One audience member and not many more comedians. I had a whole bunch of new material to try, but just before I went up Tom grabbed me and asked me to do my Power Team routine. So I went up and did mostly the sure-fire material. Got a good laughs.
Steven King suggests that upon finishing the first draft of a novel, you should put it away for a month before attempting a rewrite. I recently finished the first draft of a short story and put it away for a week. The time away was well worth it. All the awkward phrases and logic holes jumped off the page at me. It really helped.
The other thing I've discovered is a way to get myself focused to write. I've tried relaxation methods before, but it's hard for me to shut off my brain. Concentration exercises on the other hand make it difficult to foucus on my writing rather than the thing on which I was concentrating. Just by accident I did a concentration exercise, playing DOOM, then did a relaxation exercise. It worked. I was able to blank my mind of the game of Doom, and let myself drift over to where I was ready to write. The process took an hour, but now that I know what I'm aiming for, I should be able to trim that. Unless of course being aware of the process ruins it.
I'm reading the book DUNE. When I first saw the movie I kept thinking that there was a great story there under all the droning exposition. Now that I'm reading the book I think there is a great story there under all the droning exposition. The story IS great. The characters are great. The universe the author created is great. The story telling is awful! Everything is spoon-fed and repeated over and over. There is no showing. There is only telling. It is like a text book account of a really exiting story. Other than that, I'm really enjoying the book.
This is cool. For a long time each story I wrote took longer and longer. The current one I'm working on took just two days for the first draft. Two hours for the second draft. Then just one hour for the final draft. The fact that it was done in only three drafts is also amazing. Another good thing is, this is the first story where I've managed to seperate the premise from the story. That is, the thing that clicked in my head, when I said to myself, "I should write a story about that." That's not what the story is about. The story is about a man who encounters the premise and what he does about it. The characters all exist outside the premise, making them all much realer.
For those of you who weren't hanging out behind Hooters on Friday at lunchtime, you missed my professional dancing debut. I am such an attention whore I will make a complete fool of myself in front of my coworkers and the drop of a hat. The worse part was that I much fun doing it. Made 50 cents.
Strange phenom going on. I've been doing the whole exchanging stories for rejection letters thing for a couple years now, but this latest story I submitted is really bothering me. It's the best thing I've written so far. I feel like if this one gets rejected it means I'm not a good writer. I know that's not true, but that's what I'm feeling.
Small crowd. Good set. Good and bad comedians. Not bad. Perhaps new is a better term. Though some of them need to grow thicker skin if they want to succeed.
On a weird note. I managed to fill much of the down-time between sign-up and the start of the show with writing in my head. I have this story, actually I have an opening scene, that I really like, but have not been able to find the story behind the premise. So tonight I sat quietly and thought on it, and it came to me. Fun.
Wrote a good scene tonight. It's for a story idea I've been kicking around for a while. I've never been able to come up with the story of the story. I still haven't, but now I have some clues.