Minimum Verbosity: Reflections on Process

So, my ambitions of a carefully documented process have -- to the surprise of absolutely nobody -- largely fallen by the wayside; the combined stress of production week with a recurring illness left little time, energy, or inclination for meaningful reflection. Come to think of it, I've seen a number of these production blogs floating around (hence my desire to jump on the bandwagon), but they've rarely been compelling. Part of the reason for this is obvious: when you spend all day working on creating something, you don't want to come home and write about it; you're far more likely to want to curl up with a bottle of Guinness and DVD episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Y'know, hypothetically.

It runs deeper than that, though. Process fascinates me; but I don't really like talking about my own, at least not regarding a project that I'm in the middle of. Some of that's paranoia: I'm reminded of the fable about the centipede who, upon being asked how he was able to walk with so many legs, promptly fell over, unable to move anymore once he actually stopped to think about what he was doing. Some of that's superstition: every artist is Daffy Duck walking off the edge of the cliff, knowing that he's fine until he looks to see how far he has to fall. Some of that's insecurity: I've always been wary of people who seem to spend more time talking about art than creating it. (And it stings -- a lot -- that I've become far more well-known for my writing about other people's work than I have for creating my own.) A lot of it's just a desire for the work to speak for itself.

But it's something that I see among a lot of other artists, particularly comedians, this reflexive dismissal of self-analysis: every comic has a stock response to blow off those stupid questions "What is funny? Why do people laugh?" But they're not stupid questions: in fact, they're damn good questions. And nobody goes into show business without pausing at least once to ask themselves why they're doing what they're doing.

And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that good comedians are a lot like magicians, and a good joke is a lot like a magic trick: it relies on surprise and misdirection, and explaining it to the audience is a pretty surefire way to guarantee that it won't produce the desired effect. As E.B. White once put it, "Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."

(He then proceeded to discourse at length about what makes humor work. Some of us just can't resist.)

So I'm uncomfortable with it, and I find myself wondering what the purpose of a production blog is. Is it worthwhile, for example, for the audience to know that, halfway through the rehearsal process, I realized that our developing storyline was nearly identical to that of Parzival, an obscure middle German epic that's been the central obsession of my life? Probably not -- and, even worse, such knowledge might transform the performance itself, turning it into something ponderous and affected.

And yet, I know that I devour all the background information I can get on entertainment I enjoy. If I hear a song I like, it's not enough for me to listen to the song: I want to hear the whole album, to get a sense of the environment the work emerged *from*. Exhaustive, even invasive probing for background has actively enhanced my enjoyment of the work it produces: it seems somehow absurdly hypocritical for me to then want to be able to remain an invisible part of my own process.