Writing for Edinburgh

Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement

Philip Larkin

Intended consequences

On the weekend I went to a barbecue where almost all the guests were other Australian expats*.

I spent much of the afternoon chatting to a successful actor with a good drama school background who supplemented her income by running Saturday classes. The angle being that there are plenty of actors who didn't go to RADA or Guildhall who need help with 'difficult' playwrights like Shakespeare and Pinter for audition purposes.

I have no doubt that the classes are first rate and that they really do help students get to grips with the likes of The Caretaker or Coriolanus. My quarrel is with the underlying premise: -

That by attending these classes you will be more successful in auditions and so further your dream of becoming a professional actor

The classes were pretty much open to anyone who wanted to attend. No requirement that you carry an Equity card and certainly no formal audition process. The only attempt at quality control over applicants was a coffee meeting with a teacher before signing up but I got little sense that many were told they weren't suitable. She was honest enough to admit that most of the students had no genuine chance of 'making it'. A cynic might call the whole thing an exercise in taking people's money so they can pretend to be an actor on weekends.

With tact like that it's no surprise she became defensive.

There were plenty of corollary benefits to studying Shakespearean text. The old canard about confidence in public speaking being an absolute good. I'd say that if you're citing the role of the agora in Athenian democracy then you're not arguing from a position of strength.

I pay my bills by providing consulting services to a small number of pretty large companies. I also direct and produce comedy. In both situations I charge what I think I'm worth for the intended consequence of the experience. If clients or audience members take away something additional then that's a bonus.

* Given that there are about 350,000 Australians in London at any time, it probably wasn't the only one on in London that day

Getting noticed

I can't log on these days without seeing another piece on 'getting your Blog noticed'. The advice is always the same: -

Find a niche that you can credibly inhabit and stay there. Write specifically and often. One day a readership will find you. Money will eventually follow

I'm okay with everything aside from the last part. There are too many Blogs out there for them all to monetise successfully. And that's just counting those written by persistent, eloquent people who are in it for the long haul. To me the sentiment is little more than that nice but essentially unprovable hippie notion that if you just do what you love then the cosmos will somehow look after you.

The marketer in me certainly relates to idea of writing for a niche. Being someone who is known for knowing about sharks might get you a call if the other expert has his phone off when the reporter needs a quote. Being the recognised expert on hammerhead sharks gets you on TV whenever hammerheads make the news. If fate shines a spotlight on hammerheads then for that moment you're the only show in town.

Do you spend your energy trying to predict where the spotlight will shine or do you get on doing what you love and deciding that you'll be happy either way?

For Bloggers the answer is pretty clear: learn to write well about what you love and see what happens. It's different for comics; the spotlight itself is the thing we love.

Endpoint

I've pointed out a number of times the similarities between stand-up comics and other self-employed solo operators. Things like a need for personal branding, understanding that you're really only being as good as your last job and being able to deal with career vicissitudes on your own. There are blatantly obvious differences in that most people would see a career of telling jokes to random strangers as a version of hell.

A less obvious difference is the end-point of all the effort. Most self-employed people I know want to achieve little more than a level of financial well-being without having a boss, whereas every comic wants to be famous.

This means that most self-employed people are only ever rivals when in a competitive pitch; occasionally if ever at all. The rest of the time we're just people trying to pay the mortgage who happen not to have to book their holiday time months in advance. There's plenty of room for everyone.

In UK there are maybe 30 genuinely famous working comedians. By famous I mean well-known enough to get stopped on the High Street. They are all on television. And they are the envy of hundreds and hundreds of other comics.

Because it has such a specific definition, a field like 'UK stand-up' will inevitably disappoint the vast number of players who enter it. Something as vague as 'being self-employed' has room for many more success stories.

You can do better than seeing 'paying the mortgage' as being in any way remarkable. What do you really want to achieve?

Living the cliche

Last Saturday I linked to a great 43 Folders podcast about how creative types need to work out when they work best.

An obvious corollary is to work out where you work best. I can do pretty much any kind of writing from home with the exception of stand-up comedy. For some reason my best jokes are written longhand when I'm sitting in a pub or cafe.

Sigh.

Being present

A bad actor simply waits for the other person's lips to stop moving before she delivers her next line.

Conversely every good actor - and certainly every good improviser - strives to be 'in the moment'; to be experiencing action and participating in dialogue in real time rather than as the latest extension of a learned and rehearsed process. This state is known as 'being present' and I've written before about some broader implications.

Right now my diary is filling up thanks to a wonderful and bewildering range of projects. Between now and August's Edinburgh Festival I am due to appear in a variety of capacities (consultant, trainer, director, teacher, comic, writer...) in different cities across Europe and North America. To make the most of these opportunities I need to adhere to a simple rule: -

The room I am in is the only place I need to be

At a purely practical level this means switching off the phone and managing energy levels. More subtle is the use of travel time to trap extraneous ideas so that they aren't washing around my head when I am being paid to 'be present'.

43 Folders

I am a big fan of a website called 43 Folders. It's a great source of ideas about 'personal productivity', especially as it relates to digital nomads like me, but there's plenty on there that's applicable for anyone, anywhere in modern life who needs more hours in the day.

The site is the creation of Merlin Mann, a passionate, smart, funny and often profane blogger and podcaster. I am getting into the habit of downloading some of his short, sharp podcasts to tide me over whilst I'm stuck on London Transport.

A 43 Folders podcast from 2006 might be of interest to anyone who's reading this instead of attacking that Edinburgh writing deadline. Exploiting your natural circadian rhythm is one genuine advantage that comes from working from home.

Come on board!

This week I was invited to work on two new projects that at first glance could not be more different.

One is to design a highly scientific four-week 'new hire' training programme for pharma sales reps from nine smaller European markets. The other to direct a one-woman theatre show to be staged in London then Brighton then finally at the Edinburgh Fringe.

However, because both projects predate my involvement I'm discovering many parallels. For example, having to accept that cogent lessons have been learned away from my direct experience. Or that a poorly articulated vision is different from the absence of one. Or that I have to take as much responsibility here as I would for a project where I've been involved since conception.

In other words, playing nicely with others.

Damn that's faint...

Andrew Watts' comment on this site, or at least my description of it, is praise so faint it's pretty much transparent.

The seriousness of work

Scenes from Communal Living closed on Sunday night.

Was the show a success? How would it measure up against a straight consulting project (my 'seriousness of work' measure)?

Upsides: -

• We made a lot of people laugh
  
• We had pretty good houses throughout the run and full ones for all of the last week
  
• The show has been accepted for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August (more on that another time)
• Cast members have had invitations to audition for, or perform in, other projects
• I've already picked up a (paid) directing gig on the strength of the show

Downsides: -

• I lost money
• I spent a few hundred pounds more than I'd budgeted
• Our reviews were okay-to-good rather than good-to-great

But the ultimate upside is this: -

The Scenes from Communal Living brand is established and now has momentum

It was brought into the world. It didn't exist and now it does.The future is about managing those downsides for the show's next incarnation and the one after that.

Feedback for comics

After a good gig friends say that you're 'funny'.

Otherwise they call you 'brave'.

Motivation

I am working with a client on a pretty complex project that will run over the entire summer. To succeed we will have to draw on the skills and experience (ie 'the time') of a number of pretty senior players in his organisation.

Given that the project has a high priority within the company, he seems to blithely assume that we will automatically get what we need from who we need when we need it. As an external supplier I'm just trying to work out how to start the conversations that might get the same people approaching us with offers of help.

Mobilised volunteers or forced conscripts?

Nice thing about working in the theatre is that it teaches you that this isn't actually a choice.

A director's dilemma

Rarely does every aspect of a project goes as you'd like, especially if the project has as many variables as a multinight improv comedy show. The dilemma that a director has to address is this: -

Over time will the show's deficiencies self-correct or self-perpetuate?

My personal tendency is non-interventionist, which means I have an overarching faith in my casts' ability to self-correct. In a statistical sense I am wary of Alpha Error; what doctors know as the mistake of acting on a false positive test result.

Put another way, I would rather lay myself open to criticism of possibly allowing a situation to drift than to be definitely guilty of micro-management.

Personal branding 2

An interesting side-effect of the success of the improv show is that it possibly calls into question the quality of my stand-up comedy.

By almost any measure I am an experienced performer and director of improv whereas my stand-up career has been short and not especially auspicious. By pursuing both projects (and many others besides) I know that I'm exposing my personal brand to jibes like: -

For a stand-up comic he makes a terrific theatre director...

Yet to take such criticism to heart is to invite paralysis. Anyone who wants to lead a multidimensional life has to ignore David Ricardo.

Reviews 2

Best one yet

Personal branding 1

Recently I took part in an improv 'masterclass' run by a very good teacher visiting from Canada. The guy in question used to live in the UK and has a justifiably devoted following of ex-students, many of whom signed up for the workshop.

Twenty of us paid £40 and went along with high hopes only to spend the day in a small, overheated room in a South London community centre that was entirely unsuited to drama work. The teacher was experienced and passionate but overambitious in the scope of his plan for the day. This was complicated further by the variability of experience amongst the participants (improvisers almost always improve with stage time). The process was repeated the next day.

Not one experienced performer I spoke to came away impressed. Some went so far as to say that was the last workshop of his that they'd attend.

Sure the £1600 or so he earned more than covered the cost of flights, accommodation and so on and he got to catch up with old friends in London. But at what cost to his personal brand?

Reviews 1

We're just over a third of the way through the run and the reviews are starting to trickle in. Because the cast (and the show) is young and there's been much criticism to leaven the praise, I have sent them each Seth Godin's recent advice.

Still, when Time Out London publishes the following in the print edition of their comedy listings I think we have every right to be pleased: -

Performed by a hugely talented group of young tykes including Ben Van der Velde, Carly Smallman, Leanne Stott, Rachel Parris, Rob Broderick and Robin Clyfan this is a fast-paced and exciting night of improv. All the sketches are based around the lunacy that arises from house sharing. Very funny, fresh and endlessly creative. Two thumbs up!

To win going slowly

My life is pretty frantic right now and over the weekend I was reminded of a line from an old Clive James essay*: -

The secret of applying energy is to economise on effort — to win going as slowly as possible.

James has been a prolific and interesting broadcaster, critic and essayist for almost fifty years and there are few living people in the creative arts that I admire more. I am in awe of the breadth of his work. He has a bewildering range of passions (including the poetry of Shelley, F1 motor racing, all forms of television and the samba) and he writes with the same tremendous intelligence and sympathy on them all.

His prolificacy should be an inspiration for anyone trying to create a multidimensional life, surely one of the attractions of self-employment.

* The complete essay is on the Austrian F1 driver Niki Lauda. The quote I've lifted is from the final paragraph

Aligning the planets

Last night was our fourth show. I'd describe it as 'really good' but not 'great' and certainly not on par with the Press Night performance where (thankfully, happily) all six actors excelled.

Improv comedy is like that: it's unrealistic to expect my entire cast to shine on the one night. As director it's my job to create an environment where such greatness can emerge without ever accusing the performers of anything if it doesn't come to pass. Still the expectation is there and after last night's show we each felt a twinge of frustration despite the fulsome praise of the audience.

Perfectionism of this nature is a necessary curse for anyone who charges the general public for the privilege of shutting up and watching them perform. The likes of Sir Ian McKellen and David Beckham invite us into their workplaces with an implicit understanding of this idea and factored into their enormous pay packets is compensation for working in an environment where cataclysmic failure can occur in open sight.

My cast have signed up to a life where 'adequate' will never be good enough. Performers have to perform.

Brand building

Tonight is Press Night, a necessary part of the long and arduous task of building a brand for a show in the crowded London market.

One of the main reasons why I opted for a straight three-week run was to differentiate Scenes from Communal Living from the seemingly interchangeable weekly, fortnightly and entirely ad hoc comedy nights on offer around London. It's nigh-on impossible to build a presence when you're only in a venue occasionally. Brand building is also the reason why I engaged a theatrical PR company. We've already had three mentions in the free press and we're one of this week's 'Critic's Pick's' in Time Out.

Whilst it would be nice if this investment translated into immediate sales I'm not counting on it. The value is really no more quantifiable than the posters and fliers or the (paid-for) Facebook ad campaign. Some would say that I'm dodging the genuinely hard question of value-for-money in advertising / PR spend to which I'll revert to William Lever (who founded the company that later became Unilever, my first employer): -

I know half my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half