The shorter, greater challenge
Published by on August 27th, 2008
Bear with me while I pop back in time a handful of years to when I messed around with stand-up comedy.
For the first few years as an aspiring stand-up comic, one must tread the rocky paths of the open spots. These are the 5 minute - or if you are lucky 10 - slots that most smaller comedy clubs make available to new comics honing their techniques.
The open spot routine goes as follows:
- Travel for 2-3 hours to the venue
- Hang around for 1-2 hours waiting for your spot
- Spend 5 minutes in front of a disinterested audience who paid to see ‘real’ comics
- Hope the club promoter saw enough promise in you to give you another spot in a few months
- Go home and re-consider any gags that did not generate a laugh
That may seem rather cynical view, but that is the process when reduced down to its core. It is genuinely much more fun that it sounds, however. These open spots are best handled by packing them with quick-fire gags and quips; fire stuff into the mic, then get the heck off. I found the minimal audience interaction very uninspiring.
So I moved into running a couple of (very) small clubs and acting as compere. The compere spends several time slots working with that night’s audience, warming them up, cooling them down, and generally creating each appropriate segue from the previous to the next act. Most importantly, there is an evolving relationship over the period of the show.
I’m getting to the point, thank you for hanging in there…
I experience a similar problem in the difference between writing a short story compared to writing a novel. But this is not centred around the act of concise writing.
I want to get to know them
Stories are about people - at least I believe mine are, regardless of their respective settings. There’s little more satisfying than learning about the characters one places into a story, understanding their nuances, discovering their quirks, ’seeing’ them play out their lives.
The short story simply does not have the space or the time for such luxuries and that is where my challenge lies. These are interesting, nay fascinating people (they must be as I am including them in my story!).
The dead end of death
This problem is particularly acute in a series of short stories I am writing and planning which will form a collection entitled “Six Deaths” - the title is something of a giveaway - and as you might guess, each character has but a brief sojourn within the pages. And there lies my personal challenge when writing shorts: I want to know these individuals, get under their skins, understand who they really are before… well, let’s just say before they up and leave.
I find writing short stories about the characters that inhabit Edwardian London in the TableRappers book(s), so very much easier and satisfying because I know them such that I do not feel I am missing out on learning about them as individuals.
It feels so utterly disrespectful to create a character for the sake of merely a few thousand words. Perhaps I just need to grow some thicker skin and be a little more ruthless with my characters. Hmm… Six Deaths, how more ruthless can one be..?
