using pain as experience for comedy and character, and how to keep busy even when you're busy

I'm having another sleepless kind of night, where I find myself going to bed a little bit too early and napping too often in the afternoons. So here I am awake at 3:52 am writing another blog post. I'm finding the note taking process for this really therapeutic, an open honest space where I can write about my own creative process and how it relates to my writing, comedy, and character development.

Talking with a couple creative friends of mine, one an actor, and one a comedian/editor, I've found that sometimes it can be really difficult to put yourself in a place where you can be creative all the time. As much as we tell each other, man I just want to work on comedy, I just want to go act in a play somewhere and move to LA and really go for it, life presents a very real challenge of having to balance adulthood responsibilities with dreams of being a performer and making shows and movies.

Not everyone makes it big in their twenties or even their thirties, and it's this kind of rationale that keeps me going in hopes that I'll make it there some day soon. Within my notes, I constantly write little positive reminders to myself that, "hey, you're paying off debt and saving to make a show!" and "hey, you write all the time and are SO close to actually creating a real show that you're proud of." I've been writing these little positive reinforcements to myself for a long time. It's a bit easier now that I'm taking notes with my phone, where I can delete some redundancies, and I can always have a place to go back and look when I'm finding I need some comforting. I remember a few years back my friend Dominic found a handwritten note saying "YOU'RE OKAY! EVERYTHING IS OKAY!!" in one of my novels, and he told me he wondered if his friend was just fucking insane or cliche or what. I mean probably a combination of all of three.

There are a lot of real adult things that we have to deal with before we get to the actual creating part. Personally, I've been working three jobs lately in hopes of saving up some money to create a show, but also to pay off some very real credit card and student loan debt that I've been busy accruing in my mid twenties. I've had kind of a childlike view of my own personal finances, and it wasn't until I put two grand towards a credit card that I realized, "wow, I have a lot of fucking credit card debt." How much interest have I been blindly paying off while drugged out and not moving forward in my life? Thousands, most likely. I've been really determined in paying it off and reducing my overall monthly payments, so that if I do move to New York or LA I won't be bogged down by a negative financial situation.

I know this part isn't really that interesting, but it's what I'm going through, and I know for a fact that everyone my age is probably in some kind of debt, or is at least trying to improve their financial situation. The high interest stuff really bothers me, but it's really comforting to know that I have a real plan for eliminating my debts and saving for the future. It took me a long time to find sources of income that I like, and I feel are worth my time, while also giving me the time to write and reflect and take in the world around me. I feel like that is one of the most important things in making yourself feel better about your situation, to have a mental road map of where you want to be, and the steps you need to take in order to get there. Creating characters, creating a show, and having the money to do it, it all feels so real to me now, and I really do have peace of mind knowing that I'm taking all the right steps to get there (well, maybe). Even thinking of alternate creative projects, like training with some world class magicians for a while after the show is done, helps me not put all my eggs in one basket, and gives me things to constantly look forward to in the future. Without that (and I really went a long while without giving myself a lot of hope, at least creatively), it really feels difficult to be able to be positive about a full day's workload, and to feel inspired and hopeful about what tomorrow and the day after that might bring.

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I work for a search engine in the mornings, sorting through various twitter feeds and news articles to update search results so they appear at the top of the feed. At nights, I drive for a local restaurant, which gives me time to listen to the news, or whatever NPR podcasts or interviews are playing for the evening. It all helps keeps me informed of the world around me, and to think about different topics that I might not necessarily think of while hanging out with my grungy friends at a house show.

It's really interesting to see what the internet is searching for every day. Lately there's been a lot of turmoil and heartache (well I suppose there's always stuff like that in the news), murder and natural disasters. Our future is looking kind of bleak with all these viruses and climate changes, and what seems to be a lack of interest in communicating about the racial and cultural divide in our country. Trump, Hillary, Ryan Lochte, and Colin Kaepernick have all been dominating headlines lately. So have KIM KARDASHIAN ASS, KYLIE JENNER ASS, AND KHLOE KARDASHIAN. There are a lot of famous 19 year old people in the world I found out.

Anyway, all this searching gives me time to write about things that are completely irrelevant. I know I said it was inspiring to learn about what the internet searches for, but what really inspires me is my own anxiety towards how successful other people seem to be, and my own guilt about living a life that is completely happy and free of any real tragedy, while still being jealous of Kylie Jenner's ass. I mean, why the hell am I jealous of a nineteen year old girl with a big ass? Is that what I want to be? Do I WANT to be a nineteen year old girl with 65 million instagram followers? In a way, fucking probably.

And here we go, some real time character analysis and character inspiration! Maybe my doll character Chelsea is really inspired by Kylie Jenner, or is at least doing exercises to improve her own physique. People that might not necessarily inspire me, may inspire what my other characters are doing. Yangley isn't really a musician, but finds a lot of inspiration in listening to the Police, Wheatus, and Savage Garden. Tony is inspired by all the christian meetups that are happening in 2016, all the praise and worship and devotion to god that all these different celebrities have and don't have. Silver bobcat just wants to be a fucking hero like that kid who survived a brain eating amoeba, going so far as to giving himself a brain eating amoeba but having to be hospitalized several times and being upset that he hasn't gotten any media coverage because of it.

Patrik is inspired by people in the sex industry, kidnapping girls in his "DISNEY CHANNEL" van and taking them to the set in hopes of a future acting career. He's also the one who put ryan lochte up to what he did, in order to rig the olympics to make a fortune in Vegas with his earnings going under the radar in the national media.

I'm cutting myself off a little short there, but hopefully you get the point. Your characters can be shaped and influenced by the things you see in the news, and the anxiety or feelings you have toward celebrities and politicians and natural disasters. Feelings aren't always black and white, and neither are your characters. It's important to flesh them out constantly, to give them new traits every now and again, new hopes and desires and role models to keep things fresh and to help give you ideas on what they're aspiring to do next. Without that goal in mind, not only will your characters fall flat, but you probably will too, at least creatively.

I'm getting a little sleepy, so I'll get more into how pain can influence your art, and the correlation between my own pain and creativity a little later. I guess if anything, my main point in this post is that you should constantly be trying to integrate your experiences and the world around you into your art as often as you can. When you hold it in all the time, it doesn't really turn into anything other than anxiety or a false sense of knowing what's going on. Try to find inspiration in the smallest places, in things that you hear, in things that you see in other people. Really try to be good to people, and understand them in the same way you try to understand yourself. I can't tell you how often I see some dum ass teen musician or punk in their 20s trying to be cool while hating their parents completely ignore the world around them. Be more culturally sensitive. Interact with people who aren't like you, but remember to interact with people who are like you too.

Take notes as often as you can. Some people seem to be under the impression that although I'm taking a lot of notes, it doesn't mean I'm actually writing. To that I say, nobody goes up to a fucking painter or a musician halfway through a composition and tells them, "well this isn't fucking ANYTHING dipshit!!! When are you actually gonna CREATE something!?" Then when the painting or the song is finished they're like, "fukking FINALLY! something i can SEE!!!"

That's how I feel about taking notes. I don't know how people write or create without them.

Oh, and remember to listen to as much new music and watch as many films as you can. I've been getting a lot of inspiration from those two things alone, even while working a busy schedule. It's important to consume art from different people. It's therapeutic and inspiring and just a great way to get out of your own stupid head. Here's a list of movies I've been watching lately, cause hey why not

MOVIE LIST FOR THE PAST COUPLE WEEKS:

kasparov vs deep blue documentary
the boy and the beast
spirited away
the wind rises
birdman
her
the grand budapest hotel
...random one piece and naruto episodes at age 29

With love and compassion and insecurity,
-G

ps. i think all my characters should be in crippling debt too

character traits - hopes, dreams, fears, quirks, costume

Hey everyone! I'd like to start off by thanking all of you for being so supportive of my creative endeavors over the years. It really means a lot to me.

I've been in a creative mood again lately (it takes years sometimes to get enough inspiration to start creating in the way that I do), and have been thinking a lot about new characters. My friend Dan, who I've been talking ideas with lately, was asking me about what kind of work I put into my characters to flesh them out and make them feel more alive and real- whether or not I actually try and use a method-acting type approach to designing and becoming a character, which I replied, absolutely.

Some of the first things that come to mind when designing a character have to do with personality traits, interests, hopes, desires, fears, past events, present environment, and things that might happen in the future. Just like a character in a novel, I think it's extremely important to think about all of these different things - to really try to make a character feel real, and at the same time likable. Although I really pride myself in making my characters seem really unintelligent and quirky in their own ways, I don't want them to be so outlandish that they are annoying or frustrating to deal with. I want them all to be likable in some way, to have some kind of earnest and sincere quality that makes them relate to the human experience.

For now, I'll list some of the things I think about with each of my different characters, and how I actually went about creating them from start to present.

My first real character that I did in public was Yangley. I had a vague idea of him in my head, an outward representation of all my own personal anxiety and dorkiness. I knew right off the bat that I wanted him to have a kind of asthmatic type of breathing, kind of slurping his own breaths and talking as if he had a permanent type of headgear or retainer in his mouth at all times.



I didn't really know much else outside of that, but as I started to add different character traits, things became more fleshed out over time. One great way to start developing a character is to actually work on their costume before even thinking about personality traits. I was listening to this great interview with the woman who does the costuming for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, and she was saying how she feels like what a character wears does as much to explain their thoughts and their mood and their personality as a line in the script. I completely agreed.

Yangley's basic outfit consisted of a corny backwards hat with part of my hair going through that hole you see in hats for some reason (pony tails?), glasses that were always on crooked (with the tag still on), a very unstylish t shirt or sweater, and some pajama type pants. I remember always trying to tuck in his shirt awkwardly, with the pants ridden up quite high. These are all kind of stereotypical things I think about with the "nerd" type look, minus maybe a pocket protector and a calculator.

His character was very undetermined when I first started. I remember vaguely tossing around ideas with my friend Richard in Montreal. It was my last semester of university, and I remember feeling very bitter and disillusioned with my life as a writing major. I seemed to like a lot of the kids I was in writing workshops with, but there was something about the pure English-lit majors that really bothered me. They were a bunch of 18-21 year old snobs who found solace in reading, and seemed to have no qualms in putting down others who were not as well read as they were. Even then I remember thinking that that was a really fucked way of treating people. After doing so many magic shows and interacting with people of different cultures and class backgrounds, I find this to be even more the case now. English lit kids are the worst. There's nothing worse than a bunch of kids putting you down because you don't know the difference between James Joyce and a bowl of fucking croutons. I still don't!!

Anyway, I remember joking around with Richard that I should pretend to be a character for an entire semester during one of my final classes at Concordia. I had wisely made the decision to take most of my difficult classes my junior year, which resulted in having to take freshman level classes my senior year. There were a couple kids in some of my classes I remember always giving people haughty and pretentious looks whenever they said something out of the ordinary, or whenever they were unsure of themselves in relation to literature. It made me cringe every time. What a terrible way to treat people, and to treat yourself even. If reading and writing without life experience is all somebody cares about, they're bound to end up being a pretty terrible person.

So I thought to myself, well, if you're going to make fun of people for not being sure of themselves, how about I be the most UNSURE person in the fucking world? How would you react to that? And so, Yangley was born.



The first time I did Yangley was actually in class. I still only had basic ideas of what I wanted him to be, and that continued on even after the class was over. I just remember that first day when Richard was sitting in class, not even aware I had come dressed up, and I loudly started stumbling down the stairs, exclaiming, "GAAaAAAAahhHHHHHhhhhHhHhHH!!!!!!!!" the whole class stopped what they were doing and stared as I bumbled out of the classroom. That was when my love of becoming a character was born.

To be able to challenge what people think of others, and to push them to their boundaries in terms of comfort and accepting what could or could not be real, that's something that I love doing to this day. There are a lot of characters I've been working on since then, and there are a couple that I'm working on right now. As I (well, IF I) continue this blog, I really want to explore each of the different characters that I've worked on, and talk about what makes each of them tick. Sometimes it's something as simple as a costume idea (pATrICK came out of these really big fobby sunglasses and dragon hat I got from a flea market in Florida), or something more to do with one certain personality trait (my newest character would like to become a psychic medium and do tarot readings while transitioning into a real doll).

Thanks for reading so far, and hopefully I'll be able to update soon about various other characters that I do, and some ideas I have coming up. I'll end with a really quick summary with some basic traits and costume things that help me get into character and think about what makes each one of them tick. Some of them are more fleshed out than others. But as time passes, sometimes I'll think of different personality traits that really makes things click in my head. One of my favorite things to do actually, is to think about the community that each character might be a part of, and completely immerse myself in that for a while. I think that's probably pretty standard for a lot of people who create characters, actors and writers and such.

(also I wanted to note here that sometimes it's just as important to interact with OTHERS in order to get a feel for how your character would react. it's hard to actually know until you go out and do that.)
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PaTrIk - super baller asian,  iMmoRTAL Pill, big fobby sunglasses, dragon hat, hookers, gambling, drinking foUR LoKO, making sure you're FukKINg BaLLer and NoT WeINEr, making FUN of geORgIE for BeinG An ArtISTPH HaHaHAHAH

Tony Summers- christianity, earnestness, worship songs, being an aussie. i started this job working for a search engine, and i had to rate this site called "reset 2016" which involved a million christians (literally) packing themselves into a mall to pray and to be "TOGETHER 2016". one of the speakers wore a headset mic, which i felt Tony 2.0 should probably have. would like to someday do fake sermons in real churches

Silver Bobcat- being an overweight superhero with family problems. based on a character that I can't even seem to find anymore that appeared on a single space ghost coast to coast episode. his voice is based on what i remember bobcat goldwaith sounding like on space ghost as well (its not very accurate when i go back and watch that interview)

Sling Blade - cyber goth raver (since he's mostly the costume, I had difficulty even coming up with a true character. I watched so many videos of people doing cybergoth dance, and didn't learn much about personality, except that all of them REALLY FUCKING LOVE cyber)

Yangley- extremely dorky, doesn't know what's going on, often confused, terrible sense of self awareness and fashion, all of my anxiety pent up into one person. as i told richard once, if i don't do yangley... i BECOME yangley... :(

Jerry - based on "hacks and tricks" guys i see on youtube a lot. really like irrational thinking and get rich quick scams. since i don't really look like someone from the south, i started doing these videos without showing my face, but still in a southern accent. for some reason getting rich quick has a lot to do with living in the south. maybe that's just based on all the "shop at home" infomercials i watched as a kid. i mean wow, i remember just sitting there for fucking hours and hours at a time watching shop at home sell beanie babies for thousands and thousands of dollars. time well spent.

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new characters:

"haley" real doll  (not sure about the name yet) - wants to transition into a doll full time. really wants to make it in this crazy fucked up world as the person she's always wanted to be. looks up to other doll people for knowing what they want and being brave enough to transition into dollhood in their lives. does tarot for some reason. likes to dress like a gypsy.

juggalo gospel / juggalo massage - okay i have no idea but i mean.. hahahahahah

"ultimate beta yangley" - i really like the idea of going out in public and interviewing alphas and regular people on how they feel about alpha males, but being as beta as i possibly can while doing the interview. yangley's probably the best person to do this. he's usually been too scared to do interviews with people, but it's for a school project so..


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that's it for now. wish i had more ideas, but I think i have plenty to work on right now. my goal (don't laugh!) is to make a pilot for a show with a couple friends of mine and submit it to adult swim or other networks, maybe online. a friend of mine claims to know the president of adult swim (he's made music for them in the past), which made me REALLY motivated to start making videos again. i've been taking notes for a long time (do NOT underestimate the power of consistently taking notes), and feel like i'm finally ready for all this creative stuff to burst the fuck outta me.


cya soon!!
 l o  ve
 -  g