lose our fear of being wrong.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
Even so some students can still look a bit disappointed if I say something that is
clearly unfunny rubbish. I can see them thinking, ‘Blimey! She’s the teacher, she
should do better than that.’
And I
can do better than that. I can do worse as well. I have no control. I just let
it all come tumbling out.
I say rubbish things, I say obscure things, I say puns a
child of five could have written, and I say great things, but I needed to say all the
other things to get there. So when students look at me that way I say: this is the
process. Often, to write one good joke, you have to write a number of mediocre
jokes, and before that a lot of half jokes and even more non jokes and ideas that
you’re not sure what to do with.
Don’t be ashamed of your methods. Don’t worry about
the half jokes and non
jokes. Don’t shrink away and think they are crap, and therefore decide it means
you’re crap. NO, it’s part of the process. You are on your way to a fabulous joke.
If you shut down the process, you shut down your thinking and you shut down
your own potential. This especially applies when you are working with someone
else. If they say something and you say ‘Naaa, that’s rubbish mate,’ they’re
never going to say anything again. But if you take their idea and think about it,
you might be able to add to it or do a twist on it. It becomes part of the flow of
ideas.
There is the risk that you cannot
afford to take, (and) there is the
risk you cannot afford not to take.
Peter
Drucker
I once had a student in my class who was very loud, bossy and critical. When I
put students into groups to work, I would hear her saying ‘Nope, nope,’ until her
team would be sitting in silence afraid to speak. During one of the sharing
sessions she confided that she often invited people round her house to write with
her.
‘They come round once and I don’t see them again’ she said.
I think she was lucky to get someone round once!
I’m glad my friends are not like her. If ever I try my jokes out on them I always
start by saying that some of them are rubbish, some are okay,
some are half-
formed but ‘I’m going to read them all because I believe that’s what you have to
do in the joke writing process,’ and they nod solemnly while I go through
everything.
There’s always one joke I hate and they love and vice versa; they’ll always make
one comment that leads me to another thought and another joke and there are
always the duds that don’t work - but in the bigger scheme of things it doesn’t
matter.
We used to never say ‘no’ to each other, if we didn’t like each other’s idea
we’d just stay silent. Sometimes we were silent for so long we forgot what
we were being silent about.
Galton and Simpson
None of that could happen if I followed my prejudices and prejudgements – and
I do have them. I just live with them. I even send off ideas that I’m not sure
about, because you never know what others will make of things.
Some people I know are so self-critical they won’t
even write something down
in their notebook, let alone tell it to anyone, which is crazy, because, you know
what? It doesn’t matter if you have a
hundred unworthy sentences written down
if it leads to one joke. It’s not a testimony about your personality. No-one’s going
to read it at your funeral as a measure of who you were, so write it down and let
it go, or try and adapt it. See
Honing (Chapter 13).
Here’s the news: creativity is a process. Creative people are simply better at
running this process (whether they do it consciously or not) than their less
creative (and slightly more envious) peers.
Joe
Gregory
So don’t judge anything. See everything as part of the joke writing process. If
necessary, tell yourself that you will burn all your notes, but I have to tell you
that I used to keep all mine because sometimes you don’t see the joke until long
after you have written it. I would often go through all my old notes on a joke
hunt and would be pleasantly surprised. The joy of distance: leave something
long enough and you will have forgotten that you wrote it, then you will really
see what’s funny and what isn’t.
