Walk the Walk #3

May 9th, 2007

I’m on page 7 of my show-in-progress titled, *Writing With Nancy: Second City Spiritual Epicenter.* It’s going pretty well. My goal is to have something to revise by mid-June. I figure 20 pages should do it. All I want is 45 solid minutes of entertainment. It’s been a long time since I created a show and I’ve never created a script in which I was to perform. (In fact, part of the show is about how I came to realize I could write for myself...how crazy is that?) The show is about the creation of my adult misery–in my case I’ve stored a lot of my misery in my creative writing. Two years ago when I wrote an essay of the same title I thought the topic was about how teaching comedy helped me with my self-hatred. And there is some of that. But the more I go over it, the more I realize that this show is about dispelling misery. In my case, about dispelling all the misery I developed about writing. Hopefully it will be entertaining and uplifting.

In the meantime, the creative process is a blast...

One night last week I woke up about 3am and went into the kitchen for a short glass of milk. As I was standing at the counter feeling the cool, smooth liquid roll down my throat, I flashed on an old Alka-Seltzer commercial. It was an animation of a man and his stomach sitting on two swivel chairs having a conversation about the bad way the guy ate. The stomach was really mad at him. The guy tries to defend himself, whining, *But I like pepperoni pizza...* and the stomach says, *Oh Yeah? Do you like heartburn? Cuz you’re gonna have that too...*

This got me to thinking about putting my writing in a swivel chair and having some interaction with it. Not just my writing, but my writing at various stages of my development. This turns me on. I love the idea of making characters out of conceptual things.

How’s your writing going?