Writing ‘digestives’ for when things are a bit quiet on the witty, creative, or connecting department from comedy star
Helen Lederer
We’ve all been there… That moment when you sit at your computer (or even, dare I say it, with that nice new lined notebook with perhaps, an inspiring quote from Maya Angelou on the cover) and nothing pops into your creative hemisphere…
You sit there, with the ‘nothing’ for a while, waiting for the airwaves to clear. You tell yourself that soon, a detail of a funny conversation or an inciting incident will take you, dancing into some meaningful creative waters…? Still nothing?
Do not despair. This ‘ennui’ could be a sign that you are trying too hard.
In my case, ‘having to be funny’ on the page, is usually the kiss of death and the more I try to force it, the less natural my material. Laughter usually happens at a moment of recognition. If I give myself permission to visit those darker feelings of embarrassment and shame, I stand a better chance of producing meaningful content.
When I wrote my memoir Not That I’m Bitter, I had to make myself re-live the awkward, the awful and the downright toe-curling events in my past – so I could feel it again. Then I’d re-tell each element, and refine it, until the final edit offered a punchier version of what really happened. Without the underlying truth, I knew there would be no engagement.
If we can avoid wanting to be the hero and relish when things go awry, something of interest emerges and we can play with it. A particularly good channel for mining humour is to identify those occasions when I was pompous or disingenuous. Any fall from pomposity or being outed as a ‘pretender’, is guaranteed to produce humour. By the time a comedian delivers a killer punchline on stage, there will have been a lot of trial and error before honing the final words that ‘land’.
And in the absence of an epiphany (that rare but not impossible moment where a killer line just lands like a lightning bolt) it helps to make friends with the ‘trial and error’ stage and start rummaging around in raw material. The rawer it is, the more potential.
Here is a suggested ‘menu’ for loosening the digestive tract of creativity: At the top of the page write a few facts about comedy (I see these as shiny jewels of inspiration) and as long as they don’t feel too annoying or instructive, you can be guided by these, without feeling too bossed about. Sometimes words are just funny because they are, and further ana
