Most teachers who understand writing as a process say that the first step is to play with words.  They provide exercises for helping students jump and run and climb on the word playground.  But what if your teacher is a stand-up comic?  Well, then, she helps you define your personality, sharpen your comedic style, and perfect your timing while you are playing. She teaches you that being funny begins with being truthful and that you can use what you’ve discovered about yourself for being funny.

With comic Sandi C. Shore’s new guidebook, Secrets to Standup Success, published by Emmis Books, July, 2004, you can find this comedy teacher wherever you live. The 210-page workbook-style presentation is divided not into chapters but into eight segues (this is how performance artists think), the first six of which are extremely useful to those of us who write from personal experience.  The last two chapters about dealing with a microphone before a live audience and seeking an agent to find standup gigs, might seem less significant to non-performing writers.  But then again, as “regular” writers, we come before microphones and audiences, too.  We probably don’t require agents to get us those open mic readings, but we need to learn how to be ourselves up there in front of everyone and how to stay in the moment just like the standups.  And eventually, we might want book agents. So, I recommend all eight segues for finding help discovering who you are, what perceptions you write from, how not to step on yourself in front of a crowd and how to deal with acceptance and rejection.

At www.sandishore.com, Shore writes, “Comedy is a perspective about life, and not just about telling jokes. We all have tension coping with our day-to-day lives. I have given you the tools needed to begin an outrageous journey…back to yourself!” I am sure that for most of us, writing puts us on that journey—we probably just didn’t describe it as outrageous. But using the comic’s technique might be a way of getting to some sparks we wouldn’t find otherwise.

Raised in Southern California, Ms. Shore is the daughter of comedian Sammy Shore and Mitzi Shore, founders of The Comedy Store and sister to actor/comedian Pauly Shore. With a Ph.D. and a Ms. D., Ms. Shore spent eight years as Director and General Manager of The Comedy Store’s Honolulu, La Jolla, and West Los Angeles locations before focusing on her comedy workshops. Shore developed her teaching style through years of observing, coaching, and working with comedians such as Robin Williams, Jim Carey, David Letterman, Arsenio Hall, Louie Anderson, Whoopi Goldberg, Eddie Murphy, Roseanne, Sam Kinison, Andrew Clay, and Richard Pryor.  I think we can rest assured the author knows much we might want to learn about how to draw an audience in.

 “Everything is emotionally based,” Shore says, “It’s good to admit your shortcomings; it’s the human thing to do. Your audience will like you for your honesty.”  Giving details, she says, builds a picture in the minds of the audience.  “…if you’re taking about standing in line at the grocery store, paint a picture by saying, ‘I was standing in the twelve-items-or-less line,’ so your audience can picture you there.” She says, “It’s good to practice into your tape recorder.  When you play it back, does it sound natural and flow easily?” Not only is this good writing advice, it comes complete with exercises to help readers find the fun in their way of perceiving the world and in plights (or jobs!).

In Segue One, “What’s Your Play? Who Are You?” Shore says to list as many different sides to your personality as you can:  compulsive smoker, nurturing mother, compulsive eater, fault-hider.  Then she offers more prompts to help you mine your experience:  favorite game as a kid, physical characteristic about you that people notice first, rule you would change if you could change just one, what you wanted to be when you grew up, how your kids would describe you to their friends and more.  In fact, this part of the workbook, with lots of white space for filling in your thoughts, is 19 pages long.  After the prompts, there’s a perception exercise where you write down what you think of when you hear a particular word and then what two other very different individuals think of.  For instance, for the world “golf” you might think “chasing a little white ball around.” A friend might say, “game played by skilled professionals” and another might say, “game played by the elderly.”  By the time you are on page 33 of the workbook, you are more aware of what makes you you, know something about topics you are passionate about, and have stimulated your creativity through telling the truth of your life, in little bits.

With the pump primed, it’s on to Segue Two: “Defining Your Attitude & Committing to Your Topics.” Shore instructs her readers in understanding that there are seven basic comic personality types: sarcastic, ego-driven, underdog, victim, shy, opinionated, and observationalist. She says we all have traits from each of the types, and the challenge is to identify which type we are most comfortable with in ourselves and then use this attitude to write from the topics we’ve identified in Segue One.  And 24 more white-spacey pages later, you will have!

In Segue Three:  “Beginning to Build Your Set,” Shore’s readers learn how to condense paragraphs into three-sentence stories playing with endings to build what the comic calls “shelves,” parts of the standup routine.  As writers, this might be threatening—as we begin we are usually working against being overly terse. We want words to flow.  But this is a good exercise for seeing what makes a story. Here’s Shore’s student example of a three-line story:  “I can’t believe I met a girl.  I asked her if she wanted to go over to my place.  It’s hard to find people to watch your stuff when you’re not there.”  It’s the “left turn” at the end that makes a comic’s story.  Shore’s exercises coach her readers to create this kind of story using the attitudes identified in Segue Two.

In Segue Four:  “Keys to Writing” Shore talks about the little white lies that help audiences enjoy what they are hearing (or reading). Exaggerations and embellishments are part of voice and if used well, they endear the audience to the standup (or writer).  Shore includes logs for collecting daily events and then shows her readers how to practice using creative writing skills to turn their lives into comedy.  Bring topics into the present, she says, exaggerate, add detail, take a left turn, make it personal, change negatives to positives, create conflict, keep it clean, and focus on emotions. She provides daily writing workout ideas for practicing these nine attributes of funny writing.  She also helps her readers develop the knack with easy to do exercises:  use adjectives and nouns that don’t usually go together while writing about one of your chosen topics to train the mind to create one-line visuals—“My step-father has the personality of a well-mannered snake.”

Segue Five: “Turning into a Comedian” begins with instruction for turning into a character.  Shore asks her readers to consider:  Does your character have a favorite holiday?  Does he or she have a quirk like going overboard or being a bad listener?  What can’t your character live without? What is one good habit of your character?  After you know who your character is, you’ll consider using props, learn the character’s pacing and write segues and “callbacks,” which means bringing back a particular gesture, comment, phrase or character from an earlier part of your set in a later part.  Shore also discusses strong openings and “trademarks,” a word, device or phrase that distinguishes one voice from another.  One of the exercises in this chapter uses real world objects:  pick one thing up and imagine it is something else and use it that way:  a paper plate becomes a steering wheel.  This kind of play is what children do when they pretend and is related to what poets do when they make leaps of association. Playing Shore’s games will help writers loosen up, enact and embody this kind of play.

Segue Six: “Tying It All Together” helps readers put their comedy skills to the test and come away with a performance.  Although as a writer you might not want all of your writing to have the rhythm of sets that go “segue, segue, callback, closing,” by writing a stand up comic set under Shore’s expert direction, even once, you will have gained confidence in your way of seeing the world, your attitude, your sense of humor and your ability to win an audience, all of fine attributes for a writer.

When I had read through to the end of the workbook, I realized it would be fun to have a group to work with, to listen to and to perform my set for.  I wondered if my writing group members would be willing, now and then, to write a set. I thought about how much fun it would be to have the characters in their novels-in-progress write sets, to have the speakers in my essays do the same.  I began a little story:  This past weekend, my husband and I went on the Jefferson County Farm Tour and saw mountains of heirloom tomatoes.  The old-world growth was so inspiring, we talked all the way home about planting our first vegetable garden.  But we didn’t have a clue about where to find seeds for stuffed cabbage.

“Not funny yet?” Shore asks as her book draws to a close.   Ever the teacher, she has nine more tips! “Okay,” I said to myself as I read them and eagerly turned to the front of the book once more, “I really do think I can do this.”