Name: Impro for storytellers
ISBN: 9781135863807

What Hacker News says

shanusmagnusNov 2017

"Impro for Storytellers" by Keith Johnstone is so relevant to pretty much everything about life and communication that I'm reading it the way people used to read the bible -- every night or two I take it off the nightstand and read a random passage, and think about it.

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flycaliguyJul 2016

I'd recommend Impro by Keith Johnstone. He also has a sequel of sorts called Impro for Storytellers but having read both I'd say go with Impro.

It's actually a really interesting read in our modern age of status update storytelling. It deals directly with the art of "status play" as the key to being amusing. It's amazing how much of making people laugh and enjoy your company comes down to managing your display of status and being able to diminish it for other's pleasure.

I have the curse/gift of growing up in a Maritime family with deep Scottish and Irish roots. Talk about a group that values the art of diminished status.

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anatolyDec 2015

Non-fiction, best to worst:

Henry Marsh, Do No Harm. A brilliant memoir by a neurosurgeon about his work, the nature of his profession, successes and mistakes (especially the latter). Frequently touches or verges into the personal. Not morbid, but often sad.

Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers. Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater

Two very good books about improvisation, although Spolin's is too dry and theory-laden for me (it's meant for teachers more than practitioners). Both, however, pale compared to Keith Johnstone's earlier Impro: Improvisation and the Theater, which is a life-changing book about what improvisation can teach us about spontaneous creativity and relationships between people. I recommend that one first and foremost if you know nothing about improvisation and are curious.

Martinus J G Veltman, Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics. A readable account - necessarily simplified, of course - of the current state of affairs in elementary particles and much of the last 50 years of history, by one of the participants (a Nobel prize winner). Not as organized and methodical as I thought it would be, and half a year later I forgot most of the physical explanations, but it was an interesting read.

Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies. A thorough examination of the hundreds of horrible examples when "natural" societies studied by anthropologists have customs that are not only bad from our modern Western point of view, but arguably fail in achieving their own objectives. The whole book exists to counter lazy cultural relativism of the "maybe we don't like X, but if they do it, it must be for a good reason and it must be a useful adaptation for them" kind.

Michael Harris, Mathematics Without Apologies. A very eclectic and idiosyncratic book by a mathematician on the sociology and epistemology of mathematics as a discipline. To be appreciated for its wealth of ideas and references to other interesting books and theories, rather than for any particular argument or thread.

Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. A story on what happened when a psychologist tried to bring three psychiatric patients, each believing themselves to be Christ, together and to talk it out amongst themselves. Happened in the 1960s. The idea is more interesting than the outcome.

Fiction, best to worst:

Patrick O'Brian, The Hundred Days. The penultimate book in the series of the best historical novels (the Aubrey-Maturin series) ever written, by a huge margin. The series transcend the genre and I count the Aubrey-Maturin books among the very best books I read in the last decade.

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle. A brilliantly written coming-of-age story about a girl growing up in an impoverished family occupying a decaying castle in the English countryside, set in the 1930s. Reminded me in many ways of Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, a novel in the similar genre (but with a younger protagonist) that's known much less than it deserves.

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo. If you read and liked Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude, this one is shorter, darker, involves many more dead people, and you may want to give it a try.

Alfred Hayes, In Love. A story of a man obsessed by love in a mid-century NYC. Unexpectedly touching, very convincing psychologically.

Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background. SF, a grand heist novel set in a advanced civilization living in a star system located unimaginably far away from any other stars and galaxies, and so doomed to a lone struggle with its own long history. A wealth of technological and social ideas you'd expect from Banks. The ending felt a bit forced.

Gene Wolfe, There Are Doors. Gene Wolfe, Nightsite of the Long Sun/Lake of the Long Sun.

Gene Wolfe is the best writer American science fiction produced in the last half-century. "There are Doors" is a pretty weird fantasy novel about an alternate world where men die after their first intercourse (as some spiders do in ours), and the hero travels back and forth between that world and ours. It's good, but not as strong as Wolfe's best, which to my taste is the Book of the New Sun tetralogy, the novellas in the Fifth Head of Cerberus collection, and many of his short stories (well-collected in The Best of Gene Wolfe). The other two are the first half of the "Book of the Long Sun" series that I'm still reading through.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed. Superb political SF about an imagined anarchist [anti-]utopia. A serious attempt to describe a human society with no central power structures and no ownership. The hero is a physicist born and raised in that society who escapes to a sibling planet with the more typical modern states. This novel took all the awards in the 1970s when it was published, and deservedly so.

[cont'd]

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oscilloscopeAug 2013

"Yes, and" refers to one of the techniques of improvisational theatre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvisational_theatre#Applyi...

Basically you must accept the reality your scene partners put forth and build on it. Otherwise you end up with a confused, amorphous environment with no clear direction.

Improv theatre still needs tension and conflict to emerge. This comes out of the structure of the scene spontaneously. It could be some kind of repetition, pattern, contradiction, physical motion, etc. Ideally, the players don't just rehash old games but are eager to make a new, unusual play.

"Unusual" in this sense relates to the context of the world you're playing in. In a scene, it's not unusual for a coven of witches to kidnap children and boil them in a brew. But it could be unusual for a scientist to discover that brew has miraculous healing properties and to publish the results in Nature. This could be humorous to an audience, because normally there's absolutely no legitimate utilitarian imperative to mix children into a brew.

There are more interesting ideas in improv that relate to politics/business. I recommend anyone interested check out Impro For Storytellers by Keith Johnstone.

http://appliedimprov.ning.com/profiles/blogs/7-keith-johnsto...

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