AliceFraser

Writing things out by hand

Added 2019-10-22 09:19:27 +0000 UTC

Makes things easier to remember than writing them on the keyboard or the screen. I don’t know why that is, but for me it’s true - like dance steps and muscle memory. (At least I’m assuming that analogy for the purpose of this point I’m making. I never did proper dance, apart from a brief term-long flirtation with a Chinese sword forms class whose poster I walked past in second year Uni. I didn’t use that example because it’s less relatable and exposes me as the nerd I am/was/am).

My memory has always been spatial; if I remember a passage from a book, I’ll remember where it sits on the page, and when I think of the shape of a show, it’s expressed in three dimensional arcs in the air. I’d explain my three dimensional graph idea of the ways in which show structure moves, but I need the hand gestures to do it properly.

(Think flat axis Y to describe the ups and downs of narrative arcs in the traditional sense, X being time, and the axes that “come out at you” to describe intimacy and performative intensity respectively. Actually, maybe that is enough explaining and I don’t need the hand gestures. What do you think? Do you feel explained?)

Back to memory, anyway. A lot of my jokes I’ll write out by hand repeatedly before I ever get them on stage. Others I improvise on stage. The ones for the bugle I write on my phone or computer, often while on public transport en route to the show, with additional ad libs and tangents that pop up during the recording.

Right now I have to send in a transcript of the ten minutes I’m planning to do at the Opera House in Sydney on 2 November, and that involves a lot of walking around waving my hands to myself - to remember not just the joke but how audiences responded to it generally, and whether it’ll work on television.

When I remember what the jokes are, I’ll jot the names on a sheet of paper and then go into my show-transcripts to find where they are. If I ever printed the show, I’ll usually know what page it’s on, or how far into the thickness of the printout it sits. As far as research goes, it’s not exactly the Dewey decimal system, but it works for me.