Three years ago at Bible Quiz Retreat my team looked at me a few hours before the event’s talent (often called un-talent) show and said, “We want to perform a play. You’re a writer, write one.” Any protests I made were purely for show. They had called me a writer. At that point, I would have done anything to confirm those words.
Without much time I created a loose format so that we would mostly just have to do improv for practice, then remember it for the performance. I called it the Insane Asylum, or the crazy skit. We took each of the people involved, pulled one trait about their personalities out and amplified it. To make things more dramatic, we had some of their ‘issues’ conflict with each other. One person could not stop hugging people, another had a bubble of space that no one could enter. What was my personality tick? I was a crazy author, overboard and determined to capitalize on the members of the asylum’s strange habits–until I myself got sucked into the asylum.
The skit was an incredible success. A second and, recently, a third skit–continuations–were added. We pulled in-jokes and incorporated them. Before the second year’s skit we had journeyed as a group to Howe’s Caverns, where the running joke had been that one of the quizzers (a popular kid named Scott Howe) was the alien owner of the caverns. In the skit we brought him in as an alien and put one of the originators of the joke as a girl terrified of aliens.
While in book writing it is better to stay away from in-jokes (unless you are just writing for friends) elements from this skit are helpful in plotting novels. A subdued characteristic will often be missed on paper. It needs to leap from the page, aggravated by other factors in the story. Pull small traits and make them pop, though not as much as I did for the crazy skit. It may be developed slowly, but the more clearly reinforced an idea, the better it comes across. When looking for inspirations for characters, study your friends. See what is unique about them. Then steal a character-trait from one, another from someone else, and so on until you have a whole new person, who acts like a real one. (In the most recent skit we added a boy who collected hats and made him a hat-stealer, willing to face anything to get another hat.)
In trying different forms of writing, you learn more about writing that can carry into your dominate type of writing. Try skit-writing, blogging, poems, books, short stories. The more varied your talents, the more talented you become.
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