Norm LaViolette - The Art of Making Sh!t Up: Using the Principles of Improv to Become an Unstoppable Powerhouse

NORM LAVIOLETTE

Copyright 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data is available:

ISBN 9781119558217 (Hardcover)
ISBN 9781119558309 (ePDF)
ISBN 9781119558316 (ePub)

Cover Design: PAUL MCCARTHY
Cover Image: GETTY IMAGES | MASSIMILIANO ALESSANDRO / EYEEM

This book is dedicated to my incredible wife, Kelly, and my amazingly talented and beautiful daughters, Chloe and Lucy. Thank you for letting a grown man play makebelieve for all of these years.

Listen, we all make shit up to a degree. Call it testing, iterating, innovation, ideation, hypothesis. It all boils down to the same thing: We are making shit up as we go and figuring it out from there. At its worst, it can make us feel like frauds. The fear that someone will call us on our bullshit and we will be exposed for the uneducated, untalented charlatans we are can stop us in our tracks, holding our desire and ability to do something new and different and meaningful hostage.

At its best, it is the truest form of intellectual freedom. Creating something from nothing, free of judgment or even the expectation of results. Originality and innovation blossoms from deep in the recesses of the mind, not because some people have the magical creative gene, but because they have overcome the fear of judgment of others and themselves. As a poet once said, To make shit up one first has to not give a shit (no poet ever said such a thing).

So the question is, how do we use this thing that we all do for fun and profit? How do we take this muchmaligned concept, often correlated with the idea of being unprepared and undisciplined and turn the concept on its head? After all, if nobody ever made shit up, nothing would ever exist.

Let's all come to an agreement here, shall we? It will make this whole thing easier as we continue. Making shit up is a skill. It may be a skill that you do not currently recognize or appreciate, like being able to whistle through your nose or snake a clogged drain. These are things that can be learned. And once learned, the skill level can be improved upon by repetition of action. The more one does a thing, the better one will inevitably get at the thing.

Repetition leads to familiarity. Familiarity leads to comfort with the task. Comfort with the task allows one to take more chances and find better ways to do the task. Finding better ways to do the task leads to the development of skill. Skill is important, because before we have art, we must have a level of skill. Skill is the platform that art is built upon.

Making shit up is also an art. I mean, if I didn't believe that, then the title and premise of this whole book would be even more suspect than it already is. Doing something artfully requires more than just the rudimentary functions of executing a task. It requires a certain amount of thought and intent. Skill needs to be exhibited in some way, consciously or not, but there for the eyes to see or the brain to experience. And anything can be artfully done. One can just as easily artfully plate an elegant dish as one can artfully pass gas.

The actual task does not define if something is artful. The same is true for making shit up, or if you are already tired of reading the word shit so often, having a creation mindset. Developing a creation mindset, where you can start to see possibilities everywhere, is a learned skill. It can be learned by anyone on a very practical level. It ain't magic and it ain't a divine gift to the specially anointed. No different from snaking a drain, the basic skills of how you develop the creation mindset just needs to be taught. Once the skill is learned, it can be artfully deployed towards any subject of your choosing.

Developing a creative mindset allows us to consider new possibilities or solutions to problems, be they mundane or great, practical or existential. Having a creative mindset allows us to exist in an environment where that mythical and elusive spark finds us, as opposed to us constantly searching for inspiration and meaning.

These are heady thoughts of the philosophical nature of making shit up. Exactly the kinds of thoughts that I find on the one hand inspirational and on the other hand entirely useless if not followed up with practical how to do it instructions. You can tell me I should have a creation mindset just as easily as you can tell me I must have a Kobe beef cheeseburger. Sure, sounds great. But where the hell do I go to get that Kobe burger?

In the chapters that follow, we will explore not only the whys of making shit up but the hows as well. Let's be honest with ourselves; since we are already bullshitting our way through a good majority of our lives, we might as well embrace that fact and learn to use it for good.

I'm an improvisational comedian. This is what most defines me as to who I am today. What I do and how I think comes from the fact that I've spent tens of thousands of hours making shit up in front of people.