What Improv Is Teaching Me About Writing

A Brief History of Writing

I've been open about who I am on the internet, so I might as well say that this is me. This is the closest I've come to doing what I wanted to do for a living. In 2006, somehow TWENTY YEARS ago, I wrote some dialogue and other text for a video game called Rise of Legends. It was challenging in ways I wasn't prepared for—especially at the time. It ended with me being laid off and then never managing to find my way back to it, but it was closer to living a dream than a lot of people get. I try to remember to be grateful. I've never been happier going to work.

After that, I would dabble here and there, but I stopped writing for fun or as a creative outlet. Of course there were emails, Facebook and Reddit comments or posts, but those are different. They were spontaneous creative bursts, although I think they helped keep a small amount of the rust off. When I was in high school, my writing was one of the things that actually made me feel liked by people. I published a poem in the literary magazine that got some actual praise from some of the nerdier jocks, a thing that I am pretty sure actually happened to me but also that I did not remember until this moment.

The Politics of Failure Have Failed

Cut to, twenty years later and I'm writing again, taking Sketch 101 at UCB. I've taken Sketch before at both The Sketch School and the Groundlings, so I know my way around things a bit (for example, you have to use scriptwriting software. It's wild to me that people try to write scripts without it. It's not going to be formatted correctly!)

Like many writers, I'm fond of saying that I don't like writing but I do like having written. To quote Dorothy Parker:

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.

I don't get the same kind of anxiety prior to performing as I do prior to a table read of a script. But something I've noticed this class is that I believe that I get to decide what my own success is. Part of this is the very good advice of proving that I am a bad improviser, something I've been practicing for a year now. I've also been growing more comfortable with the process of growing. When I was growing up, there was a time I'd even go so far as to succumb to the anxiety and not submit a paper, preferring the failure I controlled to the failure of trying. Failure is the framing I put on the experience I have. It's my power to decide what success looks like. I've still got time before the red light comes on. Still scenes to do and connections to make. I'm not done yet.