To Err is Improv Part 2

So how do mistakes ruin a scene? I like to think of it this way: imagine your scene is a ship at sea, thousands of miles from home, no land in sight, driving into the great blue unknown. Now, any mistake made on this ship could potentially doom it: steering, navigation, morale, food, disease and any number of other things that could potentially go wrong. Now with your scene, you have an opportunity after each mistake to treat it as a gift instead; to make it an offer instead of an error. Small mistakes are easier to correct than others – calling a character “Tom” instead of “Tim” or “Bob” are relatively minor errors, in the same magnitude as maybe a minor miscalculation in navigation. An error that small can sometimes be ignored altogether; it doesn't really matter what the character's name is, and a small miscalculation might still get you pretty close to your destination, or at least not that far off course. The larger the error gets however, the harder it is to ignore and still keep the ship together, and the more the error needs to be justified and incorporated. Making multiple mistakes back-to-back without opportunities to justify them drive the ship to the briny deep much quicker (rotten food + off course + dangerous storm + disease = Davy Jones' Locker; rotten food – rationing + off course – course correction + dangerous storm – more beer + disease – medicine = OK).

“You learn more losing races than winning them.” - Frankie Avalon, Fireball 500

It's a little too easy to get bogged down in the details of failure – this is exemplified by what is called hindsight bias. Essentially, when you know the outcome of something, the events that lead up to that conclusion seem inevitable, and significantly changes how we perceive and remember those events. In retellings, irrelevant or inconsistent data is discarded for those data points which bolster the ultimate finding. But before we get to that final destination, the finality is obfuscated and buried in conflicting information – this makes sense, since after all, a good improv scene does not have a predetermined, fixed point prior to the scene, but afterwards all of the information presented make where we got to become the only available option. Which is a sign of a good scene – no conflicting information, or other possibilities, just a singularity of conclusion. The issue becomes that the more familiar we are with something, the less we tend to notice – we assume things as we think they should be, not how they are. The brain doesn't tend to notice a difference between an improv scene and real life, so when we step on stage, we don't tend to notice some things because on a subconcious level, we think we're observing real life, and we have a list of things that we do normally in real life. Except, these are imaginary situations we are presented with, and we need to pay a little more heed to pick up some of the abnormal minutiae. The noticing is what is important, usually as part of an active experience, not a passive one.