Improv & Writing Skills: “How Picard Spends His Sunday”
T. Rick Jones, Managing Editor of Daily Star Trek News interviewed my Star Trek: The Next Generation musical improv troupe Redshirts recently. You can see and watch that interview here. (*If you watch, T. Rick asked us who we like to play, which character. I automatically said Riker, which is true and for many many shows I did default to playing Riker. But recently, I’ve enjoyed playing Picard and my teammate Heather has played Riker, beautifully and hysterically. So just FYI, if you come to a show, and here are our shows at The PIT Theater through September in New York City, you most likely will see me playing Picard.)
T. Rick emailed me the evening of June 8 and asked if I would like to write something for the Daily Star Trek News website. “The rules are simple. You can write about anything you want in the whole world as long as it at least tangentially ties in to Star Trek. It’s due July 13.”
Of course I said yes! nd then I thought: “Anything? Such a wide berth. What do I want to write about? How do I even start? Where do I start? Ahhhh!”
The morning of June 9: Empty page.
I’ve gone back through my Google Doc edits to see my process and so you can see it too.
For any writer, this is the main hurdle, fear, challenge, and major anxiety: an empty page and how to fill it. Many writers can stop at this stage and sit and wait for the perfect idea. My suggestion is:
Don’t wait for perfect, just start.
Start writing, anything that comes to your head, write without self-judgement (or as little judgement as you can manage), and keep writing. Just start. That’s what I did.
Three minutes (see the time stamp?) later, I had an idea, wrote it down, and then walked away from the page.
Early morning Sunday, June 11, I had a better idea.
I was inspired by my fave Sunday morning New York Times read, the Sunday Routines section. I love that section, I want to be in that section (#manifesting).
This was the idea, the one that had the most juice, that I was the most excited about; the one I wanted to write, and the one that seemed the most obvious, to me.
I reread multiple NYT Sunday Routines to get their overall structure down. (That “Inside Broadway” above was pulled from the NYT that weekend.) Once I was able to discern a loose structure, I was able to mimic it, and come up with several sections of options of what Picard might do on a day off on the Enterprise. I also did some Trek homework to ensure I had names and dates correctly.
I wrote it in an hour.
You can see the timestamps on the right side.
I let it sit for a few hours, did another copy edit and line edit pass with fresher eyes, and then submitted it. Et voila!
There are several skills at play here: applied improv skills, writing skills, personal skills.
I pushed past fear of the white page to get something, anything on the page. I broke that inertia very soon after the assignment was received.
I didn't judge my ideas, I just produced them.
I realized that the first idea (or ideas) weren’t exciting enough to me so I kept searching and trying out ideas until I was excited by the topic. Excitement for me equals excitement for my reader.
I used an existing structure to guide my work (you do not have to reinvent the wheel).
I wrote lots, playing with different angles, and mostly, had fun while I was writing! Fun for you equals fun for the reader.
I edited later, not whilst I was writing. Create first, refine later.
I submitted quickly. If I held onto it for another month until it was due, I would have worked it to death and probably lost that initial fun creative spark. I didn’t overthink it, I didn’t overwrite it. It’s a blog post, not a dissertation. (*There are many many times when you will need to keep hacking away at something. This wasn’t one of them. That is another skill, knowing when to stop editing!
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I have taught scores of writers and creatives the above skills and I can help you! Need help generating creative content? Have a big project due? Or just want to learn how to put aside self-doubt and access your most creative self?
Join me this fall as I facilitate a series of drop-in online writing workshops, using applied improvisation tools to access some of those writing skill above.
Here are the details, sign-up information, and link!