Taking the Plunge - Sketch Writing

For the most part, if you ask a comedian how long they spent *wanting* to write or perform, the answer will often be in years, or in some cases decades (Frank Skinner only started performing stand-up in his thirties). This is because there never seems to be an easy pathway into comedy, no apprenticeships or university courses. In fact, as a teenager with comedy dreams (dreams of being involved in comedy that is, not about turning into a Bigfoot and being grated onto a pizza) I always saw the world as being split up into two groups: those who were comedians and those who were not, with no middle ground. Therefore, I ended up thinking that if I sat down one day to write my first sketch and it was unfunny I would have finally answered the question "could I ever be good at this?" in the negative and precluded myself from ever making the leap from one group to the other.

A lot of people don't get past this initial hurdle or, if they do get round to writing a couple of sketches, think they aren't brilliant and then never try again. I have spent a long time experiencing waves of inspiration interspersed with troughs in which I had little faith in my ability. Often all it took to turn a peak into a trough was for me to realise one line I wrote did not work. However, this last half a year has been different, I have been far more consistent in writing and I feel as if my overall output has improved dramatically. I put this down to my decision to "just write" and to consider writing to be a learning experience in itself. Prolific writer and stand-up Richard Herring has been attempting something similar for the last 8 years. He is so convinced of the power of forcing yourself to write that he has set up a blog (http://www.richardherring.com/warmingup/) which he updates every day, whether he wants to or not. Anybody that has followed his career path will be able to draw their own conclusions as to whether or not his work has increased in quality as a result...

In this post I'll go through some of the ways that I forced myself to stop procrastinating and start getting stuff down on paper. I have only recently made the transition from "person who wants to write" to "person who writes" and I will be making no claims as to the quality of my work. I merely want to share some of aspects of my experience in the hope that more people will be inspired not to hide their light under a bushel and to, instead, release their bum jokes and sex puns for public consumption.

I want to start by highlighting what I think are, broadly, the three stages of sketch-writing: conception, fleshing out and writing. These require differing levels of effort. The concept often requires very little conscious energy as you can't force yourself to have a good idea. However, the fleshing out and the writing can often be arduous and time consuming. It is for this reason that most ideas either end up completely unwritten or abandoned. The point at which you sit down at notepad and start writing the whole thing becomes real and you have to worry about doing your idea justice. Finding the best way to frame something can be extremely difficult.

My suggestion is that you, as I mentioned before, just start writing! Force yourself to begin and then, subsequently, force yourself to finish. You'll be surprised how simple it can be to fill in the blanks in your idea once you've started. Writing comedy is easy. People will laugh at anything. A cat? Funny. Two cats? Twice as funny. Two cats in hats? Call the BBC!

Okay, that's not true, comedy writing requires a lot of effort and experience. Still, you must just start. Pick any idea, no matter how good and decide to write it. Don't worry about planning how it will be fleshed out; cross that bridge when you come to it. You'll find you can work out dialogue a lot better on the fly than you could by sitting down in a dark room for hours trying to find the perfect line. Don't get me wrong, I am not calling for people to create work which is overly simple or rushed. I believe that a piece of comedy should be intricate and polished. I just think that a solid foundation to a piece can be achieved without hours and hours of planning.

A further advantage of forcing yourself to write is that the more you do so, the better you'll become, regardless of the quality of your previous work. In addition you will find yourself thinking in ways that are more conducive to sketch writing, being better able to work out how funny ideas can fit into sketches and how you might be able to make a sketch out of things that annoy you...

Okay, so you've forced yourself to write. How do you stop yourself looking at the result, hating it, and becoming convinced you were never cut out for the whole thing in the first place? Well, after a few months writing it will become clear that the results are never apparent in the short term and can be very deceptive. In fact, in the nineties Stewart Lee gave up stand-up comedy believing it not to be for him. When he returned to it in the early 2000s he found that the responses he received were better, even with material he had written earlier on. The only factor he could see having changed was his age. People simply accepted his material when it came from a man nearing middle age rather than someone more youthful. In the case of Lee's early forays into stand-up  innate ability was far from correlated to outcome. A sketch or routine's success or failure is based on a number of factors, only one of which is the writer's innate ability. Does it make sense to assume that one to be foremost? Not really. One bad sketch does not a bad writer make.