It's like improv

You don't  have a plan. 

Each morning you take a pen 

and open your journal 

to see what will happen. 

It's this not knowing 

and your curiosity 

that brings you back 

to the page each day 

to see if you'll make 

a new discovery, 

a new way of understanding

yourself and the world, 

a new way of seeing life. 

It's like improv, 

the art of making something 

out of nothing, 

completely spontaneous, 

unscripted, 

just an empty page 

and a desire to find out 

what you're thinking 

and feeling 

in this moment.

Diving into each moment

Every time we embark on a story, we are diving into moments—a series of moments, actually—that take place in the lives of our characters.

We may not know what’s happening in their lives any more than they do, but we join them in the unknowing and must be willing to follow them wherever they take us in the hope their path will lead us into a story.

Each moment of their lives can give us another clue to who they are and who they want to be, as well as clues to who they may be running from or trying to escape.

If we dive deep enough into these moments, we can discover the secrets that our characters are holding close to their hearts, their dreams, their hopes, and their fears.

We can learn how these secrets help them form their decisions, and how these decisions lead them to take the steps that they take in their lives.

We may make lists and outlines and plot notes, but, like our characters, we don’t always have a clue about where to go or what happens next.

We have to learn to immerse ourselves in the moments of their lives and be willing to sit and wait and listen, and then to follow them wherever they may take us, even if, as Vonnegut suggests, it’s just to get a glass of water.

It takes a special skill—let’s call it improvisation at its highest—to succeed in moving fully into each moment, to move through another person’s world and respond to events in that world as they occur in the moment.

What is your character feeling now? And now? These are questions that Carolyn Coman suggests that we ask as we follow our characters. (She offered these questions in a lecture on the craft of writing that she gave at Vermont College of Fine Arts more than fifteen years ago, but I still remember them.)

In each moment, we need to remember to ask these questions.

And we need to understand how these feelings compel our characters to act.  

We can spend days writing down images that come into our mind as our characters move haphazardly through their lives and as we try to keep up with their ever-shifting desires and fears and hopes.

It isn’t necessary to record every moment of our characters’ lives, only the moments that propel the story forward, moments linked in a chain of cause-and-effect that bring us from the start of the story to its conclusion.

Between the beginning and the end are the moments that exist in our characters’ lives. In order to write about them, we need to become part of each moment—feeling what our characters want, understanding how our characters think—so that we can record their stories with honesty and truth.

For more on improvisation in writing and staying in the moment, visit:

http://writetodone.com/fictional-improvisation/

http://shevi.blogspot.com/2011/11/improv-for-writers-part-1-of-3-how.html

http://shevi.blogspot.com/2011/11/improv-for-writers-part-2-of-3-mind.html

http://booksbywomen.org/writingandacting-how-improvising-helps-my-writing-by-louise-voce/

http://blog.janicehardy.com/2014/03/are-your-characters-living-in-moment-or.html

Trust or Bust

In "Trust or Bust," a chapter in Danny Gregory's The Creative License, he discusses Keith Jarrett and his 1975 album, The Koln Concerts, an album that Gregory calls the "best-selling solo piano album ever."

"What's extraordinary," writes Gegory, "was that the music on the album is purely improvised."

If you want to learn to improvise, to reach that place where you are totally immersed in the present moment, Gregory suggests you have to learn how to "quiet down, clear the crap, and trust."

"When Jarrett improvises" writes Gregory, "he allows the performance to be a distillation of who he is and what he knows. He says you have to assume that what you are doing is meaningless, to be willing to toss it away. You can't think that what you are making will be recorded, sold, reviewed, even listened to. Just do it and see what happens."

But sometimes we're afraid of just letting go and seeing what happens.

And that's often because we're afraid of making mistakes.

But, as Gregory asks in an earlier chapter ("Celebrate Your Mistakes"), "what is 'a mistake' really?"

Isn't it just an outcome you hadn't anticipated? A variation from your expectation? And what made you right before (when you set up your expectations) but not during (when you drew your lines)?

So the real questions are:

What goes into your expectations? What's wrong with an unexpected outcome? What if you had tried to achieve it in the first place? What if you actually set out to draw whatever lopsided mess you are chastising yourself for? Could you have? Could you have purposefully created this mistake?

And beyond: Have you been able to survive the most horrendous mistakes of your past? Should a mistake or fear of a mistake prevent you from reaching your goal? Can you expand your mind to deal with the unexpected? What would life be like without mistakes? Without gravity? Without evolution?

Not only does Gregory offer advice on how to deal with your inner critic, he offers questions that can help you gain perspective on your work and the risks such work requires.

Although The Creative License is designed for artists, many writers can benefit from Gregory's wisdom on creativity and his insights into how to sustain one's creative vision over the course of a life-time.

Here's what the Table of Contents offers:

1. Drawing: Kick-starting your creativity and learning to see
2 Journaling: Making creativity into a habit
3. Shock: Blasting your butt out of a rut
4. Sensitization: Re-connecting with reality
5. Resistance: Winning the fight to go on
6. Judgment: From enemy to ally
7. Identity: Who you are and why that's fine
8. Expanding: Broadening your creativity
9. Next: Creativity in the real world

Anyway, you don't have to want to draw to find worthwhile advice in this book. You just have to want to create, and Gregory will help you open your eyes to the creative sparks that dwell within you.

For more information on Gregory and his work, visit his website: http://www.dannygregory.com/

For an interview with Gregory, visit:
http://litpark.com/2006/10/25/danny-gregory/