Film Courage: We talked earlier about getting the audience on your side so creating empathy or sympathy. I feel like I might want to try this, maybe when I go into the grocery store, I’ll trip on purpose, not fall of course but something to kind of getting me used to being in the position of wanting to feel stupid about myself?
John Vorhaus, Author/Speaker/Artist/Screenwriter: Yes, what you’re proposing is that you do something new and unexpected, to break a rule. It’s a rule we might say that you go into the grocery store and you behave properly and you don’t trip and you’re proposing to break a norm, maybe not a rule but a norm. An exercise homework that I give to my classes whenever they run more than one day at the end of the first day, I always tell them between now and tomorrow morning go out and do something you’ve never done before. It doesn’t matter what it is and it doesn’t matter how you go about deciding what to do, the experience of doing something you’ve never done before carries so much creative value and so much psychic value that it’s worth having just for the sake of having it and I illustrate this if you can imagine. Here’s a great illustration, one of my students was divorced from her husband and had been for a bunch of years. They hadn’t had a really healthy dialogue since they divorced. She took my homework as a permission to do the following new thing I’m going to have a civil conversation with my ex and I’ll call it homework so that it’s safe for us both and she entered into that and had a really productive experience. I asked her later how did you feel and she said Well, at first I was really afraid because I didn’t know what I was getting into and and I didn’t know if it was going to work and then when I saw myself in the moment and having a good experience I felt really powerful like I’m in charge of this moment in a way I’ve never been in charge before and then coming out of the moment she said I just felt high I’d had so much an exhilarating experience of the new that in and of itself has value. This exercise, whether it’s brushing your teeth left-handed or talking to a stranger on the subway or buying a stranger a drink in a bar, talking to your ex-husband or whatever else you choose to do. There’s so much excitement and discovery and humor in breaking the rules and breaking the norms.I predict if you take yourself to the grocery store and stumble around like…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
John Vorhaus is best known for his comedy-writing classic, The Comic Toolbox: How to be Funny Even if You’re Not. He has taught and trained writers in 37 countries on five continents at last count, and created TV shows of his own in Nicaragua, Romania and elsewhere. His writing credits include dozens of teleplays and screenplays, plus seven novels and some two dozen works of non-fiction. His latest book is the little book of STANDUP. Vorhaus is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the Writers Guild of America. He lives in Southern California and secretly controls the world from JohnVorhaus.com.
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