I’ve been taking some improv classes lately, and having an absolute blast while learning a lot. Including something I now accept as a truism:

Improvisational theater is like boot camp for perfectionists.

Only waaaaaaaaay more fun.

Never in my life have I been so pointedly challenged to loosen up and just try things. To trust that I have creative ideas inside me which will spontaneously emerge when I stop trying so damn hard to dig them up and force them out.

(Yes, I find improv even more challenging in that respect than NaNoWriMo. Though the latter is pretty much the former, done via writing.)

Here’s another truism for you, which is definitely the case in improv.

If you try too hard to be interesting, you’ll probably be boring.

It’s like the folks who try to call out clever titles when the actors ask the audience for a location and a relationship between two people for their next scene. There’s always a wise guy who tries to impress his friends by calling out, “A priest and a nun in a whorehouse!” But the (sad excuse for a) joke is already in the title—there’s nowhere for the actors to take it even if they wanted to.

Interestingly enough, the converse is also true. What you think will be boring is usually pretty interesting.

When I started improv classes, I understood intellectually that I was supposed to relax and go with the flow, but I didn’t know how to actually do it. All my life’s training had been in exactly the opposite direction—prepare well and know exactly what you’re doing when you go into a situation.

In the beginning, this resulted in some spectacularly dull acting on my part. Often it still does.

But if you stick with improv long enough (and I know I’ve only scratched the surface), you begin to have little breakthroughs, and occasionally big ones. I clearly remember the day I had my biggest one so far.

My breakthrough came the day I was told to be deliberately uninteresting.

Our instructor was teaching us to create a “platform”—a quick establishment of place, situation, and relationship when you’re starting a scene. It feels very awkward to stand there making up dialogue with someone on a bare stage when you have no idea where you are or who you are to each other. A platform grounds the players (not to mention the audience, if there is one), giving you something to grab hold of and work with.

So you walk in and pretend to pick up a bowling ball, sight down the lane, and roll. Then you turn around, notice your fellow player walking toward you, and say “Hey, Grandpa, you’re late,” as he mimes lacing up his bowling shoes. Maybe with shaking fingers, if he’s paying attention.

Or your partner walks out and leans against an imaginary railing, looking out over the heads of the audience. You join her holding a couple of “drinks,” hand her one, sigh, and say, “Thanks for inviting me come on this cruise. I really needed a vacation.”

That’s all it takes to know who and where you are before you get to see where the scene takes you.

On this particular day in class, the instructor had us go up in pairs, with one person sitting on the sofa (we do have a few simple props) eating an imaginary meal. (This is called “space-object work.”) The other would simply sit down on the other side of the sofa, pick up an equally imaginary magazine and leaf through it.

That was it. If we were too interesting or started creating a story out of it, she stopped us and had us do it again until we were sufficiently boring.

It was the first time I was ever truly able to relax on stage.

The feeling was tremendously liberating, like a backpack full of iron ore had dropped from my shoulders.

And the weird thing? It was utterly fascinating to watch each other do these simple actions and nothing else.

It’s a strange paradox. We try to be interesting and we’re tiresome. We think we’re doing something incredibly dull and we draw attention.

Why does this happen?

I think it’s because we like the familiar. We like things we can relate to personally. In improv, for instance, most people would rather watch a showdown between the overbearing boss and the fed-up employee than a scene on the planet Zorgon with orange-skinned aliens speaking in gibberish.

This is true in life, too. We like it when things are understandable, relevant, meaningful to us.

We also like it when things are genuine and not forced. And most of us have pretty good B.S. detectors. Don’t you?

In social situations, your insecurity (and don’t worry, we all have it) probably tells you that you need to work hard to fascinate others. But that’s just not true. You don’t need to be the life of the party, constantly telling jokes and outrageous stories. All you need to be appreciated is to be real.

I learned how to relax on stage.

You can do the same on the stage of your life.

Just relax and be your own unique self. Trust me—that’s interesting enough.

Life is one long improvisation. Don’t make it so hard on yourself. You don’t have to deliberately try to be boring, like we did in class…because if you’re simply you, in all your everyday glory, I guarantee you won’t be. You’ll shine.

My butt hurts.

Okay, metaphorically. But it still got a pretty good kick.

If you’re a writer, an artist, a person with creative goals of any kind, or an aspiring any-one-of-those, read on. I won’t kick you, promise.

But this other author might.

I’ve finished Steven Pressfield’s phenomenal book The War of Art, and the most difficult part of writing about it will be to NOT quote most of the book. It’s that good.

It’s also intense. Scary intense. Hardcore in the way that taking a good honest look at yourself—and then doing something real about it—is hardcore. This isn’t feel-good self-help, folks. This is gut-wrenchingly honest stuff. And that’s why it’s so fantastic.

The title is a clever reversal of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, the classic military treatise. The book itself is about the enemy every creative person (which, yes, really means every person) faces on the battlefield of life—resistance. Pressfield considers it important enough to capitalize.

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? . . . Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

Got your number there? Mine, too.

I will now give you a micro-synopsis of the book, which, if you are human and breathing and have aspirations toward a better life in any way at all, I urge you to read as soon as possible. It’s fairly short and (hallelujah!) well-designed, but every page is pithy. Many statements are epigrammatic enough to crochet into samplers or emblazon across shields.

Book One defines Resistance, and discusses its many manifestations. (You’ll recognize most if not all of them.) Book Two talks about “turning pro”—the conscious, willful decision to give something your all regardless of the outcome. Book Three discusses the muse, life and death, the ego and the larger self, and other equally daunting yet relevant subjects.

The novel for which Steven Pressfield is probably best known (yep, because of the movie) is The Legend of Bagger Vance, which is a modern reimagining of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita. There are many parallels between those and The War of Art as well, but this post is long enough already. More on that if you want it . . . let me know in the comments!

I came away from The War of Art inspired—and also scared. Pressfield says this is good.

If you find yourself asking yourself (or your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

The book feels like a clarion call to me—a clear ringing of trumpets urging me to rise to my highest potential. Very compelling.

But that’s what scares me. I recognize those trumpets. They tend to bring on countless iterations of the “passionately inspired – giving 110% – burning out” cycle, and now that I’ve become aware of my perfectionistic tendencies, I’m careful about anything that might send me spiraling recklessly down that path again.

So I skimmed through the book once more. And I found this:

Resistance outwits the amateur with the oldest trick in the book. It uses his own enthusiasm against him. Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion.

(Sound familiar, anyone?)

The professional, on the other hand, understands delayed gratification. He . . . steels himself at the start of a project, reminding himself he is in the Iditarod, not the sixty-yard dash. He conserves his energy. He prepares his mind for the long haul. He sustains himself with the knowledge that if he can just keep those huskies mushing, sooner or later the sled will pull into Nome.

From one perspective, how depressing! I want to read that success is possible by this time next month, dammit! Don’t talk to me about the long slog through the ice and snow. I’ve been slogging long enough already.

But there it is again. Wanting the magic bullet, the quick fix. Often combined with clever marketers trying to sell me on the latest weight-dropping, muscle-toning, productivity-boosting, time-managing, power-focusing product, service, or package, which is “the last thing you’ll ever need to buy to solve this problem!!!” until the next one comes along to weight down my bookshelf, clutter up my living room, or fill up my hard drive.

But.

There’s another perspective we can take.

What if we all simply started implementing the knowledge and systems we already have? What if we quietly, steadily, without fanfare, just started doing The Work (whatever that means for each of us)?

Difficult, yes. Every day we will face our own stuckness. But Pressfield (rightly, I think) tells us that

Resistance will unfailingly point to true North—meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. . . . We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.

If we can calmly face down Resistance every day (or at least keep showing up and giving it our best), how freeing! To not have to care about how good something is . . . to let it just pour out of us, trusting that it will gradually, naturally perfect itself over time?

That’s a mighty soft pillow for a sore butt to rest on.

I can’t resist one more plug for National Novel Writing Month, which starts at MIDNIGHT TOMORROW! (Yep, somehow midnight on Halloween night seems very fitting.)

Even though I’m very sad about not doing it this year myself, NaNoWriMo was one of the key things that taught me how to start fighting back against my perfectionism when I first participated in November of 2005.

I’ve done it three times since then, and successfully completed a horribly raw and unedited 50,000-word novel twice. And I don’t think I’ve ever found a better—or more fun—crash course in how to throw your inner critic out the window (or at least lock her/him in a closet for a while).

So it’s worth stating again how heartily I endorse this program. If you’ve never heard of it and you’re intrigued, or if you have and you’re on the fence about participating, NOW is the time . . . because it won’t come around again for another year!

If you have specific questions I can answer about NaNoWriMo for you, feel free to post them in the comments below or send me a private e-mail at the address in the very bottom line of my “About Me” page. I’ll make a point of checking that at least a few times today and tomorrow.

I also want to make two offers for anyone who’d like to get involved . . .

If you do NaNoWriMo this November and would like a personal cheerleader, I’d be happy to be your NaNoBuddy via e-mail. You can send me your word counts if you want to keep yourself gently . . . ac-count-able (heh). Or you can just check in with me and tell me how it’s going, and I can reply with hearty cheering-you-on messages and any advice I can offer.

If you’d like to be part of this adventure of literary and creative abandon, but don’t want to actually, you know, write a novel, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Office of Letters and Light, the parent non-profit which runs NaNoWriMo and other beneficial programs—many for children.

There’s something in it for you if you do, hopefully. A very good friend of mine is doing NaNo (again!) and she’s personally raising funds to get into a special Write-a-Thon here in San Francisco on November 22. If she makes her stated goal, she will not only get in herself, but she’ll be able to bring one guest.

That will be me.

If she raises enough to qualify us both to attend the third annual “Night of Writing Dangerously,” I promise to blog from there and give you an insider’s view of the unbridled thrills and excitement. Maybe I can even take a little videocam, record a few brief interviews with other writers, and post them here. (I haven’t included a video in a blog post yet! Hmmm . . .)

Oh, if you’d like to donate, you might want the link:

Donate to my writerly friend’s NaNoWriMo fundraising page here! Just click the link and then the “Sponsor Me” button (after reading her lovely page, of course).

So there you have it, ladies and gents.

A fantastic month-long chance to play with imperfection begins tomorrow.

You can join in if you’re inspired to.

If you do, you can take me up on my offer to be your NaNoBuddy.

And/or you can donate to the cause and hopefully get me in the door to blog from the Write-a-Thon itself.

Or none of the above. Of course it’s up to you. But I couldn’t resist one more reminder that NaNoWriMo 2009 starts at MIDNIGHT TOMORROW! )

I was going to write about something else today, but Chris Zydel’s wonderful post changed my mind. Check it out—she talks about why reframing the whole concept of making mistakes is a very good idea. I love her weed analogy. And her allusion to the doctrine of the Church of Mistakes. I know I’m a member of that congregation.

Chris reminds us how important it is to remember to be kind to yourself when you make mistakes and things don’t turn out the way your judgmental mind hoped they would. It’s also helpful to remember the good that can come out of your mistakes (or the things you think are mistakes). Like learning. New insights.

And sometimes, the Happy Accident.

One of my favorite Winnie-the-Pooh stories (I almost typed “when I was a kid,” then I realized it’s still one of my favorite Pooh stories) is the one about Eeyore’s birthday. Eeyore, as you may remember, is a rather gloomy and depressed donkey. He doesn’t expect much from life, so “not much” is usually what he gets. One year on his birthday, Pooh and Piglet each bring him a birthday present. Pooh’s gift is a jar of honey, which he (being a Bear of Very Little Impulse Control When it Comes to Hunny) unthinkingly eats along the way. Piglet’s gift is a big red balloon, which he falls upon and bursts while running to Eeyore’s place.

Each presents his gift rather shamefacedly, but Eeyore is entranced by the way the burst balloon fits into the pot perfectly. Pooh and Piglet leave him happily dropping the balloon into the honey pot, then pulling it out again, then dropping it in again . . .

Quite by accident, they had given Eeyore the best birthday present ever.

I remember a happy accident of my own. One year during college, I stayed in town for the summer semester. I’d been working hard on my honors thesis and other very cerebral matters of (*cough*) lofty import (*cough*), so I decided to get my hands into some soothing, 100% physical clay. I took a wheel-thrown pottery class and had a blast—so much that I frequently went to the studio after hours to practice on my own.

One day I decided to use the big, heavy kick wheel (where you kick a very heavy round stone attached by a vertical axle to the potter’s wheel, making them rotate together) rather than one of the electric ones (where you step on a pedal to make the wheel spin, and the speed varies with your foot pressure). I’d never used the kick wheel before, so I intended to make a simple bowl.

As I worked the clay, it collapsed too far inward. At first I was upset, but then wondered what else the clay might want to become. It turned (pun absolutely intended) out to be the best mug I ever made, and I still drink out of it today. It’s not perfect—I didn’t know much about making handles, so my mug handle is sort of fragile and irregular-looking.

But because of its beginnings as a proto-bowl, my mug has a very thick bottom. Coupled with the inward-curving sides, it holds heat like no other mug I’ve owned. And there’s nothing like the pleasure of sipping hot tea or coffee from a piece of pottery you’ve thrown, glazed, and fired yourself. It means more to me than any “perfect” commercially produced mug I could buy from a store.

What kinds of happy accidents have you had? I’d love to hear about them!