How Improvisation Techniques Can Transform Your Writing
A couple of years ago, I found myself stuck on a crucial chapter from a novel I was writing at the time. I had mapped out the plot and character arcs, I knew exactly what needed to happen and when. Everything was in place. Yet when I began to actually write, each sentence felt like I was assembling flat pack furniture. It was functional, but devoid of personality. I had created the literary equivalent of overthought responses that feel clever in your head but fall flat on the page. I was so busy trying to precisely engineer everything that I forgot the reason why people are motivated to read fiction in the first place.
At the time, I was taking a course in comedy improvisation. This prompted me to think about the parallels between creative writing (especially drafting) and theatrical improvisation. Both involve originating something from nothing. Both require responding to what emerges rather than following a predetermined plan. And both suffer enormously when the creator becomes too fixated on being clever or correct rather than authentic.
Lessons from the Stage
One of the insights I gleaned from improvisational theatre is that adults aren’t more advanced than children, in fact in many cases, they are at a disadvantage. The education system, rather than developing our creative capacities, dismantles them in favour of being ‘correct’ and avoiding failure.
This has profound implications for writers. Most of us learned to write in educational environments that prioritised correctness over authenticity, structure over spontaneity, and cleverness over emotional truth. We learned to edit ourselves before we’d even finished thinking, to search for the “right” answer rather than the truthful one. It is, therefore, no surprise that writing often feels more like a test than a creative pursuit.
Perhaps the most counterintuitive insight from improvisation is this: the more obvious you are, the more original you appear. When you accept your first thought rather than searching for something clever, you’re actually being more authentic because no two people are alike. It’s only when we all start reaching for the same ‘non-obvious’ ideas that we become generic.
For writers, this is both liberating and terrifying. It suggests that the agonising over word choice, the endless revisions before you’ve even finished a first draft, the self-censorship that stops you writing what you actually think. All of this might be actively harming your work rather than improving it.
The LEO Paradigm: Logic, Emotion, Offer
One of the underlying principles of successful improvisation (and I would argue, successful writing) is that it requires balancing three elements: Logic (the story must make some sort of plausible sense), Emotion (the performance must feel authentic) and the Offer (what your scene partner gives you that you must respond to).
This framework, which I’ll call LEO for convenience, translates remarkably well to the act of writing.
Logic in writing is your plot structure, your argument’s coherence and your internal consistency. It’s the conscious mind at work – the editor, the planner, the architect who ensures your second paragraph doesn’t directly contradict your first.
Emotion is the authentic feeling that makes readers actually care. It’s not sentimentality or melodrama, but genuine emotional truth. This comes from the subconscious: accepting your instinctive responses rather than manufacturing feelings you think you ought to have.
The Offer is the trickiest to translate from improvisation to solitary writing. In improv, your scene partner makes offers: actions, statements, reactions that you must accept and build upon. In writing, your ‘offers’ come from several sources: the characters who develop their own momentum and start telling you what they’d actually do; the narrative itself, which begins to suggest its own direction; and most importantly, the unconscious material that emerges while you’re writing. This might include the unexpected phrase, the image that appears unbidden, the tangent that suddenly seems more interesting than your planned route etc.
The problem most writers face is over-privileging one element of this triad. Some become so obsessed with logical structure that their prose reads like a legal brief. Others chase emotional authenticity but produce incoherent rambles. Still others follow every tangent (every ‘offer’) and end up with a sprawling, undisciplined mess.
The skill (which can be learned) is holding all three in balance.
Acting Before Thinking: The Repetition Principle
Sanford Meisner developed acting techniques in the mid-20th century that complement the improvisational approach. One of his core tenets was that acting is “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” His method trains actors to respond instinctively to their scene partners rather than playing predetermined choices.
The relevance to writing might not be immediately obvious, but consider this: one of Meisner’s core exercises involves repetition, where actors repeat observations about each other until something shifts and authentic emotion emerges. The exercise short-circuits the intellectual, self-conscious part of the brain that wants to ‘act’ and instead accesses genuine, moment-to-moment responses.
Writers need a similar capacity – the ability to write before thinking, to let sentences emerge without the internal censor immediately demanding to know whether they’re good enough. The first draft should be improvisational in this sense: you’re discovering what you think by writing it, not transcribing thoughts you’ve already had.
I have noticed that my best writing happens when I am slightly ahead of my conscious understanding. In other words, writing to find out what I am trying to say rather than saying what I already know. A lot of writers will describe this feeling as ‘being in the zone’. This requires a kind of trust in the process that formal education actively discourages. We’re taught to know the answer before we write it down. Improvisation suggests the opposite: the answer emerges from the activity itself.
The next question then becomes: how does a writer practically apply improvisational principles? I have experimented with several approaches, with varying degrees of success and occasional complete disasters. Described below are some principles that I have found work well for me.
Separate Generation from Editing
In improvisation, the actor who is evaluating their performance while performing is doomed. The same applies to writing. Your first draft should be as close to pure improvisation as possible: accept what emerges, follow emotion, be ‘obvious’ without self-censorship.
Logic comes later. In revision, you can examine structure, fix contradictions, maintain coherence. But trying to do this while generating material is like trying to walk down stairs while thinking about each individual step. You’ll lose your balance and probably fall over.
Accept the Offer from Your Material
When writing produces something unexpected: a character does something you hadn’t planned, an argument takes an unforeseen turn, a phrase suggests a direction you hadn’t considered – that’s an offer. The instinct, especially for writers who’ve invested time in outlining and planning, is to reject it. “That’s not what I meant to write.”
But often these unexpected scenarios are your subconscious mind telling you something important. At a minimum, they deserve investigation rather than immediate dismissal. Some of my best work has come from following these unplanned tangents, even when they initially seemed to throw a hand grenade into my carefully architected plot.
This doesn’t mean following every whim or abandoning all planning. It means staying open to the possibility that your subconscious might know something your conscious mind doesn’t. Test the offer against emotional truth and logic, but don’t reject it simply because it wasn’t in your outline.
Status Transactions in Dialogue and Argument
One insight from improvisational theatre concerns status, i.e. the constant raising and lowering of social position that occurs in every human interaction. This is directly applicable to both fiction and non-fiction writing. Every line of dialogue is a status transaction. Every sentence in an argument is positioning you relative to the reader.
Understanding status makes dialogue more dynamic and persuasive writing more effective. It makes you aware that you are not just conveying information, but positioning yourself relative to your reader. Sometimes you want to be the authoritative expert, other times the humble inquirer asking good questions. Both can be effective, but you need to know which you are doing and why.
The ‘Being Obvious’ Exercise
Here is something I have started doing when stuck: I write down the most obvious thing that could happen next, or the most obvious argument I could make. Not the cleverest, not the most sophisticated, but the first thing that comes to mind. More often than not, it’s actually the right choice. It is only obvious to me because it emerges naturally from my particular perspective and accumulated understanding. To the reader, it’s simply clear and direct. Inspiration, it turns out, is often just being obvious and accepting your first thoughts.
The Deeper Implications
There is something more profound here than just writing techniques. What improvisational training reveals is that creativity isn’t a special gift possessed by talented individuals. It is the natural state of human beings, which education and socialisation suppress.
We learn to fear being wrong more than we value being authentic. We learn that there are ‘correct’ answers and our job is to find them, rather than discovering that interesting questions often have multiple valid responses. We learn to privilege the intellectual over the intuitive, the planned over the spontaneous, the safe over the truthful.
The result is writing that is semantically accurate, but dead. It is the literary equivalent of a corporate PowerPoint presentation: everything in the right place, nothing that might surprise or challenge or genuinely engage.
What both improvisation and good writing require is a kind of controlled surrender. You need enough structure to prevent chaos (logic), enough authenticity to make it matter (emotion), and enough openness to let the work surprise you (offers). Too much control and you strangle the life out of it. Too little and it collapses into unreadable chaos.
The Question This Leaves Us With
If the education system that taught us to write also systematically damaged our capacity for spontaneous, authentic expression, what would writing look like if we had learned it differently? What if we had been taught from the beginning that the first draft should be playful, exploratory, improvisational? And that logic and structure were tools for shaping what emerges, not straightjackets to prevent anything interesting from happening in the first place?
I suspect there would be more writers producing work that actually sounds like human beings rather than content-generation algorithms. We might have fewer people paralysed by blank pages and blinking cursors – or ‘witer’s block’. This might produce writing that took more risks, followed more tangents and surprised its authors as well as its readers. The blank page is just an empty stage. Your job isn’t to execute a perfect performance of something you’ve already rehearsed. It is to step out there and see what happens.
Now, are you brave enough to improvise?