The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 364 - Into the Woods

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: Hello, Jennifer.

Jen: I have just returned from a week in the woods, where I was working on a creative project. And I thought we might unpack some of the trials, tribulations, and lessons learned after creating something from nothing.

Pete: You know, sometimes I feel like you live in a movie set, as an Australian, watching these Hollywood movies unfold for my friend. Going into the woods to create...I don't know, I think of a writer going into the woods to write a book. Or for you, going into the woods to create, I'm sure, something extraordinary. It feels like a movie. So you've got to tell me more about what happens when one steps onto a movie set, and steps into the woods, and comes out with, I hope, something worth sharing. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: Yeah. I was deep in the woods, Pete.

Pete: I mean, is this a cliche for you?

Jen: Well, I was in the literal woods and I was in the figurative woods at the same time.

Pete: Right, right, right.

Jen: But like, there were so many deer. Like, so many deer that driving was really an obstacle course.

Pete: Wow. Again, as an Australian, it's hard to imagine. For us, I guess it would be driving along and there's so many kangaroos.

Jen: Oh my gosh. That's such a great, amazing thing.

Pete: Wait, wait, wait. So tell me, what is this all about? You've gone to the woods to create something. I'm sure there's more to this story than that. You have an intention. You have a hope. You have a dream. You have an outcome.

Jen: I wandered into the woods.

Pete: Yeah. What happened? What is this all about?

Jen: Okay. So my dear friend and client, Shereen Ahmed...look her up.

Pete: Oh, I love Shereen. I know Shereen.

Jen: She's sensational. Anyway, she was asked to create a solo show. And so, I am directing this show and helping her create it. We were invited by the Forestburgh Playhouse, which had just closed their season. And they host a couple dozen artists after their season closes, for this essentially like a writing and creating retreat for a week.

Pete: Like an intensive, kind of off-site thingy.

Jen: Like a major off-site for creatives.

Pete: Right. Cool.

Jen: So, Shereen and I went up there. And Drew (my dear friend Drew, who did the music for this show) came up for a couple days as well. And basically, our task was to create a shitty first draft of a solo show, to be performed by Shereen, based on her life story.

Pete: Alright, alright. So, we have some sort of desired output of this week, "We're going to create a shitty first draft of a solo show, based on Shereen's life." Now, I could ask a bunch of ignorant questions about what a solo show entails. Is there a time constraint on a solo show? Is there general parameters you're working within? What does a good solo show look, and sound, and feel like? Is that important?

Jen: I guess the best way to describe what we're aiming for, for folks who have a Netflix subscription, would be like watching a Netflix stand-up special that has some songs in it.

Pete: Aha. Now, you're speaking my language. Stand-up specials, yeah, I know them all. Alright, I got you. I got you. So, "We're going into the woods with one of the most brilliant people we know, and the hope is that we will turn her life into a solo show of some description." Cool.

Jen: Yeah. It was really wild. So, there were lots of lessons learned. Maybe the first thing to just say is that we literally started with nothing.

Pete: Right.

Jen: We didn't know what sort of structure we were going for. We didn't know which chapters of her life we were going to share stories about. We wanted to incorporate music. We did not know what songs she was going to sing. She arrived with a stack of sheet music, most of which was never used in what we ended up presenting. But we just really had no idea what we were going to do, so we basically went into these brainstorming sparking sessions and tossed ideas around. And what was very interesting, Pete, is, Shereen had done some writing on her own. But when we got into the room together, what ended up being the most useful way to write was to turn on the Otter app and just talk it out. And then, we had a transcript of the script. Instead of having to stare at the screen and come up with the perfect words, we were like bouncing them back and forth. And there were times where I literally grabbed chunks of the Otter transcript and put it into the Word Doc script, and how it came up in conversation is how it was delivered on a stage a couple of days later. Because at the end of the week, we did two presentations of what we had created.

Pete: Wow. I mean, I facilitate a lot of off-sites for corporates and leaders and workshops, so I have some nerdy questions. Are you two sitting around just having a conversation with your voice recording app on? Is that what's happening? Do you have a, "We're going to do a whiteboarding session first, on all of the key milestones of Shereen's life?" Or did you just make it up? I'm so intrigued. Because it feels like it could be overwhelming, going, "We have a week. We have nothing. What the hell do we do? Where do we start?"

Jen: Honestly, at first it was overwhelming. But one of the things that was very helpful is the people who organized this week-long festival gave us a production calendar that had our work times listed. And what was so great is it was like kind of arbitrary, but it was so helpful to have them say, "You will work from nine to one. And then, lunch is from one to two. And then, you'll work from two to six. And then, dinner is from six to seven. And then, there's a creative session from seven to ten."

Pete: I love this.

Jen: And these sessions, there were no rules. They were just like, "Go into the woods and do something for four hours." But we knew that we had these four hours. And so, we were going to have a beginning, middle, end to this session.

Pete: Love this. It reminds me of the time, I mean, I've done a couple of these solo off-sites. (Which we've done episodes about, I'll put them in the Box O' Goodies.) And one of my key learnings was like, I just wrote an arbitrary agenda for myself.

Jen: Right.

Pete: And shocker, it was really helpful to go, "Well, it's 8:00 a.m., which means I have to start now,” and, “It's 12:00 p.m., which means I need to stop and have lunch." And that constraint or rule was super helpful, yeah.

Jen: Yeah. That was very, very helpful to us.

Pete: Okay, great. So, we've got time constraints. We've got an output that we're hoping to get. We've got voice recording. We're talking. We're singing. We're laughing. I feel like I have this vision of you guys sipping whiskey on a leather chair, as you're musing about what this could be.

Jen: It was more like sipping tea on an Adirondack chair, but yes.

Pete: Oh, nice. Nice. Now, we're talking. Yeah, okay. So what else did we learn, apart from the beauty of these constraints?

Jen: Well, we used actually a lot of the prompts you and I have discussed in the past, of generating ideas by starting with, "This might be the worst idea in the world."

Pete: Yeah, such a good filler.

Jen: I would say 80% of our ideas started with that, "This might be the worst idea in the world," or, "Bad ideas lead to good ideas, right?" And just sharing every possible thing. So, I think taking the pressure off of needing to have a good idea.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: And instead, just have any idea and say any idea out loud. Having that be the culture of the moment was very helpful.

Pete: Yeah. Because I could imagine...I mean, you even said it, that like success was the shitty first draft as opposed to success was the finished product. Because what I imagine could happen in these intensives is you go in on the, call it, Monday. And by, I don't know, Sunday, you're meant to have this output. And I'm like, "I want to be creating the Sunday thing on Monday."

Jen: Right.

Pete: "I want to just write the finished version immediately." But what we know, what people far smarter than us have mused on and talked about for eons, is, you can't possibly do that without getting a bunch of crap out. You have to get the shitty ideas, the bad ideas, the rubbish ideas, the perhaps threads of a good idea out first. So I love that you used those tools of framing it as a bad idea, which encourages you to sort of uninhibited share ideas without fear of what Shereen might think.

Jen: Exactly. And so, there was so much freedom, and play, and a lot of laughter. And sometimes, we would challenge ourselves to see how ridiculous we could make something. And quite frankly, some of the most ridiculous ideas we had are the ones that we kept.

Pete: Nice. I love that.

Jen: And maybe it's also important to state that we had a collective objective for the week, which was to land on a shitty first draft of the show. But Shereen was going to have to be the one who literally got in front of an audience that paid money to see this shitty first draft, and deliver it. So, she had her own objective for those presentations. So, as a collective, it was like, "Let's get a draft of this." And then, for her, it was, "Get through delivering the draft in front of people." It wasn't like, "Sound amazing," even though she did. It wasn't, "Be utterly charming and hilarious," which she was. It wasn't, "Rip my heart open and put my guts out on the stage," which she did. But it was just, "Get through this draft in front of people."

Pete: I like this sort of lowering of the bar of what success looks like. That feels important. "I don't have to change someone's life just yet. I just have to get through this draft."

Jen: Well, and what was really interesting is we did a presentation on Friday. Then, we had Saturday off to work and most of Sunday off to work. And then, we did another presentation Sunday night. So we did the show, the shitty first draft version, Friday night. And then, Shereen and I, we worked and worked and worked. And by Sunday night, we were on draft eight.

Pete: Wow.

Jen: I'm not joking. We were on draft eight. But we didn't have a chance to rehearse draft eight. And our commitment was to present the first draft of the show. And her objective was to get through the first draft. So even though we were already in another time and space in the future with the script on Sunday, she did the thing that we had committed to do.

Pete: No way.

Jen: And what was so fascinating was we learned so much from watching the first draft a second time, even though we were already on draft eight in our writing process.

Pete: Yeah, that feels hard. You've already moved on. "I already know this part in draft one is crap, so I've already rewritten it. But now, I'm going to go back and do it."

Jen: Yeah, which is why it was so necessary to have stated these objectives at the beginning of the week. But yes, I mean, if you ask her, I'm sure she will tell you that was hard. It was like, "Oh, we already fixed this part, but I'll do the part that's broken."

Pete: There's something so obvious, but so important in this idea of having a shared collective objective. Because what I see very often working with leadership teams when they're doing an off-site is a lack of clarity in what that collective objective even is, or if you've got eight leaders in a team, eight separate objectives and no shared collective objective. And so, what can happen is it becomes really frustrating for the facilitator or for the people in the room, because they're not clear in the first place on what we all are here actually trying to do. It's shocking how common this is. It's wild. So write it on the white board, "This is the one sentence summary of what success looks like. This is our collective objective. Everything we do filters back to that one thing." And then, holding yourself true to that (which you did), I think that's so important.

Jen: Yeah. Another thing that came up many times throughout the week as we were figuring out which version we were going to actually present is, we came up with some things we really, really loved and they didn't work within the context of the show. So even though we loved them, we had to cut them. I mean, at one point, our music director, he came to us with a stack of pages and said...I mean, I'm talking like inches thick. And he was like, "This is what we've cut so far. Say goodbye to it. I'm so proud of us."

Pete: Oh, wow.

Jen: And I was like, "Wow. That's amazing, how much we've cut."

Pete: Yeah. Cutting as the bar of success, though. That's really, that's like a celebration of what we've cut.

Jen: Yes. What are you willing to let go of, even if you love it, in order to find the thing you're actually looking for? That was a big lesson of the week.

Pete: Yeah. I love that. I would almost flip it for myself, to go, "What are you holding on to that's prohibiting you getting where you want to go, or prohibiting you from delivering on the thing you want to deliver?"

Jen: Ooh. Yeah. That's rich.

Pete: It could be an existential crisis coming.

Jen: Okay. Something else that I think is just really important to say, we as a society are just obsessed with product and perfection. And the whole point of this week was process, process, process. So when we got into our rehearsal with all the technical elements, to decide what we wanted it to look and sound like and how we wanted it to go on the literal stage in front of people, we decided that what we wanted to do is show everyone that it was in process. Like, not try to pretend with the audience that it was farther along than it was. So, we decided to have one lighting cue. That's it. We really didn't change the look of anything. We had Shereen bring her laptop out and read from the laptop, in certain moments. We kept it very transparent that we were in process. Which sounds very scary to put something unfinished in front of people, but I think people really appreciated and maybe even loved it more because they got to experience something that wasn't pretending to be perfect. It felt very human, very raw, very true to the experience of making something new.

Pete: That's fascinating. I mean, the first thing that came to my mind that feels like that is, my favorite type of podcasts are the ones that feel like the guest or the person is sharing something that is this raw process thing, that doesn't sound like a polished answer that they've said a thousand times. And so, I actually prefer those kinds of raw, messy, conversational podcasts more than the super high-polished, almost documentary-style podcasts. And I think part of it is because of that. It's like, it feels more human. It feels more real. It feels more relatable. Because I know my mess and my process. And I know at times that I've had, if I was to get up in front of a bunch of people when I was in that stage, I'd be like, "I need to read this off my screen, but it feels like you can't do that." And so, to see someone else doing it, it's like, "Oh, she's human too." There's something so relatable about that. Especially in this, like you said, in the world we live in, it's obsessed with everything looking perfect on Instagram, or everything appearing to look perfect in written texts because of AI, or whatever it is. There's something that's becoming even more alluring about the imperfection of humanity, I feel like.

Jen: Yeah. Actually, at one point, she gets to this sort of epiphany of the show. And I won't give it away, because I want you all to come and see it when we do it for realsies, as they say. But she gets to this moment in the show where she has this major epiphany, and she literally turns to the audience and says, "I haven't figured out how I'm going to tell this part of my story yet. But basically, the thing that happens is...," and she sort of like explains the life lesson. And then, she sings the song that's going to come at that point. And people were crying.

Pete: Wow.

Jen: She didn't even tell the full story. But just like seeing someone be so vulnerable and say like, "This part is going to be really hard for me to share, and I don't know how I'm going to do it yet. But let me tell you sort of like what the punchline is. And then, I'll sing the song," it was intense.

Pete: I love that. Yeah. That feels better than the polished show at the end, yeah. I want to see that part.

Jen: It was great.

Pete: Wow. Okay. How are you thinking about...well, maybe you've still got the after-glow, the after-effects of being in the woods for a week. Is there a way to bring some of these learnings in one's day-to-day when we're not in the woods, when we're living our lives? Like, what's translatable? Versus maybe part of it is, it's actually not translatable, and there's some benefit in going into the woods sometimes to create stuff.

Jen: Well, if I had to sort of like sum up the big takeaways, it's: "You need structure. You need freedom. You need to hold on to things. You need to release things." Those are sort of like the big takeaways that we had. And we have more iterations of this coming up. We're not going back into the woods, but we're going back into that writing mode. And having structure, having freedom, making things we love, and being willing to let them go are going to have to be like core principles of our work.

Pete: Yeah. I love those four principles. And I want to add a fifth, which is to: "Have someone else."

Jen: Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, that's the key. Right?

Pete: That, you didn't do this alone. Shereen didn't do this alone. Like, Drew came in for a few days. There was an audience that was there at the end. That, you can't possibly have created or made so much progress, I don't think, without the feedback and the bouncing around that happens when other people are in the room. That feels like an important fifth.

Jen: Yeah. If you want to make something from nothing, it's better to do it with other people.

Pete: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.