Showing My Work
Take a look at a sketch I wrote in less than an hour last week
I love sketch and want to help that grow within our community, but I didn’t have the capacity to run a full sketch program. So I came up with Instant Sketch (my wife calls it Instasketch, and I kinda like it) where people get an hour to write a sketch before we put those first drafts up on stage.
Part of this came so I could push myself to write more sketches. I produced Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, a showcase of my sketches, in York, Pa., in 2023, but have not had a chance to put together a second version of that show. Thanks to Instant Sketch, I have written four more sketches (one for each Instant Sketch night) and think I have a better idea of how to improve my earlier scripts as well.
I went into last week’s Instant Sketch with one goal - get to the game quickly. I recently noticed when reading another one of my scripts that I spent way too long setting things up. I think the writer part of my brain makes that mistake sometimes and plays coy with the premise. I wanted to avoid that this time and write something really tight. I needed the improviser in me to act quickly.
As part of my continued “jump in the deep end” mindset, here is the sketch that came out of that exercise.
This took just about 30 minutes (I am a pretty quick writer and had the general premise locked and loaded, but nothing written). I definitely want to give it another pass and lean more into the “I am disappointed this house isn’t haunted” vibe,” but I like what I got out of this exercise.
Sometimes we overcomplicate things. We think people need (blank) levels of classes before they can put a show together when sometimes they can just hit the ground running and figure it out. Let’s lean into trusting the creativity and fearlessness of people. Especially ourselves.