1. Why are we doing this?

    When I started caring about justification, everything I wrote got weighty. If I couldn’t come up with a genius justification, then everything was cancer or dead parents. “Why are you painting your body?” “My mom just died, she would have wanted this.” “Why are you on a date with this walrus?” “I have cancer, I want to try new things.” I wasn’t doing it to be hilarious. I was doing it because why the hell would my characters do anything unless they were moved deeply?
    I was confused.

    I had an epiphany when, in a fit of frustration, I tried justifying everything I did for a day. I thought, if this works on stage, at least some element of it is derivative from real life. I discovered something pretty straightforward: that our motivation is usually simple. Most of the time, you’re just eating because you’re hungry, checking people out because you want to have sex with them, and wearing clothes because you’d get in trouble if you weren’t.

    From there I realized a few things. One, that it’s apparent when you try to manufacture justification. Everyone knows you’re lying if you say you used the handicap bathroom because it was the only one open. It’s much funnier to just be honest: that you used it because you can’t poop around other people.

    Secondly, that justification can be simple. Don’t bog us down with exposition and don’t jump to a dark place. I think we we automatically put ourselves on trial when we think “Oh, I have to justify this craziness.” Our response: we get verbal diarrhea trying to prove our characters sane. Or we get dark trying to prove ourselves funny. Well, dark things aren’t funny on their own. It’s our perception of dark things that’s funny; so having cancer isn’t funny, but a scene where two characters try and talk around having cancer is awkward, harsh, but also hilarious. As for being sane, who said your characters had to be sane?

    Which brings me to my third point: that we don’t want to make our characters sane, we want to make them reasonable. I mean this: if we over justify, we can make a weird thing normal and therefore no longer fun. We want our characters to do weird things for reasons that make sense to them. We want those reasons, furthermore, to not make the character’s actions normal—just ‘grounded,’ or based in their perception of reality. For example, my mother once called me because she had a dream that I had gotten hurt. Perfectly reasonable: she’s a mother, she would be worried. Still bizarre behavior: it was, after all, a dream. We understand where she’s coming from even though she’s behaving weirdly. That’s what we want to hit.

    post by loserbeam

Powered by Tumblr; designed by Adam Lloyd.