I am Tom and this is my blog. I have a lot of thoughts about stories and want a place to write them down. I should say at the outset that through a combination of being easily-distracted, fundamentally lazy and having to earn a living, my own writing efforts to date have not been very numerous, nor have they met with wide acclaim. My hope is that anyone reading this (hello, you) will take something from it, or take issue with it, regardless of my other achievements or lack thereof.
For what it's worth, in my time I have written...
- Four sit-com scripts
- Half a play
- Any number of topical sketches for BBC Radio 4's Week Ending
- Several pieces of corporate "entertainment"
- Several outlines for an improvised sitcom pilot (don't ask)
- A treatment for a revival of an old 80s sci-fi show
- A treatment for a new romantic comedy-drama for tv, plus half the first episode
- And I have any number of ideas for plays, sketches, movies etc floating around.
More to the point, for ten years I have been teaching, performing and studying improvisation. And since I believe improvisation is theatre (funny theatre, generally, but theatre nevertheless) and that theatre is storytelling, this means that I have been studying stories all that time. Whereas a screenwriter or novellist can (and should) do multiple drafts to get a story right, improvisers have to get stories right the first time. No wonder most of them survive on the novelty of games ("let's see that again as a film noir") or just spend their time on stage making jokes.
My improvisation company is called The Spontaneity Shop and it's now my full time job. Cool. Here's our website: www.the-spontaneity-shop.com.
Our work is heavily influenced by the work of improvisation guru Keith Johnstone whose books "Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre" and "Impro for Storytellers" should be regarded as 'set-texts' for this blog. Amazon has them: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Impro-Improvisation-Theatre-Keith-Johnstone/dp/041346430X
Some of the things I want to do in this blog are as follows:
- Discuss what stories are and are not
- Discuss when stories are needed and when they are not
- Comment on other story manuals, notably those by Robert McKee and Christopher Booker
- Analyse some particularly successful stories from different media
- Expose some myths and share some storytelling tools.
If you want to join me do. And if you want to take issue with me, please, please, please do. I love a good argument!
