Blood and Bones Part 9: Letting the Genie out of the Bottle

“There are people who prefer to say 'yes' and there are people who prefer to say 'no'. Those who say 'yes' are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say 'no' are rewarded by the safety they attain.”
― Keith Johnstone

Creativity and genius may be lying there inside us waiting for the starting signal of inspiration to create that piece of artwork that the Universe is waiting for.  According to my friend Skidmore, he has all the techniques ready from the writing course I unwisely advised him to go on, but nothing comes. Something or somebody needs to give him a hefty kick of high voltage to get inspiration going.

The process of encouraging inspiration is what us old hippies would call improvisation. It’s a word that means different things to different people. You’ll have come across it in improvised comedy shows. Actors and comedians seeming to surf effortlessly on a wave of often crazy ideas. Improvisation is the art of creating in the moment.  Ex tempore, unplanned, at this time, in the here and now.  There is no forward planning or backward assessment.  On the stage the actor and his or her audience live in this moment with no idea of what is about to happen or where or how.  Each moment is a surprise and the reaction is new every time.  And for a stuck writer I can’t think of a better way to start.

The Doyenne of this sort of improvising as a theatre technique was Viola Spolin who developed these ideas over the 40s and 50s for her Second City Company which was the forming ground for many subsequent Hollywood Actors.  Her approach was called Theatre Games.

Each Game challenges the players to keep some arbitrary seeming rule or technique at the forefront of their mind as they play out the scene. This gives the actor something on which to focus and stops them thinking about clever and witty lines or working towards some apparently brilliant ending. You know, “Play a love scene as though you’re in a Zombie film” that sort of thing. The player gives up analysing the scene and just lets the words come. At first He or she must trust that nobody is going to criticise if the scene crashes and burns.  Trust is a crucial element.  Trust that everyone understands that they’re all in the same boat and there is to be no blame for failure.  In fact there is no failure.  Every game is an experiment in creation.  This focusing on something apparently random and outside the game keeps the mind busy in the moment of creating or playing The games are, "structures designed almost to fool spontaneity into being."

Having developed trust the game players then need to accept that whatever anyone says or whatever happens is good and must be incorporated within the growing piece.  Ideas cannot be rejected and conscious discrimination must be put on hold. In the world of improvisation this rejection is called blocking.  Blocking an idea cuts off any future possibilities of that idea and must be avoided at all costs.  The improvisor will always be required to say “Yes and…” when confronted with something new.

 There is a second meaning to improvisation, the idea of making do with whatever is at hand. A craftsman  can use an odd shaped off cut of timber to make a piece of furniture, for instance,  You’ve seen those sort of videos all over YouTube.  My father was a blacksmith, he could look at a pile of scrap metal and visualise how he could turn it into something useful. During the war, he built a tractor by cutting and welding two model T Fords back to back.  The point being that he could see the possibility of an object by looking at a collection of other objects in just such a way the an ancient hunter must have been able to visualise the possibility of an arrow head within a block of flint.  And then the flight of the arrow into the neck of the prey.

This making-do reinforces ideas I was putting forward in Part 6; a deliberate drawing together of two otherwise unrelated ideas to create something new.  It may prove to be rubbish but, hey, let’s see what happens. We are back to the idea of the child playing in the muddy puddle oblivious to the world beyond.

The juvenile architect will make use of mud and twigs and leaves to create dams and castles and so on.  They will improvise on the theme of mud.  Seeing the possibilities as they build without preplanning. The trick here seems to be able to think iconically. To think in pictures.  To look at a pile of mud and to see the ramparts and turrets of a medieval castle. In other words, to let one thing or idea to stand for another thing. 

Thus The language of improvisation coincides with the language of metaphor.  An improvisor will see how one idea can stand for another or even, how one idea contains another.  It becomes a metaphor.  And through metaphor we see new possibilities and different connections. In improvisation two levels of reality operate, the reality of thing itself and what it stands for or could be.  We suspend disbelief and let metaphor take over.  This potato could represent the world.  Or a football. Or a nasty wart growing on someone’s nose.

So Skidmore, you may have learnt the techniques of writing on your course.  But Viola Spolin and Keith Johnson whom I quoted at the beginning will give you the key to unlocking the inner recesses of your foetid imagination.

Try reading Spolin’s book Improvisation for the Theater or Keith Johnstone’s Impro. Better still get involved in a theatre company and play the games yourself.

These rules of improvisation are, in effect, rituals. They require the performer “to be in the present moment, like a mantra in meditation”

In “The Archeology of Ritual” Evangelos Kyriakidis says that a ritual is a set activity (or set of actions) that, to the outsider, seems irrational, non-contiguous, or illogical. We are all aware of that sort of trance that ensues when we become fully and deeply engaged in an activity.  The ritual guides us and pulls us into that state so that we lose all sense of self and become the process, the conduit for divine inspiration. Time is suspended and we seem to have superhuman powers of creativity.  The genie is at work within us and the breath of God fills us so that the creative act pours from us like honey.

We become so absorbed that we leave the certainty of the Apollonian analytical world and tumble into the dream-like rabbit hole of visions and ideas.  And having entered this twisting, turning unmappable labyrinth of disconnected images we can smell and taste the words we are using.  And if that all feels a trifle drug fuelled, let me warn you that the uncontrolled chemical images are never as interesting or as useful to the writer as the organic waves from your own subconscious.  Using the rituals We start to think iconically and speak metaphorically.as ideas and visions coalesce, forming and reforming.

So?  Do we actually make the finished piece or merely retrieve it from the dustbin of nonsense that wells up from our unconscious? Remember what I was banging on about in Chapter 3 when I was talking about engagement?  That is, engagement with the work we are making and with the world we are making it in. We snuffle about in the undergrowth of our subject Learning everything we possibly can about the situations we are writing about until we find something to surprise and intrigue us.  We become committed and engaged and then consign ourselves to the vagaries of improvisation.   We use our rituals and trance like state to bridge the gap between the world around us and the world as we imagine it. We may not be able to envision the final product before we start out but we know the general direction we are taking to get there.  the improvisation of the writing will carry us off into unexpected directions.  Later we will exercise our choice as to whether those new circumstances are a complete dead end or an important waymark on where we want to get.  But first, Like a swimmer, we need to let go of the handrail of certainty and let the sea of ideas wash around us.  We  trust them to buoy us up and carry us along.

We may start swimming towards the horizon but the current will carry us at a tangent from our expected course and we surface on an island that may have interesting new monsters roaming on it. 

The vague sense of direction that I begin with is usually manifested to me by a stage picture, a certain style or, as I call it, a taste of what the finished piece will be like.   Perhaps I could explain that better by saying that I can visualise the gap in the cosmos that this piece will fill.

It is almost a way of saying that like my Dad and his tractor I know what use it will be put to before I know what it is that I will make. 

For me, the justification of a piece of any piece of art is that it fits neatly into space where nothing else will fit.  This is what brings joy to the creator and the watcher or listener.

It is almost as though I start with a Platonic ideal or form of what the piece will be but it is only through the actions of creativity, genius, improvisation, outward intervention and choice that I can bring the ideal into Substantial reality.    In our writing we create a form of reality that gives an echo of the ideal we have been aiming for.