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STEVE CAVERNO: Hi. My name is Steve Caverno on behalf of Expert Village, and today I'll
be talking to you about playwriting basics. Now, we went over finding inspiration in newspapers
and we also went over some brainstorming exercises. Now, we'll look at how you might be able to
search through your local newspaper and magazine to find some inspiration. In this story, they
were talking about three men who were tortured by some drug dealers because they stole drugs
from them. And when they went to the police investigation, they told them that the drug
dealers had taken some hot cookies out of the oven to burn them with. And so, you can
see the comedic potential in the story where you have this big muscle-bound gang member
with tattoos all over his arm walking towards you with a Toll House cookie that's steaming
hot. These are some ways where you can see comedic potential in actually a real life
situation; believe it or not, fact is more alarming than fiction. In this one, we have
an incident where people we're arrested in Wal-Mart for drinking some lemonade and eating
some chips in the aisle. They were just so hungry that they had to eat some chips. So
in this, you can see maybe a scene at a store, maybe a general store in a play. And you can
see a guy just snacking on some chips in aisle and the guy behind the counter saying, "Hey,
what are you doing? You have to pay for that." and that kind of jumpstart an idea. Over here,
we have a picture from a magazine where it says, "Hello, my name is Dad." And you can
picture maybe this guy being at a business convention, a luncheon or something like that,
and there's someone walking up to him saying, "Hey, how's your kid doing? How old is your
kid?" And the guy saying, "I don't have a kid. My name is Dad," and then this offers
all kinds of comedic potential because when he was growing up, his dad would be calling
him Dad. So it's kind of an interesting little thing we got there. Also, you can cut out
a picture of a character. There's a girl in a bikini. So you can cut out that, that gives
you a character, then maybe you can cut this cop behind her then you have a cop, a girl,
maybe you have a fireman, you have a farmer. And this creates just different characters
just looking through a local magazine and cutting out the first thing you see and then
put them together and see how they interact with each other. These are some of the ways
to develop stories from your ideas with different articles and pictures in the world around
you.