The improv class ended this week. I'd like to do another session, although I haven't quite decided when.
As I mentioned before, this improv class differed from the earlier one I took in that it focused more on developing narrative, as opposed to developing characters. Of course, character-playing was still important in this one, and I enjoyed trying to play characters different from me. I've never really been drawn to acting before, lacking either interest or inclination. Plus physically I've always felt stiff and awkward, barely aware of my own physicality, much less aware of how to put on someone else's. But I've noticed now in having tried it that by affecting someone else's body language I end up learning how to better effect my own.
In any case there's something to be said for developing storytelling skills. I've never thought of myself as a good storyteller, which is embarrassing given that I have close relations who I think are quite gifted in it. I've spent much of my life feeling like the unmusical child of virtuosos - not just talentless, but conspicuous in it.
I suppose part of my problem relates to memory. While I do have a very long and very detailed memory in many ways, in the same way I can never remember rules to card games I have a hard time remembering stories in sufficient detail to be able to retell them properly (I have this problem with jokes, too). I also have problems with pacing, as I get nervous and all the details I do remember tend to pour out of my mouth in one unattractive verbal clump. I trip over myself trying to get everything straight, inevitably fail, and, if I'm lucky, merely bore my intended audience.
At least all this is true with regard to stories that other people have written. I'm finding it much less true for stories *I've* created, but it's a relatively recent development that I've been figuring out how to do that. To some degree I've been practicing it on this blog, particularly with my travelogues and such. But with those stories I've had the luxury of time to carefully consider how I'd like to craft them. Whereas with improv there's no such cushion.
In the improv class I've had to learn to ignore that sense of panic that makes me run through everything I know about my story as fast as I can until it's all blurted out indistinguishably. I've had to learn to let the words and ideas form themselves in their own time and trust that this will, in fact, all happen in time.
The results can actually be amusing. For instance I heard myself blurting out the phrase "hippy-hunting hypocrite" during one performance, and then hearing everyone laugh because it had been quite the perfect thing to say. It was good that I hadn't stood in the way of those words finding their way to my lips.
At the same time, however, I'm learning I'm in a lot more control of the story-creation process than I would have thought, even on the fly, as long as I don't actually panic. In one exercise we were given three random images, which we then had to spontaneously weave into a impromptu short story. I was given "an accordion hanging in the window of a pawn shop," "a heroin addict slumped over in an alley," and "a bowl of orange jello." So I told the story of a woman who awoke one day after a night of hard partying in Reno, found herself mysteriously drawn to purchasing the accordion she passed in a window, and then ended up arrested for playing it publicly. As a result she got kicked out of her hotel and ended up spending a night in an alley with the junkie. But when she awoke she found herself safely in her bed, where she realized that she never should have eaten the bowl of orange jello before going to sleep the night before. OK, it's hardly O'Henry, but it wasn't a bad story given the constraints and no time to prepare. Particularly because it was structured: I let the accordion image influence the setting, since I remember seeing lots of pawn shops in Reno, and pawn shops always have instruments. The junkie was pretty easy to link in given the urban grittiness I was describing in my tale. And then it was just a matter of setting everything up so the orange jello could be the punchline. Knowing where I wanted to end up, the rest of the effort was therefore expended trying to get there as interestingly and descriptively as possible.
That's what I mean about controlling the story. I had to juggle lots of pieces: a beginning, an end, characters, setting, plot, drama, etc. I need practice doing it, certainly, because there were parts in the middle where I stumbled. But on the whole, I could do it, anticipating my story's structure and then just decorating the space in the middle of those pillars on the fly.
I had one other opportunity to practice the other day. We did an exercise where I was the novelist typing my novel, and my classmates acted out what I was describing. Someone in the audience threw out a title that I had to make my story conform to, but the rest was up to me.
I set my story in a grocery store in order to tease the instructor. She'd earlier tried to discourage us from using stores as settings for our improv. Everyone always tries to set their situations in stores, she lamented, but it quickly ends up a dead end. "'I went to a store to buy some butter.' What can possibly happen?" Naturally, then, I made my story about a guy named Bob who went to the store to buy some butter...
Bob, it seems, was a very mild-mannered guy. (In fact, the classmate playing Bob really was a mild-mannered guy, so it was easy to have Bob adopt that trait.) But niggling annoyances kept happening to Bob in the store: long lines, inept cashiers, abusive customers... At first Bob took it all, but then suddenly he snapped. "Bob got mad," I narrated from my pretend typewriter. "Really, really mad."
Suddenly flush with the power that his anger earned him, Bob continued to overreact to the various other indignities he experienced in trying to buy his butter. Eventually he stormed out to his car. Realizing he'd forgotten his keys he smashed the window before climbing inside, where he then grabbed the ignition wires and angrily rubbed them together. He slammed on the gas and tore through the parking lot, ramming cars and running down old ladies, before speeding away from the carnage.
At which point I tied my tale to the title given to me, also the title of this post, by pretending to type the conclusion, "On retrospect Bob realized that he probably shouldn't have nibbled those grapes of wrath in the produce section."
The end.