What Improv Taught Me about Writing—Tip #1 Listen Hard

Some of the best advice I’ve heard for screenwriting is that writers should study acting. So when the Groupon came along for six sessions at my local improv comedy school, I jumped on it.

Writing, as you may know if you’ve run that fearsome gauntlet, is acting. Except writers have to be every character. In our heads. They’re all rattling around in there, along with every setting and every plot twist. But the story all comes from character.

Writing is about throwing a couple of characters into some situation beyond their control and seeing what they say to each other and what they do. And that, my friends, is also improv comedy. You and your partner(s) on stage take a couple of random characters that you make up on the spot, give them some tweensy suggestion as to why they’re together, and you let it rip. It’s great practice for generating dialog, action, character—you name it.

The improv class had a list of tips that to me applied directly to writing—I’ll post  a new one every Tuesday. Here’s the first.

Writing/Improv Tip #1:
Listen hard/make eye contact. Everything your scene partner says is important; hear them completely.

In improv, what this means is to capture everything that’s said and work it into the scene. For example, let’s say I’m up on stage with Malcolm, and we’ve been given the suggestion that we’re siblings. The scene starts.

Me: Dude, where did you put Mom’s ashes?
Malcolm: Washing the dishes is your job.

We then embark on bickering about chores and how unfair it’s always been and how he was always the favorite and how I never appreciated him. But until we close out the scene with something like …

Malcolm: Let’s get some ashes from the fireplace. No one will know.

… the audience is left hanging there, unresolved about poor Mom. We do them a favor by paying attention to every weird thing that was said, creating a justification for it being there, and giving the scene a sense of completion.

What this means in writing is let your characters surprise you, and follow their lead. I’ll never forget working on that dreaded story we all have in us—you know, the one about our family of origin. I was writing an argument between the “me” character and “my husband,” about “my father.”

Me Character: You always stick up for him!
Husband: Well, I think you guys are too hard on him.
Me Character: He’s just a jerk.
Husband (pissed): And you’re just like him!

My hands recoiled from that keyboard like there were spiders on it. I’ve never been more tempted to delete, delete, delete. But as I stared at that line, the concept came into focus. It clarified many of the story threads I’d been wrestling with (not to mention a lot of my life), and subsequently became a major theme of the piece. (For the record: Actual dad is not a jerk.)

Throwing the characters together and letting them talk only works if we listen to what they say, and listen hard. What are they saying to us? What do they want us to reveal to the world? They won’t rest until you let them say it, and you have to be willing to listen close to catch it.

Tagged as: Improv, Writing How-To