I’m travelling around Scotland this week. Probably not the first place you think of visiting during a summer holiday, but what’s the alternative? Go there during the winter? Nice weather makes things nicer.
It’s been great resurrecting the half-hinged obsession I developed with this country after watching Braveheart as an eight year old. Yesterday I visited the manor formerly owned by Aleister Crowley and later, Jimmy Page on the edge of Loch Ness. I didn’t encounter any ghosts or lake dwelling creatures, but there were more than enough rolling moors to keep this hill country boy happy.
Next to the lake, there’s a writeup about a man who threw in the towel on ordinary life to live lakeside chasing “Nessy.” The bio (located beside the caravan he lives out of) all but admits that this man knows there’s probably no Loch Ness monster to be found, but a lifestyle selling model “Nessys” and foregoing a career as a burglar alarm installer makes it worth it all the same.
None of which touches on what this article is meant to be about, but I thought it was worth mentioning as a sidebar.
Getting to the point
On my first night in Scotland, I managed to catch one of the final shows of the Edinburgh fringe festival.
Being the final night (and a pay what you can entry fee) I knew I probably wasn’t in for the hottest talent the comedy scene has to offer. But a show is a show. Across the space of an hour, five comedians came on stage.
Two of them were good, two of them had me preoccupied with how illiterate some people are about etiquette as a member of the crowd— just because you’re not enjoying every second of a person’s set, doesn’t give you license to talk among yourselves— but one of the comedians was fantastic.
This comedian wasn’t even the headliner, but from the first moment he stepped on stage, he held the room.
He stood in front of the mike and let the silence stretch out. After seeing some of the less confident comedian’s on stage, this had the audience on edge—half-wondering if they were about to sit through a bad case of stage fright.
But then he spoke—calm, well rehearsed lines. With an intentional rhythm and evenly spaced punchlines.
Outside of his jokes themselves (which were good) the performance is what got me. It was the efficient choice of words, the use of empty air, the manipulation of expectations. It’s a form of hypnosis that you’ve only half consented to as an audience member.
I’m conscious that this reads as though I’ve never been to a comedy show before. Which isn’t the case. I’ve encountered the effect of live performance and how it does something to you that the same show viewed through video can’t achieve. But the difference in this case was the contrast of the comedians who came before and after. The amateurs who came before showed the importance of having high quality material, the headliner who came after showed how you can’t lean solely on solid material if your performance isn’t up to scratch.
I won’t linger too long on the parallels between this and the writing process. I’m sure you’ve drawn that comparison already. That stage presence and control of the room is the exact thing you are establishing with your first sentence. Each choice you make, each omission of unnecessary clutter in a sentence, contributes to the trust a reader has in you. Good choices build authority. They allow you to hold the room. Once that’s achieved, hopefully you’ve got something worthwhile to say. Do this and you might be able to take something that was entertaining and turn it into a revelatory experience.
Anyway, on that note of efficiency and focussed language here are a few pretty pictures that I took along the way.
