Original material

[clapchap]

How do you come up with original material? All good acts have something, a persona, a trick, a line. Do you get up every morning and list ideas (what i'm trying to do) and build off of them, or do you wait for inspiration?

[mini mansell]

in rather a nerdy way i use technology these days for this.

i have what i call original thoughts at the most irrational times.

just about the only thing i have as a constant in my life is my mobile (cell) phone. nit this piece of wonder has a built in dictafone, so if something pops into my mind its recorded there. else i forget it.

[Greedybogle]

I'm a rookie, so I'm not really in a position to give advice.

That said, I'm didactic and love to do it.

I go further than writing ideas down - I compulsively construct shows. They're not good, and they're not really supposed to be, but once they're written (or more often outlined), I look at them and take what's good, keep that for future reference. My best ideas, though, come from staring at these bad shows and asking 'what does this need?' I guess it amounts to the same thing as writing down ideas, but looking for a specific need helps to focus me. When possible, I try these shows out on limited audiences (like groups of friends or family) whose opinions I trust, with the caveat that the show is an excersize in process, not in product. If their responses jive with my own thoughts, I go from there. 99% of the time nothing worthwhile comes up. Once in a great while I hit on something I want to keep.

In my (limited) experience, this is the hard part of performing. Skills can be learned through brute force and hours of practice, showmanship comes with experience, but there's no easy way to come up with material.

[Steven Ragatz]

Attend MotionFest. It won't write your show for you, but it will get you one big step closer.

Steven Ragatz

[scot]

You can do any of these things. As long as you're trying, you're far ahead of most of us.

Something that helps me is going to open mic nights and trying to do different stuff every time. I work hard during the week and then pop out something, anything. The important thing is to be doing. Keep doing.

Scot

[Evan Young]

in my current juggling show I have a few origional lines. Some of them are lines I came up with in the middle of a show and decided to keep. Some of them are lines other performers wrote for me while watching me perform (I don't mind letting other people write for me). Almost nothing origional has ever come to me outside of a performance setting in regards to my current solo show.
Over the summer my friend Dave Cox and I would do late night street shows where we would attempt to improvise the entire act. We came up with some good ideas that way.
The most origional thing I have ever done had almost nothing to do with what I perform now. It was a piece for the final presentation at Circomedia. We started with my roomates big jungle cat character (he was an acrobat), I created a texas redneck(ish) hunter character, and it went from there. But that required a lot of direction from Bim Mason.
Good luck.

[jugglermatt1]

Original ideas usually spring up from endless variations of another original idea . If you do the same 15 min show every day for 2 years , then the result will be a much different show than how it started out .The best shows are not 100% original , the best shows are the result of ideas borrowed and endless variation .Put yourself in a place where you can do lots of shows , thats what I say .