Speaker's ToolsLet me just sum up here before we go to lunch. When we started out the basic aspect of writing is you get your subject or you get your topic. What is the first thing you should do? When you decide you are going to write an essay or you are going to write a monologue or you think, my God, I want to write something about my school, college professor. I want to...
Answer: Write your Association List.
John: You make an Association List. What does an Association List consist of?
Answer: People, Places, Things and Miscellaneous.
John: People, Places, Things and Miscellaneous. And you try for how many in each category the first time?
Answer: Ten.
John: At least ten. Then you set it aside and what you would actually do is say, 'let me write two or three Reverse jokes. Let me write two or three Combo Jokes. Let me write two or three Word Play jokes.' You would actually do that. I'm breaking these out. We're doing just the Combo or just the Word Play - to illustrate them. But when you start to get comfortable with this, they start running together.
Also keep in mind that these techniques in the real world are not found as pure as these exercises. Sometimes you'll find something that's partly a Word Play, partly Reverse, partly Exaggeration, partly Combo. That doesn't really matter. I isolate these or at least try to isolate them to illustrate them fully. In the real world, like anything else... You know how when you are in school and learn the way the world is. And then you find out from the real world it's a lot messier than they taught you in school. It's the same thing. But the principals remain the same.
So we have Exaggeration - when you are exaggerating something, what you do is you focus on the trait. You remember automobile? You can exaggerate an automobile on how long it is. You simply make a list of other things that are long. What else is long? The United States is long. It's a long automobile, on the rear end I have a Mexican license plate and on the front it's Canadian. It's a long automobile. Same principle. Doesn't matter what your trait is. You make a list of people, places, things and you go back and cross pollinate with the original list.
In the Word Play, you look for words that have double meaning. And in the Combo you take some aspect of your automobile - the fact that your automobile has paint on it - you would make an Association List for paint. Michelangelo, uh brush, canvas - go back and put together the traits. Combo is different than Exaggeration. Understand the techniques.
So, so far we've done the Exaggeration, the Word Play and the Combo. When we get back from break we'll do the Reverse and then we will polish these ideas into a chunk of material that has a beginning, a middle and an end that will seem seamless. Then we will talk about selling the material that you write. So give yourselves a little applause for the work you've done so far today...
