In this clip, we're going to talk about the ultimate writer's exercise. Now this is something you can do yourself, you can do with just a couple other people or you can do it at your salon. Now, what I did first of all was I made up characters off the top of my head. And what you're going to do is cut those into strips and fold them up, put them in a hat or an envelope, and have each person in your writers' salon draw two at random. If you have five people at your writers' salon, obviously, you want at least ten characters, sometimes even more for variety. My first character is Buster McGill who is 105 years old. He's a decorated war hero. He paints oil paintings of battle scenes and loves chocolate chip cookies. Sometimes when you're writing out the character descriptions, if you throw in just random things like, loves chocolate chip cookies, it really gives you an idea of what that character is like. Now the second one is Lisa Collins, 23 years old, she's an archaeologist. Next character is Arnold Smith, who's a plumber, born and raised in New York. He's recovering from a broken back. He's an expert chess player and he hates tofu. And, again, the hates tofu is just a random thing that was thrown in there and it might give a writer a creative idea of how to start the scene, is maybe Arnold is opening his lunch and takes a look at tofu that his wife packed and throws it out. Something like that. Just something to sort of make the character rich. The final character is Kelly who is 14. Very sweet and polite, a habitual shoplifter. She loves peppermint ice cream. Let's put that down for a second and we'll come up with some random settings and observations. An observation deck on the Eiffel Tower, a smelly auto repair shop, a fancy bakery in a small town, plush 4-star restaurant and a train headed for San Diego. Now here's a word or topic and this can be what the entire scene is about or it can be mentioned within the piece. It can be important or a little less important. And they're just random words: divorce, smog check, health food, Groundhog's Day and the Hollywood sign. And finally is props and you can make a list of props: comb, harmonica, a high-powered rifle, smashed cupcakes, old coin worth $1,000.00, onion soup. All random props and each participant will draw one prop, or even two, it's up to you how you want to run it. Let's say that I'm a writer at your salon and I picked the characters of Buster McGill and Kelly. And so we know that they're, that the setting is the train to San Diego. So let's say Buster is going down to San Diego and why would he be going down? Well, he's a painter so maybe he's got his oil paintings there at his feet and he's going to take those down to try to sell. Or maybe he's going to paint something down there. Kelly could be his granddaughter. Maybe he's taking her on a fun excursion for the weekend. Maybe she's another passenger and she, maybe she comes up and Buster loves chocolate chip cookies, so what if she comes up and steals some of his cookies. For our next example we have word or topic. So let's say we drew the Hollywood sign. Maybe Buster can be telling her that he helped renovate the Hollywood sign long after the war. Divorce, maybe Buster's son has just gotten divorced. Or maybe her parents have gotten the divorce and that's what led her into shoplifting. It could be anything like this. And then, of course, our props. We have any one of these props that we can work in. Harmonica, maybe Buster plays the harmonica. It could be a smashed cupcake, maybe the girl's walking by and Buster steps on it and that's what starts their dialog. And maybe Buster wants to try to buy some onion soup from the concession cart and they don't have it and he's upset and Kelly's grossed out by the thought of onion soup on a train. And after the people in your salon have written this scene, which may be only two pages long, depending on how much time you give them, ten minutes, twenty minutes, it really depends, then you can all read what you've come up with. You can use this exercise for creating elements of your own play or you might just want to use it as exercise. But it definitely can stimulate your creativity and get that writer's process going. I'd love to hear if you do try this exercise. How it works and I'd also love to hear any questions you might have about this exercise or any of the things we've talked about here. Thanks.
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