Writing with Workarounds A writing exercise 1. Close your eyes and imagine that you are riding on a long-distance train. 2. Keep your eyes closed and let yourself settle into the experience of riding this train: the view out the window, the feel of the upholstery, the smells, the vibrations of the moving train. 3. With your eyes still closed, imagine the person seated next to you on the train. This person is a stranger. Notice this person’s appearance: their apparent age, gender, ethnicity, clothing and body type. 4. Now open your eyes and write a description of this person. THE RULE FOR THIS EXERCISE : The description you write can only include what this person is NOT. For example, you can’t describe their clothing, hair, face, manner. If you need a phrase to get started, some options... He/she/they had no... Nothing about this person... Being around them, I did not feel... 5. Now close your eyes again... and imagine a conversation you have with this person sitting next to you on the train. Let yourself hear their voice, see their mannerisms as they talk and listen, their gestures. Feel what it’s like to be in this person’s presence. 5a. Now open your eyes and write 5-10 sentences describing the conversation. THE RULES FOR THIS EXERCISE : You cannot write what this person says. You cannot write what you say. You cannot describe the person as they behaved during the conversation. You can only write what the conversation was not, what the person did not do or say, what it did not feel like talking to them. 6. Keep writing the scene on the train using the same approach. SOME OPTIONS: A. Begin with “He/she/they was nothing like ________”[a person you know well]. Then write a long, winding sentence (even a run-on sentence) about the person you do know, describing them, and digressing into a memory about them. B. Begin by writing what you don’t know about the person sitting next to you, and what you really would love to know. 7. The train comes to a sudden, unexpected stop. Write what the person sitting next to you does NOT do when that happens. Option: Write how you (and, if you like, other passengers) react to what your seatmate does not do. 8. Reflection Look over what you’ve just written. What was easy or hard? What gave you energy or was fun? What ideas does this exercise spark?

An experiment gone amok feat. Studs Terkel & Dr. Oliver Sacks Charlie Varon 's Comic Bonbons #12: An Experiment Goes Amok, feat. Studs Terkel & Oliver Sacks Studs Terkel & Oliver Sacks - An experiment goes amok 00:00 / 04:53 Written & performed by Charlie Varon Collaboration: David Ford Special thanks to J.P. Tilleman Keep the bonbons coming! Email me when the next one is ready! Email Subscribe Attention, writers and performers: I have openings for mentoring/coaching .

Charlie Varon's satire and other mischief Charlie Varon 's Comic Bonbons #7: "Poetry Unwound " Poetry Unwound 00:00 / 02:00 Written & performed by Charlie Varon Keep the bonbons coming! Email me when the next one is ready! Email Subscribe

Bernie's Dream - Oct 24 Charlie Varon 's Comic Bonbons #15: Bernie's Dream - Oct 2024 Bernie's Dream - Oct 2024 00:00 / 04:50 Written & performed by Charlie Varon Collaboration: J.P. Tilleman Attention, citizens! Less than a month till the most important election of our lives. Join me to make a difference!

Charlie Varon's satire and other mischief Comic Bonbon #3 Satire, Pranks and Other Comic Bonbons Comic Bonbon #3: Alan Watts, "Be in (and beware) the moment" August 2022 I'm in the shower, talking to myself. Or, really, Alan Watts is doing the talking. Watts was the British lecturer who introduced Eastern religion to the American counterculture in the 1960s. Watts has been dead since 1973, but I love his voice and it's a very entertaining shower. I get out and text my collaborator, David Ford, and my favorite sound engineer, Jason Reinier. On the appointed evening, we all show up at the studio and I start doing the material I'd been working up in the shower. I improvise, David and Jason throw suggestions at me, I flail. Then David throws me a real curveball. PS: If you've never heard the real Alan Watts, here's a taste . Alan Watts: Be in (and beware) the moment 00:00 / 04:45 Keep the bonbons coming! Email me when the next one is ready! Email Subscribe

A sample of Charlie Varon's "What am I doing alone onstage? Memoirs of an accidental solo performer" What am I doing alone onstage? Memoirs of an accidental solo performer Below is a sneak peek at the beginning of my solo performance memoirs. Enjoy! -- Charlie Prologue You may have seen me walking down Dolores Street talking to myself. It’s a wide street, with wide sidewalks, and the strip of grass running down the middle has tall palm trees reaching to the sky. In another country they might call it a boulevard. In San Francisco it’s just Dolores Street. It’s never crowded, and sometimes as I walk up and down its hills, I marvel at my solitude. How can a neighborhood so close to the center of a city be home to such a peaceful street? I’m from New York. It’s true the neighborhood I grew up in – Riverdale, in the northwest corner of the Bronx – has wooded areas that are good for walking, but midtown Manhattan is at least a half-hour away by subway. Dolores Street is where I’ve walked for more than a quarter of a century, running lines for my solo shows, or thinking through questions of plot and character in whatever I’m writing or directing, or scheming about where I’m going to get the money to produce it. If you saw me on Dolores Street in 1994, I was pushing a stroller and running lines for my solo show Rush Limbaugh in Night School . By 1997, my hands were free and you might have seen me gesticulating as I worked on my characters in Ralph Nader Is Missing! . If it was 1999, I was in the world of The People’s Violin ; if it was 2002 I was working out bits for Ten Day Soup ; in 2004 Visiting Professor of Pessimism . By 2009, I was doing some of my walking at Crissy Field, the long, flat promenade alongside San Francisco Bay, lost in the world of my magnum opus, Rabbi Sam , running my lines, preparing for the weekend’s performances. But now, in the 2020s, I’m back on Dolores Street, sometimes walking all the way from Dolores Park, near where I live, to Market Street, sometimes circumambulating the park, lost in something I’m writing or thinking of writing, or just hearing in my mind’s ear (and maybe speaking out loud) one of the voices that’s lodged in my head and that gives me pleasure. Introduction As I begin writing these memoirs, in the summer of 2021, the world is still in the grips of the COVID-19 Pandemic. So much has been upended, suspended, altered -- including theater. In the last 18 months, I’ve set foot in a theater only twice. What was once a warm and familiar setting has become scary and strange. Is the ventilation system good enough? What if the masks we wear slip below the nose, as masks do? And what of the unmasked person or persons onstage and their exhalations and saliva? Is this place a vector of disease? A few theaters in the Bay Area are beginning to reopen, with distanced seating and mask and vaccine requirements; others are being more cautious and remain closed. But the old Normal is gone. And no one really knows what comes next. So now, as I walk down Dolores Street, this uncertainty intrudes, and I hear myself thinking old-person thoughts, curmudgeon thoughts: What will become of theater? Of solo performance? All the work I’ve done in this art form over the last 30 years -- and all that I thought I was helping to build -- will it all be swept away? I hate thinking these thoughts. But the truth is that I was thinking thoughts like these long before the Pandemic. In the last decade, the seductive, ubiquitous Screen has disrupted our art form. Why leave home, why pay money, why have to look for parking or take public transit when there’s so much great free streaming content that you can watch in your pajamas -- and stop watching if you get bored? But while I was busy worrying about the future of theater, Donald Trump got elected. And we tumbled into the nightmare of his presidency, living in a constant state of political emergency, our nervous systems fried, the old Normals gone, the old assumptions shattered. Trump, the Pandemic, climate catastrophe, racial reckoning, the threat to American democracy: there’s nothing quite like a bunch of cascading existential crises to make your career as an artist feel indulgent. * After Trump was elected, I threw myself into political activism. I continued my work as a theater artist - but starting in 2017, my highest priority was politics: I canvassed for Democrats, phone banked, mobilized friends, fundraised. The two parts of my life did come together. In the fall of 2018, Brian Copeland and I created and performed The Great American Sh*t Show , which blended monologues and a call to political action. And in early 2019, I collaborated on and directed Dan Hoyle’s show Border People , about immigration in the Trump years. Even that seems ages ago now. * The idea of writing these memoirs was sparked by a conversation with my directing apprentice, Molly Rose-Williams. We were talking about solo performance, and I thought: I’ve known Molly for just a couple of years; she doesn’t know the long path that led me to think the way I do about theater and art. There’s a skeptical voice in me that looks at the state of the world and condemns this memoir project as irrelevant. The planet is on fire, why spend time writing about my art, about projects that now seem remote or dated or both? And yet this is the work I have loved, it’s what I have poured my life energies into. And I want Molly to know what I’ve learned.

Before a show, after a show: maintaining sanity as a performer Spiritual Exercises for Solo Performers Stage fright. Adrenaline. Vulnerability. Before a show. After a show. A few practices I've found useful. To view or download the printable booklet, click here . STORYTELLING SPIRITUAL EXERCISES FOR SOLO PERFORMERS Political Theater Now I remember seeing Mother Courage at Berkeley Rep a year or two ago. The acting and production were excellent! But the transaction seemed off. I would have preferred a documentary film about one of our current Mothers Courage, living in Iraq or Congo. The transaction at Berkeley Rep seemed comfortable. An affirmation that by watching this play and getting it, we audience members know something about the world and are on the right side of things. Some days I wonder how much theater (and other art forms) consists of flattering its audience. Offering comfort food of one sort or another. I look at the world. Who can fathom the global economy? The future of disease? Climate change? Korea? Megacities? The massive behavior modification experiment called the Internet? I inspect my world view. Totally inadequate to the times. So for me the question is always: How do I let myself write from inside the question, and resist any impulse to offer an easy resolution, facile answers, or stale truths? When I'm doing my work right, my characters take me to places I wouldn't otherwise go, and say and do things that scare and trouble me. And now I must indict myself. Last fall, my agent got me a weekend's worth of gigs doing Rush Limbaugh in Night School in Kirkland, WA and Tacoma. I printed out the 3-year-old script -- which was itself a 10th anniversary revision. Which meant that many of the words were already 13 years old. Reading the script, I laughed. Some good jokes! It was like reading someone else's play. One of the nice surprises of time passing. You get to be the audience of your own work. I memorized, I did character work, I purchased pears. Politically the play felt dated. I cut out some lines about voting machines in Florida. But satire really wants to be fresh -- to have not just the absence of the stale but the startling new. And RLNS did not meet that test. I rationalized doing the show on the grounds that it's a well-wrought story, it's funny, and people need to laugh. And I need to buy groceries. But that is a rationalization. One night recently in my solo performance class, a guy about my age did a piece about his first job as a newspaper reporter, in the early 1980s, in a small town in Connecticut whose main industry -- silverware making -- had just collapsed. The Hunt brothers had bought up silver futures, causing the price to skyrocket, and the industry fled overseas. The performance piece was full of the texture of decay -- potholes, eviction notices posted on plywood doors of houses, bars full at 2pm. A girl rides a motorcycle without a helmet, suffers brain damage, Reagan's Medicare cuts prevent her from getting the rehab she needs. The reporter writes a series of stories about this and wins an award; some action is taken; and there is a death. So why was I riveted? Why didn't this all feel dated? Maybe it was the presence of the man who had lived it. The events occurred 25 years ago, but he's here, still struggling to understand, wrestling with the past in the present, asking me to join him on the journey. Maybe it was the fact that it forced me, uncomfortably, to see afresh. "Holy shit, I lived through this! I lived through Reagan and decimation of social programs and deindustrialization!" Or maybe it was just that he told it well. (Winter 2008) POLITICAL THEATER NOW

Alan Watts: "Puzzling Evidence" Charlie Varon 's Comic Bonbons #13: Alan Watts, "Puzzling Evidence" Alan Watts - Puzzling Evidence 00:00 / 06:00 Written & performed by Charlie Varon Collaboration: J.P. Tilleman Attention, writers and performers: I have openings for mentoring/coaching .

WRITING CRAFT: The 3 Selves in a Memoir Experiencing Self Does not know how it will turn out Lives in the emerging present Thus, try writing in present tense Remembering Self Knows how it turned out Has made some sense out of it (or decided it doesn’t make sense) Has conclusions that may have hardened Reflective Self Stands back, as a painter would looking at a canvas: the canvas of your life Sees anew; may see new patterns or themes May have more questions than answers (lives in the questions) Is open to what is emerging Asks bigger questions than we normally find time for: Wonders how this life fits into the times the ‘character’ grew up in the place and culture and subculture the influence of key people pivotal moments the human condition The memoirist is moving among these three selves Each has a different gift a different sensibility Each is a part of the human experience So your memoir is both yours and bigger than you These ideas are inspired in part by the work of Daniel Kahneman, z"l The photo is of me writing my memoir on what appears to be a fruitful day

Against perfectionism For years I labored with the useless idea that there is one, perfect path between the idea for a piece and the finished piece of writing. Logically, this idea leads one to ask, every few minutes, "Am I on the right path, or not?" The fear of doing it wrong inhibits risk, experiment, fun, discovery. I find it more helpful to imagine a vast network of roads branching out from the starting point. It doesn't matter that much where you start. Nor does it matter terribly which road you take at any juncture. The main thing is to notice when your energy is liberated, when things seem to be opening, flowing, and when the discoveries are coming. Follow that energy, and don't worry about the specific path. This view suggests that there is not one perfect result, but a vast number of possible outcomes that are valid, and even wonderful, expressions of the initial creative impulse. Any one will do! Note: There will be moments along the way when you will need to step back and think critically about the piece, asking (with a director or someone you trust) the tough questions about whether it builds, holds an audience, fulfills its promises, and holds water conceptually. But these questions should wait until the piece has enough life and momentum to withstand that kind of inspection. (And I always need a day or two to recover from such a critique, and let go of precious ideas I held about the piece that have turned out to be illusions. Within a week the pain subsides, and new openings present themselves.) Destination In order to begin writing or creating anything, most of us need to have a sense of where we're going. "I'm heading for that mountain!" And we begin the journey, full of enthusiasm and energy, eager to progress toward our destination and indeed to get there. Then, a ways down the road, we look around. We know more than we did before we began; we're beginning to get a feel for the terrain. We see things we couldn't have seen, and we modify our destination. We head for a different part of the mountain, or an adjacent mountain, or a different mountain range entirely. This process of reassessing and redirecting repeats itself. We need to have a destination we're moving toward, but not stick to it rigidly when a new, more compelling destination presents itself. All destinations are provisional. And, while our conscious mind requires a destination, we can cultivate a trust that the process will take us where we need to go. Learn from documentary filmmakers As I'm working on a new piece, I have a desire to know how the words I'm writing today are going to fit into the finished play or monologue. But I can't really know, because it's too soon to know - and that's a bit disconcerting. And what about the prospect that today's words might end up being cut! Well, then why I am bothering to write them? My partner, Myra, used to help produce documentary films, and I got to observe the process. Documentarians film everything. Then they put it all together into what they call a first assembly. After that they take a stab at shaping the material into a story - the rough cut. At this point, more filming may be needed. Then they put together a second cut. And on it goes, version after version, with material being added, deleted, moved around. I purposely imitate the documentary process. When that voice demands to know how today's words will fit into the end product, I answer: "I don't know. I'm 'filming' everything. I'll edit later." Filmmakers talk about the ratio of film shot to the running time of the finished film. Four to one, five to one, even eight to one. So I've borrowed that way of thinking, and now assume that I will have to write three to five times as much material as I need. A related idea is... Many at-bats Baseball players are doing well if they get three hits per ten at-bats. I try to remember this when I have a "bad day" writing. Not every day will yield a home run, or even a single. So it's important to have as many writing sessions as possible. Not all of them are supposed to be "successful." There's a lot of sitting with the problem, waiting, trying things that end up not working. But these "failures" are an essential part of the process. It's part of the writer's job to… Become comfortable with discomfort A lot of the work is just hanging out with what's unresolved, holding multiple possibilities and exploring them openly, letting things get unwieldy and a little out of control, and not jumping too quickly to easy salvation. Rough carpentry before the finish work How tempting it is in the early stage of a writing project to fuss with what you've already written rather than take the risk of writing the next paragraph. How tempting, when hearing work in progress, to criticize small flaws, to quibble with a punch line, to suggest a better word or phrase. But before putting on the trim, you need to build the house. The writer's job in the early going is to keep writing, to write lots and lots and in so doing to discover the world of the play. Those helping the writer can help by refraining from nitpicking, and by offering comments that speak to the new work as a whole. Intellect and intuition To write, we need both. The trick is to know when to deploy which. This is an area where it's best to listen only to yourself, and to learn over time what works for you. But I offer these thoughts for your consideration: 1. The intuition leads you to more interesting and risky places than the intellect. 2. Perhaps this is because the job of the intellect is to get people to like you. 3. When you notice that this desire to be liked is taking over your writing, stop. Check in with the intuition, ask it what's central or true, what is trying to be expressed. 4. Let your intellect ask the question, but let your intuition answer it. The answer will often surprise you. 5. The intellect wants to end the scene, reach closure; the intuition is more curious and willing to explore without knowing the outcome. 6. Keep to your writing schedule, and show up at the appointed times. But remember that the intuition does not obey schedules. It speaks when it is ready, sometimes when you least expect it. What people care about Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, spouses and lovers. Conflicts pertaining to the above. The self, and the conflicts within the self. The above relationships occupy the center of a bull's eye. They are what human beings seem wired to care about most. The next ring out on the bull's eye contains more distant kin (cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, in-laws, etc.), close friends, and other relationships of long-standing from which it's hard to escape. Also relationships where one person has power over another: bosses and workers, landlords and tenants, etc. In the outermost ring of the bull's eye are strangers. Audiences are hungry for relationships toward the center of the bull's eye, for the history of those relationships, and for what has changed or is changing in them. A second bull's eye (which we can visualize as an overlay of the first) has at its center our old friends conflict, violence, sex, illness, death, deception, status and money. So, a play about two strangers who meet and converse (even if the dialogue is very witty or arresting) tends to be less compelling than a play about a man who owes his mother money and is having an affair with his boss. A word is a shadow of a thought …and on the stage what is unspoken is as important as what is said. It's part of the writer's job to "listen" for, and write, the silence. And to imagine what is being thought and felt in it. In addition to silence, there are grunts, sighs and other kinds of exhalation, mouth noises of all sorts. There are shrugs, hand gestures, body movements and postures. There are looks. The palette of the playwright includes more than words. Ten commandments of comedy Jim Rosenau and I wrote these a few years ago. 1. Surprise yourself. 2. At every stage of the process, if it's not getting funnier, it's getting less funny. 3. Comedy loves specifics. 4. Comedy needs conflict. This is what makes people care enough to laugh. 5. Comedy thrives on discontinuity. 6. Separate the creative phase from the editing phase. 7. Push it too far. You can always pull it back later. 8. When you think you're done, cut, cut, cut. Throw away even your best jokes if they don't serve the piece. 9. Stuck? Add one random idea and see what you can make. 10. Comedy happens in relationships. Find the people you enjoy being funny with. © 2003 Charlie Varon

< Back #10 For Pete Seeger's Sake February 29, 2024 Written & performed by Charlie Varon Special thanks to J.P. Tilleman For Pete Seeger's Sake 00:00 / 02:01 Keep the bonbons coming! Email me when the next one is ready! Email Subscribe Attention, writers and performers: I have openings for mentoring/coaching starting in February. Previous Next

Storytelling + community We Are All Storytellers A performance series presented by Charlie Varon and benefiting Or Shalom Jewish Community of San Francisco Saturday evening, April 6, 2024 at Noe Valley Ministry in SF Storytellers: Evelyn Martinez, Rabbi Me'irah Iliinsky, Rabbi Dan Goldblatt, Charlie Varon Buy tickets “We are storytelling creatures, and should have been named Homo narrator , rather than the often inappropriate Homo sapiens . " - Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist and evolutionary biolo gist (1941-2002)