Where it stalls is what needs to be rewritten and fixed, which is the hard part of writing (breaking the story), at least for me.
So to develop the rest of the story, I’ve been watching Westerns this week. I find the best way to get ideas (not inspiration–you can get that by pondering your imminent death) for whatever I’m working on is to watch other work–watching it actively and jotting ideas down as they come to me. Since I’m writing a satire (that also honors the genre), I’m looking for tropes and archetypes to play with and steal. And once I start looking for ideas, my brain starts listening for more ideas and then they just start coming to me throughout the day, which is much easier than sitting and staring at a screen and trying to think of things.
And now that I think about it, I get most of my ideas when I watch something being performed: plays, films, actors in a class, an improv show. Sometimes I think “I’d like to do something like this but with x or y or z” and sometimes I just get an idea for something completely unrelated. Or just a fragment of a scene or a setup or a line of dialogue. I jot them down and when I want to start something new, I have hundreds of starts, ideas, scenes, or other fragments to start with.
It always works this way and I almost never get an original idea that comes from just staring at a blank page–there’s nothing to connect to a blank page, so how can you be creative? You have to start with something and connect it to something else.
Possibly a more fun psychology thesis than the one you’re doing
I’ve been listening to an audiobook from Audible called No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life
What struck me was this: I listened to a lecture last week talking about Sartre and identity. And the what he said (excuse the clumsy paraphrase here) was that we’re social animals, not in the sense that we like to socialize a lot, but in the sense that our identities are inextricably linked to what other people think about us. Part of your identity is what you think of yourself as being and part of it is what others think of you.
I didn’t give it much thought until a few days later and I’m pitching ideas for a sketch show with a friend and basically he’s playing a character with a racist history that doesn’t want to be known as a racist. And it was funny to hear him talk about how that was one incident and why can’t you just see me for what I am, a musician? Now, I think that if Sartre was wrong, that other people have nothing to say about our identities, then that wouldn’t be funny. And I think that in character-based comedy, the laughs tend to come from recognizable (usually bad) human behavior.
So in one sense, I see the audience as a sort of truth-detector that laughs whenever you get close to the heart of something. Which is why a lot of improv teachers tell you to play truthfully. And the reverse of that is that theoretically you could test out philosophical or psychological theories by artfully writing them into comedy routines.
The irony is that while an audience (as a unit) would almost certainly laugh at the bit (we’ll find out in a few weeks anyway), if you asked them all individually about it, they probably wouldn’t be able to give a clear answer as to why they found it funny and they might even outright deny the plausibility that their identity is formed by anything outside of their control.
One of my favorite quotes on creativity
One of my favorite quotes on creativity comes from David Foster Wallace:
Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still “are” human beings, now. Or can be.
This isn’t that it’s fiction’s duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans; I’m not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art. We’ve all got this “literary” fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like “Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!”
But we already “know” U.S. culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn’t engage anybody. What’s engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn’t have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not why not?
It’s something that I always try to think about whenever I write something new, although I probably live up to it only 25% of the time. It’s just damn hard to write comedy that is both funny and can leave the audience with something that makes them feel better as human beings, to feel full and light at the same time, which is how I think about it whenever I watch something that’s technically amazing and packs a good emotional, humane punch.
It’s especially hard when writing satire because satire is more about tearing something down than building something new. Even if I can’t hit what I’m going for more than 25% of the time, I still think it’s a worth goal to aim for–to make things that are funny and that have a positive effect on the audience, even if that means showing them something dark about themselves that they don’t want to confront.
Meisner Setups for Writing Short Plays
I don’t know if all Meisner acting classes or schools do this, but in my level 2 class we spent a lot of time acting in ‘setups’, which comprise a set of imaginary circumstances within which the actors improvise (and hopefully find their emotional cores).
Anyway, I found that these setups all turned out to work really well as premises for one-act plays. Basically, they start with one person in an apartment performing some activity (ironing a shirt for a date, running lines for an upcoming show, rewriting your will, etc.). Then the second character enters the apartment, usually because the first character invited him or her over to talk about something (invitation isn’t required, at least for a play).
They key is that the characters both need something from each other, and it has to be high-stakes. Most of the setups in class are between two struggling actors or two friends that have some conflict between them (Tom needs Joe to get him an audition but Joe will only do it if Tom let’s him sleep with his girlfriend). It’s easy to make these comedic if you just stretch the circumstances a bit into the realm of absurdity or you give the characters some good comedic traits.
The one thing that isn’t really dealt with in class (because it’s not a writing class) is how to end them, so that ends up being the hardest part. I usually like to kill someone off or start them off as comedies and then reverse it so the ending is dramatic. All you need to write them is a basic premise, what the two characters need, and then maybe some kind of twist. Then you can improvise based on that and after an hour you’ll have most of the work done already–just need to polish the dialogue and tighten up the beats.
Anachronistic Profanity in Deadwood
Watching rehearsals for Date Night, which has a few f-bombs in it but is still pretty palatable for the parental set, I realized that a lot of what I’ve been writing lately has been on the tame side in terms of content and language.
So I’m writing a Western (a comedy) that’s pretty damn blue and takes place in a whorehouse. For inspiration, I’ve been re-watching Deadwood and read this, which is pretty interesting, about David Milch’s use of profanity in the show: