This is the forth and final part of our Ira Glass on Storytelling series. So far we’ve looked at the Building Blocks of Story, asked whether great stories are found or made, and discussed the importance of improving your technique to achieving your creative vision.
This video discusses two struggles improvisers often face: simply being yourself on stage and the necessity of give and take in your scene work.
Strive to be natural
Improvisers can say anything, do anything, go anywhere or be anyone. In a perfect world, this would inspire a sense of excitement and play from which each person would add something totally unique. In reality, this kind of freedom can have the same paralyzing effect as staring at a blinking cursor on a blank computer screen.
So rather than be themselves, many improvisers will attempt to be clever or imitate other performers. For many, it takes years of training, rehearsals, and shows to drop the shtick and approach improv with the confidence to go anywhere or do anything in a truly natural way.
Jill Bernard makes this point nicely in her tiny and excellent book, Jill Bernard’s Small Cute Book of Improv:
“You will spend your formative years becoming a crazy quilt of every improv teacher you ever have, and every book you ever read. Then, eventually, you will become yourself. You will find your style.”
If you want Truth in Comedy, start with truth: be yourself
The strength of improvisation lies in its capacity to demonstrate human nature in an immediate, intimate way. Great improvisers portray realistic people on stage. Realistic people with unique, well-defined points of view, desires, flaws. They sometimes have bad behavior or find themselves in outrageous situations. In short, they seem real because they are. They are themselves.
“If only more people came to improv wanting to be natural instead of wanting to be on Saturday Night Live…”
Maybe they are themselves as a pirate, an absent minded husband, or a bully on the playground, but they are still themselves, and the work is good because it is real.
The thing is, those people who truly can be themselves are the ones who do end up on TV or in the movies.
When your work is honest, it will be funny. It will also be real, awkward, beautiful, and sad. “Truth in Sadness” might not have been a great choice for a book title, though.
Give and take
Scenes are at their best when they feature characters interacting with one another in genuine, meaningful ways. If there is too much of one character or the other, there won’t be enough room for the interactions necessary to create a great story. A scene must be a conversation.
Likewise, drama is just as important to improvisation as comedy. It is the other side of the same coin. Watching characters want things is engaging. The obstacles those characters face can be funny or sad or anything in between. Dynamic scenes which incorporate both comedy and drama are great when we’re lucky enough to get them.
So, what makes a great story again?
Creative work in general, and especially improvisation, must address relationships in order to be successful. Not relationships as in “brother and sister,” but rather the literal way in which one person or idea relates to and interacts with another.
More importantly still, stories must address how relationships change. How and why does your character go from happy to sad, from depressed to hopeful, or from proud to cowardly? How do the things that happen to them make them feel? What will happen next?
Characters aren’t interesting in isolation; they are interesting when they interact. Stories consisting of only action or only reflection won’t be engaging; they need both. Scenes and stories are best when they have both comedy and drama. Like players in an improv scene, each one supports the other to create something greater than the sum of its parts.
Wrapping up
If we take one thing away from this series, let it simply be that stories are important. It is human nature to create and share experiences with one another. Telling stories is how we let each other know that we share the same world.
We’ve presented some ideas on how to create effective stories in the context of improvisation. Which storytelling techniques work best for you in your own work?
If you are an improviser, give what we’ve talked about a try and leave a comment to let us know how it worked out for you. And if you aren’t an improviser… well, actually, everyone is an improviser. It’s just that some of us never get on stage.
{ 0 comments… add one now }