Can I Get a Noun, Please? (Or, How Improv Made Me a Better Writer)

Improvisation. Quick, what comes to mind when you hear that word? If an image of five people standing on a decrepit comedy club stage, wearing bright colored t-shirts featuring cringeworthy, logos, yelling, “Give us a noun!”, while you’re shelling out for a two-drink minimum comes to mind, well, I feel your pain. But there’s another side of improvisation that transcends when it hits right and—for our purposes—can make you a better writer.

(How to Write Comedy Into a Rom-Com.)

I worshipped Gilda Radner and Carol Burnett as a kid, favoring goofy impressions and unfettered clowning over fitting in with the cool crowd. Needless to say, adolescence wasn’t easy—did anyone enjoy the seventh grade? Cut to being an undergraduate at Cornell University and seeing a flyer to audition for an improv comedy group called Whistling Shrimp. I had no clue what improv was, but once the audition started and they asked us to play out scenes without a script, based solely on a one-word suggestion, I was hooked.

Writing is improv. Whether you’re a plotter, a pantser, or somewhere in-between like me, you are improvising. You’re world-building, creating characters, and a plot line based entirely on what’s cooking in that brain of yours. Many of us get stuck in that cerebral mire somewhere. We overthink, we go back to what we just wrote too soon, and micro-analyze everything. It’s easy to sink in the quicksand, get blocked.

Imagine that happening onstage with an audience expecting magic from you, laughs, heartache? That’s called tanking in comedic parlance. It doesn’t fly on a stage, so why not adapt that same mindset when you’re staring at a blank screen in your writing cave, fixated on your cat chittering at birds outside the window?

There are two types of performative improvisation: improv games and the long-form improvisation called The Harold.

The former are more like parlor games or charades and involve getting one- or two-word suggestions from the audience, say a noun, verb, or occupation. In these scenes, there’s a clear resolution or finish line (or at least the audience hopes there is) that will come in 5-10 minutes. I liken these games to writing prompts, exercises that get you writing without overthinking—literary calisthenics.

The latter, the Harold, in its form today, was born from the Chicago-based comedic royalty of Del Close and Charna Halpern in the 1980s. Three scenes, three beats, plus games usually shape this long-form improv, based on a one-word suggestion given by the audience. Sounds a little like a novel structure in three acts, doesn’t it? The Harold is where the real writing happens.

My speculative suspense novel, The Found Object Society, centers on a deeply troubled socialite who almost crashes her car one night while driving drunk. When she returns home, a peculiar blank white card slides under her front door, yet there’s no one there when she opens it. Within the card, she discovers a hidden QR code that links her to an invitation to the Found Object Society, a secretive society lurking beneath one of the oldest buildings in NYC, which allows the very wealthy to select one of thousands of objects from any era or region and experience the death (called a voyage) of the last person who died touching it and live to tell the tale.

My novel is structured in five parts, featuring a particular object in each one. Like the film Being John Malkovich, once my protagonist starts her voyage, the POV shifts into that of the person whose death she will soon experience based on the object she’s holding: a perfume bottle from 19^th century France; the windshield wiper sunglasses made famous by Elton John in late 1970s central California; an ornate enameled cigarette lighter from 1920s Chicago; and one more I can’t tell you about since it’s a massive spoiler. Sorry!

As I wrote, I used the principles of the Harold I gleaned from my time at Upright Citizens Brigade in NYC, with each voyage becoming its own Harold: The given object came first (my audience suggestion, if you will) and this informed each POV. The perfume bottle transformed into the story of a lovesick lady’s maid in the French countryside; the glasses, a sad sack wannabe serial killer near Fresno; the lighter, an aging silent movie star transitioning to talkies in the Windy City.

This approach made facing that blinking cursor every morning less terrifying. Don’t get me wrong, I’d still wake with that deep-water dread that I wouldn’t be able to keep going, wouldn’t find the words to continue, but somehow, I did. I reminded myself how I’d never stand mute on a stage, so why do it while writing my novel? This was a first draft, dammit. Get the words out and fix it later.

Another aspect of the writing process where improv has made a tremendous impact on me is dialogue. The foundational tenet of improvisation is Yes, and… It means that when you’re in a scene with a partner, you must listen; you must agree with what they say to keep the dialogue and action propelling forward.

Here’s an example: You’re onstage and your partner says, “Oh look, it’s raining,” and you say, “No, it isn’t.” The scene shuts down right then and there. Instead, you could say, “Yes, it is, and we left the laundry hanging outside. We'd better go get it.” Now, the scene progresses, ending up on the lawn. Who knows where it could go from there? But it does go; it's in motion.

When you write dialogue, listen to what each character says to the other. Does it sound natural? Is one character blocking the flow of the scene? I often see dialogue (a conversation between two or more people) that’s written in large blocks, more like a monologue (a long speech by one character), and that drags the action. Sure, sometimes a monologue is necessary, but in real-life exchanges between two people, conversations can be effective with the use of a few select words.

Here are a couple of writing prompts I like for dialogue:

Will the above generate literary brilliance on every try? No, and it’s not meant to. But it trains your brain to be more aware of dialogue and how best to execute it, as well as how to vary cadence and sentence structure.

Another trick I employ is to extract all the dialogue from a particular scene or scenes and read aloud. Does it sound natural? Am I getting out the information I want? Do the characters sound different and distinct from one another? Do they each have a clear voice?

Using improvisation in your writing can and should be liberating. Even if you don’t go out and take an improv class, you can still sit at your computer, look at the screen with its pulsing cursor, and taking a deep breath say, Yes, and…

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