Are rules important?
The Attention Paradox
Dramatic improvisation is the art of creating a story at the same time as you’re telling it. Now, creating anything requires you to make decisions. Making decisions is an internal process that, depending on how complex the decision, can take a bit of time. While you’re making a decision, your focus shifts away from the external reality of what’s going on before you and into yourself. But as an improviser, your performance and your decisions are at their best when you’re fully focused on the External Present; what’s happening right now in front of you. Your only source material is what’s already been created and what’s happening right in front of you right now, so you have to pay attention to that!
This is what I call the Attention Paradox.
It sort of blows, right? You improvise best when you’re not thinking, but you have to think in order to improvise!
Good news: there’s a solution to this problem. See, it’s all about compromise. You want to do as much thinking as is required to make creative decisions and work out how to implement them and then IMMEDIATELY STOP THINKING AND FOCUS ON THE PRESENT MOMENT AGAIN.
Bad news: this is hard. Really hard. The only way to get good at it is to practice doing it, over and over again. That’s how you get good at stuff.
The rules of improv
So, the rules of improv. What are those again? Well, they’re guidelines that help you to make those decisions you need to make to create a story. There are two main goals in following the rules — you want to tell a good story and you want to do it with the minimal mental load, because mental load gets in your way. Some examples:
Establishing ‘who, what, where’ is good because it gives you and your audience a context for interpreting and evaluating the character’s behaviour. Caring about what’s happening and responding honestly makes your story engaging. Justifying mistakes keeps your reality believable. Some of the rules are about making stuff up quickly. Not denying stuff means you don’t have to stop and work out what’s true. ‘Yes, and’ covers a whole load of these, which is why it’s the golden rule of improv — it’s a basic principle of storytelling and creating things and working with what you’ve got and building on it in real-time and everything else.
Here’s a problem, though. Rules have to be remembered, which is a thinky activity, which takes your focus away from what’s in front of you and into your head. What’s more, they imply a value system — following rules good, breaking rules bad — and thus they give you a whole load of ways to criticise yourself! ARGH!
This means we need to make another compromise: we want just as many rules as we need to make our decisions good enough and no more. What’s more, we want those rules to be as simple as possible to understand, remember and follow, without compromising their effectiveness.
When you’re starting out in improv, you’ve got a lot of things to focus on. The rush of nervous energy that comes from standing in front of a bunch of people with no plan for what you’re going to say next is still new and unfamiliar and you might not be confident in what you’re doing. In short, you’ve got a lot of distractions from being present. Remembering rules is another burden on top of that.
When you’ve spent a lot of time doing improv, you’ll have practised following the rules so often that you’ve internalised them completely and the process of making decisions in line with the rules, so you’ll spend very little time thinking about them. What’s more, you’ll probably have developed a nuanced understanding of the principles behind the rules and a sense of which rules affect the story you create in different ways. In fact, you’ll probably look at a lot of these rules and think “well, I’ve been in scenes when I didn’t do that and everything was fine”.
Have we been lying to new students? Are the rules just an unnecessary burden that they can do without? Are we actually making things needlessly complicated? Could we lose one or two? Here’s an example that seems to come up more often than any other: Why shouldn’t we ask questions in scenes?
Don’t ask questions
At the start of an improv scene, your goal is to generate information about the world you’re in and the characters you’re playing. Any bit of information is useful because in narrowing the possibilities of what could happen next, it helps you decide what to do or say. Specific information is more helpful than general information, certainty is more helpful than uncertainty.
The more you practice improv, the better you get at inferring more information from each move your scene partner makes — their posture, their tone of voice, their physical distance from you as a performer all influence how you interpret what they’ve said and done and give you an idea of what might be happening that you can then confirm and build on. You also get better at giving information in these more subtle ways.
In fact, you can totally frame a whole load of information in a question. You might WANT to do that, because it jumps to the heart of the action, which is a stylistic decision that arguably makes scenes more interesting. You can impress the audience with how quickly and seamlessly you’ve leapt ahead of them and how effortlessly your fellow improviser picks it up, as though you both already knew what was going on!
When you’re starting out, though, you don’t have those skills. You have a load of things to do when the scene starts and you have all that fear and anxiety to battle with as well. A complex move might be a treat for the experienced improviser, but to you it’s just a bundle of information that takes time to unpack — time spent in your head. Even a loaded question creates more work for you than an outright statement that conveys essentially the same information. More work in one area means you have less focus to dedicate in all the other areas you have to pay attention to.
Even worse than that, some questions don’t add anything for you to pick up on if you’ve had little experience divining intent from the slightest gesture or verbal quirk. Having a question thrown at you in those circumstances is effectively like being told “you create something — I’ve got no idea!” Being put under that kind of pressure is an easy route to panic and dismay.
Just as you don’t want to experience that panic, you want to do your best not to inflict that panic on your fellow improviser. How do you avoid that? Well, don’t ask them questions. Make statements instead. Be specific.
Sure, there can be leading questions, but if you haven’t yet completely integrated that sense of what is and isn’t valuable information and specifically practised phrasing valuable information in the form of a leading question, then every question you ask unthinkingly is at risk of being an unhelpful question — and stopping to think about whether it’s a helpful or unhelpful question is taking your focus away from the external present.
Until you have both sublimated that understanding to the point where it doesn’t distract you AND have enough experience to unpack a question and draw a lot of information out of a little tiny offer, it’s just easier to avoid them altogether.
Outgrowing the rules
Rules are like safety harnesses, strapped to your improvising spirit to avoid you from falling into traps in scenes. As your skills as an improviser develop, some rules just become embedded in you. But you also get better at avoiding those traps, to the point where some of those safety harnesses start to chafe. You’re not going to run into the oncoming traffic of not giving your scene partner anything to work with, so you don’t need the reins of never putting an upward inflection at the end of a sentence any more. That’s fine! That’s GREAT! You’re doing it, Peter! But the fact that those rules aren’t really helping you any more doesn’t mean they weren’t ever helpful, or that they aren’t helpful to a lot of beginners.
The ‘no questions’ rule is probably the first one you really grow out of as an improviser. The shortform game Questions Only is really helpful as a tool to teach you to get comfortable with unpacking offers buried in questions and with packing your own offers in question form. As teachers, we can actually use this fact to our advantage when teaching intermediate improvisers. Once people have been improvising for a while, they usually start to develop opinions and ask questions about theory. The ‘questions only’ rule is a great launchpad for a discussion about the role of rules in improv, as a quick and dirty guide to the principles they represent.
I don’t think the rules ever really go away though; as your understanding of their purpose develops, you come to express them in more complex ways. Giving your partner lots of stuff to work with never stops being helpful, just as specificity never stops making your scene more believable. It’s just that “don’t ask questions” stops being a useful shorthand because you’re capable of engaging with more nuanced versions of those principles, without them getting in the way of that all-important principle: being in the moment.
This article was written in response to a blog post by the excellent improviser, teacher and writer Ben Hall, of Birmingham-based Fat Penguin Improv. You can find his post here.
If you enjoyed this article, check out this list of alternative improv rules by my beloved friend and co-director of Sturike and the Sheffield Improv Jam, Bobby Anderson.
