Mental Revision
Writing my first Edinburgh show has got my head in knots. I’m swinging between getting too close to the subject matter and being too loose about what I want too say. It’s like having a table half of ingredients and no recipie to bind them together. I do have a plan as to what it’s all about, but am trying not to fall foul of over marketing it in my head, deciding what it’s all about before it’s written.
There’s a danger in the kind of personal subject that this is, that if I outline too clearly what it’s about I’ll restrict my options to broaden the topics to tackle, but conversely to not have an outline is too wayward and provides no focus for what I’m writing about.
I’ve got 2 beginnings, several middles and no end at the moment, I suppose that’s the problem. 10 years back when I wrote little indie comics I didn’t have this bother, stories went all over the place and were about anything, but this is different, it has to have the ring of truth or indeed be true itself. Most of it is, about 80% of it is, but I have embellished some of it for laughs.
The problem with over analysing any subject is you can very easily kill any of the things that made it interesting in the first place, but then the hope is by doing that you’ll find that one area of common experience that is unspoken by everyone, but everyone knows, and finding that speck of common experience is comedy gold dust.