The Improv Writers

This is a group in which we exercise creative writing through the process of literary improvisation. What is "literary improvisation" you might ask? Well before answering that I'd like to tell you how this project came to be. I assume you like reading as well if you're interested in writing 😉

It all started two years ago. Quarantine was a fact for most people and staying at home most of the time ends up encouraging, even more, the passivity of consumption that many of us have today on the internet. “The internet never ends”, as my father used to say when I asked him to finish watching just one more video before doing a task. And it's true! There will always be another interesting video, a beautiful photo, or a controversy for you to find out about. High salaries are paid precisely to make algorithms that never run out of videos that catch your attention on the timeline. But just consuming content incessantly can not only lead to a stressful life of always wanting more and more (and yet always ending up bored), it also alienates our own individual ability to produce content, produce art.

Producing art is an inherently more time-consuming process than consuming it. What at first glance might seem like a negative aspect, I'd argue that the contemplative factor that sitting down to write, film, sing or play something exerts on us is a much greater gain. You probably won't remember 20 minutes from the Instagram videos you just watched, but you will remember for months, years, or even the rest of your life a poem you wrote. Thinking about all these factors, I and a few other great friends decided to get out of the inertia of consumption and move on to textual production.

Now back to the infamous question: “what is literary improvisation?”. Not yet answering it directly, I invite you to remember the school days when we were asked to write essays. Although we all want to be in control of what we write, it is a known fact that a “free topic” ended up making it difficult to start writing, even more so for a not very experienced writer. In theory, we always liked being able to choose exactly what we would do, but in practice, the magnitude of the universe's set of possibilities and stories that a “free theme” provided was enough to stop us. And that's where literary improvisation comes in, a theme is given in the imperative that forces us to be creative in a short time to work on it, worrying more about the act of doing it than with the perfectionism of the final result. The first contact I had with literary improvisation was in a theater workshop I did a few years ago. In addition to the proposed body, voice, and acting exercises, my teacher also created a homework assignment that would also help our creativity. Five apparently random sentences were given by him and written down by us. As the week progresses, these five sentences should become five poems with the sentences as their respective titles. The average of a poem a day was enough pressure for the brain to work in a way similar to impromptu acting, hence the name.

All of that came into my brain on some idle quarantine evening, and so I brought to my friend's group the idea of ​​adapting this process for writing short stories. As a kind of game, we divide each stage into rounds. To start, each of us gives a title — a random phrase that we liked the sound of, a single word, or anything else we think is creative and that can make a good story. Then we raffle the titles so that each person receives one other than their own. At the end of the round, everyone shows their written stories and we all read, laugh, get emotional or get scared, of universes created by us, in a few days. Over time, more friends became interested, we improved our writing quality with practice and from time to time we took the liberty of making small variations in the structure of the round. There are rounds that everyone writes based on the same title to see the differences in styles and perspectives that each one will create. In others, in addition to titles, we also drew restrictions (“the story must be told from the perspective of a dead person”) to further increase the necessary creative improvisation. But every round we were surprised, with the quality of stories and worlds that we ourselves, who previously never touched on the art of writing, now were creating on a weekly basis.

Now I created this space to spread the creativity seed to even more people. I hope to dive deep into fantastic new worlds, terrifying mysteries, and funny wordplays with all of you that will dare to pick up a pen (or keyboard) and start writing. Together we will follow our inevitable progress that the practice of any activity conquers, but without ever having the pretension of writing a perfect work. Being perfect is unattainable, perfecting yourself is not.

Join us and let's get creative together! 😊