Process

I've been thinking about how people write shows. Of course I have. But mainly about how I write shows. I thought of a good way to explain it the other day (midway through explaining it. This is a good way to figure things out for me - because how do you know what you're thinking til you've said it). Anyway, I think (at the moment) a good way to articulate the process is to say that my shows are working backwards from a feeling. For me to explain this, I'll make sure you're up to date with the fundamental assumptions I make about life/comedy/the universe/everything. 1) the feeling of *having* an idea is a fabulous one 2) the laughter at "getting" a joke is a manifestation of the *having* an idea feeling - marked by the element of having been "given" the idea by the joke teller. But you have to "get" it on your own. So. The way I'm thinking of my show writing process is along two streams or ropes. The jokes come to me piecemeal, in bits and drabs over weeks and months and on stage in pieces and in conversations. I collect these jokes in rope A. Rope B is the bit i will explain now. In my own personal life, I have occasionally (as we all have), moments of feeling extreme or unique precise feelings. The feeling you have as a young lawyer when you realise that the life you've been told is the good life makes you want to kill yourself, and that they knew it would all along, but they told you that you wanted it anyway.* The exact feeling you have when you are exhausted and grieving and hopeless and you tell a friendly acquaintance you just bumped into that your mum has a few weeks left to live and he puts his hand on your face and says "well, I believe God heals".** The feeling when you find out something about your childhood that recontextualises the whole of your formative life experience in a Hitchcock zoom of sudden tragic epiphany.*** * Everyone's A Winner (2014) ** Savage (2015) *** The Resistance (2016) Sometimes I have a feeling and I think... The feeling is distinct and precise and illuminating. I decide I would like other people to know this feeling. But they can't - because their lives are not my life. The proportions and ingredients cannot be replicated for my moment of feeling to be given precisely to another human being. Even if I describe my own life in fullest detail, it will still be second hand. So art. I grab rope 1, and curl it into rope 2 in the proportions I think are necessary to carve a shape; draw tensions along a path for my audience to move through, cut my story down to bare bones, reinforce it with universals, glue it with jokes. As many jokes as I can. As strong as I can. Clean lines and sharp edges. Then I use the shape of the show I've built as a path to direct the kinetic energy of the show so that my audience can be gathered together, be positioned and moved and all facing the right direction so that when I release the sling, I can shoot them all (or as many of them as I could collect) through the hoop of the feeling I had - so that I'm not just telling them how a feeling looks, I'm running them through how a feeling feels. That's if it works. Or maybe I'm doing something else entirely... Art is subjective. Mep.