Ideas

The title of this post is a bit of a misnomer because, truthfully, you can never have enough ideas! While you may not need every idea you’ve ever had at this very moment, the ideas you come up with can definitely be useful in the future. You never know when a past inspiration can become useful going forward. This exercise is inspired by entrepreneur James Altucher’s “idea machine” concept, which is simply to come up with ten ideas every day. The goal is to strengthen your idea-creating muscles so that coming up with new ideas becomes easier and easier. You can then use your ideas for pretty much anything within your drama classroom – ideas for future topics or lessons, ideas for classroom games and activities, ideas for shows you might produce in the future, ideas for a class-devised theatrical piece, ideas for playwriting… The list goes on and on. And if you are ever feeling blocked creatively, you can go back to your lists of ten ideas for inspiration. For at least one week at the beginning of class, write a prompt for students to use as a jumping-off point. For each prompt, each student will individually come up with ten ideas and write them down. At the end of the school week, every student will have generated 50 ideas each! Here are the rules:• Students must force themselves to write ten ideas. More is fine, but ten is the minimum. • If a student misses a class, they still have to complete their list of ten ideas for that day based on the prompt of the day. Consistent practice is the key to success in this exercise. • No self-censorship! Write it all down. Some ideas will be good. Some will be not so good. Some ideas will be downright silly or dumb. The point is not to judge yourself. It’s the practice of forcing yourself to come up with ten ideas daily that will help to strengthen the idea-creating muscles and help you to eventually come up with more good ideas than not-so-good ones. • I strongly encourage teachers to participate in this practice each day as well. Here are ten prompts to get your students started on creating their ten ideas lists:1. Ten ways to communicate onstage without using words. 2. Ten ways to create a scene using little to no technology. 3. Ten ways to costume your show with zero money. 4. Ten ways to get in contact with Lin-Manuel Miranda. 5. Ten ways to fundraise $1,000 for your upcoming production. 6. Ten different topics for a playwriting assignment. 7. Ten plays or musicals you’d like your school to produce. 8. Ten celebrities or well-known people to impersonate in an improv game. 9. Ten drama classroom activities that you’ve particularly enjoyed. 10. Ten more ideas for future “Ten Ideas” brainstorming sessions. You can build on each individual brainstorming session by having students come together into small groups (four to five students) to share their ideas, and come up with their top ten favourite ideas to present to the rest of the class. Have students look for patterns and similar ideas that they came up with individually, as well as ideas that combine well together to create an even more exciting idea. At the end of the week, students will complete and submit a Reflection. Where will your ideas take you and your class? The possibilities are endless!

Came across this lovely article about costumer Jane Greenwood over at the TDF Stages website. She has been designing costumes since 1963 with multiple Tony nominations under her belt. She’s in the middle of designing the costumes for the upcoming Broadway production of Rebecca. Here’s what I took away from this article. First, the amount of prep work that goes into Greenwood’s process before she even meets with the production team. She is “immersed” in the world of the play. She knows everything there is to know about what the characters might wear. “The show won’t begin performances until October 30 or even start rehearsals until next month, but Greenwood is already making choices that will shape its future. For instance, she has filled several large binders with sketches and ‘inspirational photographs’ for every character.” Second, that she’s prepared to throw away that prep work if it doesn’t jive with the direction of production. She wants the costuming to be a part of the team and because theatre is a living entity, things change. Things change. If you are an actor, an artist, a writer, a dancer, that is the core of the creative process. Things change. If you are so married to your idea that you’re not willing to alter it when need be you’re not getting the most out of your creative process. This is not to say that you have to throw everything out the window on someone elses say so. But if the idea needs to change to make it the best work possible then you need to be able to make that change. Things change. But in order for things to change you need a start. You can’t change in a vacuum. You need a starting point, you need that idea. And you just can’t come up with something frivolous and slight. “What’s the point in putting work into my idea if it’s just going to change anyway.” No. I meet so many young writers who don’t want to put the work into an idea, they just want to jump into the deep end of the pool. And then they’re upset when the play starts to fall apart in the middle. The idea is as valuable a part of the process as the finished product. As Greenwood states: “Without the idea, you’re lost, so you have to have that. But then you have to take the idea and channel it through so many different areas.” Are your students flexible enough to go with the flow when change is suggested for a scene?

The biggest obstacle to writing a play often comes before the first word. It happens in the idea stage. I want to write, but my ideas are stupid. I know I could write something great but where do I start? How do I know my idea is a good one? These are the thoughts that lead directly to writers block. When it comes to play ideas there are three things you should teach your students: 1. Ideas don’t grow on trees – you have to look for them. 2. The more ideas you have, the less you have to worry about good or bad. 3. Ideas are a place to start. Sometimes they are just a fragment, a sentence or a question. Ideas are not finished products. There is this misconception that writers just magically think of things to write about. And that every idea is a gem right out of the gate. It’s just not true. Writers look for things to write about. They create a habit of observation. To observe is to look specifically at people, places and things. If you observe on a daily basis, if you’re always looking, you will come up with ideas on a daily basis. Writers learn to write down what they see and hear, what they experience. They write down their observations. It’s not enough to leave an idea in your head. That’s when ideas get lost. Writers know that an idea is something to play around with, to try out. An idea is not a finished product. An idea is a place to start. And sometimes the idea will work, sometimes it won’t. That’s important to know. Ideas don’t always become finished products. When a student writers falters with an idea, their response is to assume they can’t write. Instead, remind students that not all ideas develop fully. This process of idea creation put a lot less pressure on a student writer. You don’t have to magically come with a wonderful thing to write about. You simply: • Observe the world around you • Write it down • Try it out ReflectionWhen starting a playwriting unit, it’s important to get idea misconceptions out in the open and then out of the way. Discuss with students – What is an idea? Where do they come from? Have students reflect on their abilities to turn an idea into a play. Practice the act of observation with your students and get them in the habit of writing their observations down. And lastly instil in your students the fact that an idea is not a finished product. An idea is just a place to start.

I’m working on a new play in a different way this month. It’s going to be from the ground up with a class. When we had the first meeting a student raised their hand and asked “What’s this play about?” and the answer was “We don’t know yet.” Ground zero, nothing written on paper, the only thing we know is the audience for the play. It’s exciting, it’s of course daunting, and it’s great for adding a new spin to my own writing process. And our first step in this process was to brainstorm on form, topic and theme. Brainstorming is an interesting technique if it’s used in a focused way. That may seem beside the point – come up with any idea! But only in this way! – but my experience has been that brainstorming is sometimes too vague of an exercise. It’s too vast. There is a place for anything goes writing, especially if you’re working on encouraging confidence in someone’s writing ability, but since I’m the one doing the writing this was not the place. For me, it was most important to hone in on what this group was thinking. What they wanted, how they wanted the play to take shape. To that end that’s why we started with form. It would be pretty arrogant of me to write a play for a group and not give them any input on what kind of play it was going to be! What form do you want this play to take? Comedy? Kitchen sink reality, or something non-traditional? What kind of characters do you want to play? It’s a great place to start because it’s an that every drama student has an opinion on – if I could be in any kind of play this is what I would want to do. I divided the students into small groups and had them discuss and decide on how they would finish the following sentence starters: • I want the audience to remember….. • I want to perform the kind of show that…. • My favourite character to perform is… Next we moved to topic. The audience for this play is going to be middle school students so the first question to answer is, “Is the play going to be about Middle School life now, or what can Middle School students expect when they get to high school?” Two different slants which would end up with two different kinds of plays. This was a choice the group had to make, so the students discussed the possibilities and we went with the majority: What can MS students expect. With that topic in mind, I moved to a combo independent writing/group discussion brainstorming. First, the independent brainstorming exercise – automatic writing. Automatic writing is my go to exercise for getting words on the page without censorship or self-criticism. That is the key component of brainstorming – words on the page. With automatic writing you get a topic and a time limit and the goal is to keep writing for the entire time. Don’t let self-criticism of what you’re writing, stop the writing. The Automatic writing prompt was: “In Grade 9 I wish I knew that….” And then to hone their automatic writing into a presentation form, students read aloud their writing (again, in small groups) and within the group chose five things (words, images, sentences) to present to the group. This was a fantastic exercise! So many ideas came to the surface. I had a full page of chart paper. Lastly I had students discuss in their groups what they thought the most important themes were for their topic and why they were important. Essentially, this is determining what the play is going to be about. What the scenes are going to focus on. I gave them four possibilities: • Issues • Relationships • School Life • Self-Image So we could have started here with our brainstorming. We could have started with what do you want the play to be about – isn’t that the most specific starting point? But the possibilities are endless. Play topics are far and wide. The play could be about anything. It is a pretty large topic if you don’t know what your form is, if you don’t know what you want your audience to remember, if you don’t know what your topic is. To ask the question first could lead to blank stares and blank pages. But by moving through this session, step by step, I feel the brainstorming contributions made at each point were thought out, interesting and really helpful for the process.