What flimsy excuse is this?

It's been a while. And although I didn't have any great inspiration to write, I just linked this blog to my Facebook entry, and I thought there should be something to see.

Tonight I performed in Jamie King's O.M.F.G. show at The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre as part of their Spank series. Jamie is one of the writer-producers in Friends with Deficits, my regular sketch group, and he took a bunch of material of his that we'd already performed and glued it together to make a show.

Working on the show was a good lesson.  Most of the sketches he only tweaked a bit here and there; one got completely re-written.  He introduced the scenes in character, using interstitial material written in blog form for his web site.  Bits got added or dropped because of time or technical constraints.  Nothing ended up exactly as it started out.  And somehow we had thirty-five tight little minutes of funny.

So Jamie didn't have exactly this show in mind when he wrote his first O.M.F.G. sketch;   things evolved.  The scene that changed the most (called, variously, Double Talk, Fem-Speak, and finally, Crazy Ears) was cute but didn't really make sense to us or the audience, and Jamie completely re-wrote it, trying to make both the underlying idea and the "funny" clear.  And along the way, we got one of our best lines (something I won't repeat about honey bees and a woman's, um, parts).

What was the lesson?  Even genius writers have to cover costume changes.   (Thus the Porter in Macbeth.)  When you set out to write a sketch--or a show--you never really know what it's going to look like in the end, so don't strain yourself trying to write comedy gold into every single line of the first draft.  The funniest, most memorable material may come out of your quest to fix a structural problem.

It's a real relief.  I used to think scripts came to writers in a single burst of inspiration that could somehow be sustained for a hundred pages.  With every thing I write or work on it becomes clearer that it's much more of a step-by-step slog, with occasional flashes of light. Sometimes you've got to cover a costume change, and sometimes your brilliant idea just doesn't make sense.  So you re-write.  You paste things together.  And eventually (if you keep at it with faith and perseverance)  you end up with a book, a play, a movie.  And if you're good, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.   Even if some of the parts came in the door with nothing but a flimsy excuse.