How to Be Interesting

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.

Tagged as: art, authenticity, creativity, surprises