First-drafting as Improv

Thirteen ideas from how actors train for spontaneity

A post by

Andrew Chapman

, about the Elizabethan actor-clown Will Kempe, has got me thinking. One reason Kempe left Burbage, Shakespeare and the rest of the Chamberlain’s Men was probably that his style of wild jigs and improvised clowning within a simple scenario didn’t suit an increasingly text-based theatre. In a comment on Andrew’s post, I found myself saying

But human wiring is still human wiring: we are still creators who can only create in time and space. Every time you start a story with a person in a place, and then get writing - every time you embark on a crazy first draft and wait to see what happens - every time a character you’ve dreamed up refuses to do what your plot requires - every time you go for a walk and a sentence for the work-in-progress forms in your head and is so just-right you have to write it down … Then, it’s Will Kempe’s spirit which is alive and well and dancing through your brain.

And that thought sent me to my bookshelves to dig out Improv Wisdom: don’t prepare, just show up, by the renowned theatre teacher Patricia Ryan Madson.

You would think that ‘training for improvisation’ was a contradiction in terms, wouldn’t you: how can spontaneity be planned for? But that’s where Madson’s book starts: with how how actors learn to face a blank stage with a blank mind, have the courage to actually walk onto it, and then make the most of whatever emerges into those empty spaces. I was never a gifted improviser, but as a drama student I did my share of it; I do recognise the experience that Madson is working with when her book sets out to show how practising similar skills can transform even non-actors’ everyday lives.

We writers, on the other hand, tend to see first-drafting purely as a choice between ‘planning’ and ‘pantsing’. True, many of us plan some aspects of a novel while in others we fly by the seat of our pants, and I often talk about planning and first-drafting as merely two different kinds imagining-on-paper; but the discourse still revolves around this either-or: either we plan story, character or plot before we write, or we don’t prepare, just start to type.

But what if our idea of preparing (or not-preparing) to write was neither of these, but about working on our own mindset, our own mental skills and habits - so that we can face the blank page with an open mind, in the confidence that words will emerge and we’ll be able to make the most of them?

If you’d like a deeper dive into Improv Wisdom, Abebooks* have copies and it’s definitely worth tracking down. Meanwhile, here’s a whistlestop tour through Madson’s Thirteen Maxims:

1. Say yes. You are agreeing to join the situation - in our terms, to start imagining, word-digging, and writing. But there’s a crucial difference between saying, ‘Yes, and’, and saying ‘yes, but’. With yes and, ‘you are agreeing to the process and moving it further in a positive direction’ even if you don’t know where that direction will end up. Yes but, by contrast, blocks you off from what the situation is offering you.

2. Don’t prepare. By not focusing on the outcome, by not carefully setting yourself up to do well (and so when the unexpected or the unsatisfactory arises being filled with fear), by letting go of your ego’s involvement in the process, you lose your self-absorption and your sense of being on the line. Only then can you be fully attentive to what’s appearing in your imagination and on the page.

3. Just show up. Show up to the page because that’s where writing happens - even if today’s ‘page’ is your mind during a plotting-walk, with a notebook in your pocket. Jenn Ashworth’s #110daysofwriting is a lovely example of this, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk is good too. When you show up, small rituals and habits can help stabilise you and create safe ground from which to improvise - provided you don’t get so wedded to them they become a fetish without which you can’t write at all. And sometimes old habits become deadened and deadening: if the same old stuff keeps showing up on the page, you may need to change location or activity.

4. Start anywhere. ‘When you don’t know where to start, begin with the most obvious thing, whatever is in front of you… Once a job is underway you will have a more realistic perspective’. Madson also suggests that when you get stuck, ‘eliminating the script’ can help: in our terms, letting go of already-established ideas and instead freewriting, clustering or writing questions to yourself and answering them in whatever words come naturally.

5. Be average. Insisting that you’ll only let words onto the page when you’re sure they’re the best words hardens your yes and mind into yes but: it strangles infinitely more potential words, ideas and possibilities at birth. In any case, you won’t even know what perfect is until the book is finished, if then - so why get hung up on it now?

6. Pay attention. ‘What we notice becomes our world,’ said Madson. ‘Open your eyes and notice the detail. See what is actually happening’. As writers (like actors) we need to pay attention to absorb the ‘reality and detail’ of the world, as John Gardner puts it in The Art of Fiction: it’s the basic materials of our trade. And we need the same kind of attention when writing: when your story-imagination conjures up a scene or a person, what is this specific, individual entity actually like?

7. Face the facts. Having said yes to a creative situation we must then work with it: being practical and realistic about what we’ve got here, not kidding ourselves that it’s something else perhaps easier to deal with or more obviously desirable. And this will mean you must also embrace the wobble: a creative situation is always unstable, non-linear, in flux, and if you lock it down to stability for more than a moment of breath-catching, you will also lock out most of its possibilities

8. Stay on course. ‘An improvisation always has a point. It is never simply “whatever”… Instead of asking, “What do I feel like doing?” substitute, “What is my purpose now”?’ In my experience the most powerful question editors and tutors have asked me is ‘What are you trying to do here? What is the point of this scene?’ And in turn I’ve learnt to ask it of myself, and of my own students and mentees.

9. Wake up to the gifts. ‘To the improv professional the glass is always half full.’ In any creative situation there are three possible filters through which to look at what’s happening, says Madson: to see what’s wrong with it; to see it objectively; to see the gift in it. All the elements in a creative situation are offering gifts for you to take and work with, but you will need the improviser’s mindset, not the critical thinker’s or the scientist’s**, to recognise them as such.

10. Make mistakes, please. ‘What I really want is for you to do something risky or challenging, where mistakes are possible’, says Madson, because mistakes are just ‘a result we had not planned, something unexpected, an odd outcome, a side-journey, something new … unanticipated, giving us information. That’s good.’ This isn’t a license for sloppy attention, of course, it’s simply help to build courage for risk-taking and thereby resilience, by helping us trust that mistakes will happen and they will not be the end of the world, or the writing - and they will tell us something useful.

11. Act now. ‘The essence of improvisation is action - doing it in real time. We act in order to discover what comes next.’ And even if you’re not going for the full-on freewriting keep your hand moving thing, it’s the writing down of the current sentence which will gear up your imagination and word-mind to start building the sentence that will follow it. So act now.

12. Take care of each other. Writing is a solitary business for most of us, whereas improv is the ultimate collaboration. Perhaps our equivalent of the courtesy and care that Madson’s group members take of each other is to take care of the several selves - parts, in IFS terms - within our system: acknowledging their value and their efforts to do good, however sometimes misguided, and not hating or scorning them when things don’t go so well. ‘Mistakes’ are only information, after all.

13. Enjoy the ride. ‘Having fun loosens the mind. A flexible mind works differently from a rigid mind.’ Seeking and having fun is the best antidote to the ego-driven, censor-feeding need to be good and successful. But, Madson also says, ‘Enjoyment is a way of approaching an activity, not the activity itself’. Without being too Pollyana about it all - some things in life are just plain awful - staying in touch with the fun in creative work isn’t only what makes the whole business worthwhile. By emphasising process and attention, and setting outcome and achievement aside for now, remembering to enjoy the ride will, paradoxically, vastly increase the chances of a successful outcome.

Come to think of it, perhaps some of this is the psychological equivalent of what I was talked about in ‘What do I Mean by Yoga for Writers?’. If actual yoga develops a physical relaxed-but-ready, strong-but-flexible body, then yoga for writers does the equivalent for the imagination and word-brain of our writing mind. But the channels from writing mind to page, too, are so often narrow and lumpy, tightened and made brittle by inhibition - which is to say, fears. An improv approach to drafting can help to keep that channel open and free-flowing - less likely to block and less likely to flood - so that the writing riches your mind comes up with actually reach your page.

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* Yes, Abebooks is these days owned by The Online Retailer Who Must Not Be Named. However, booksellers who sell via both assure me that it’s far better financially for them if we buy even the same physical copy through Abebooks rather than through Amazon. More generally, it’s a far better-stocked hunting ground for obscure and out-of-print titles, and often much cheaper. Dig in!

** Mind you, we increasingly realise that self and others never have, and probably cannot, ever disappear completely, in science or any other discipline.

Image Credit: Frankie Fouganthin, Theatre Sports, Kulturhuset Stockholm. Actors from Stockholm City Theatre at Wikipedia