Howdy! How are you? No really, how are you? What’s new? How are your creative projects developing? I’d love to hear! In all seriousness, since moving the newsletter to Substack I’ve noticed that post views and subscriber numbers have gone up, but I don’t get as many replies from readers, and I miss the replies a bit as that two-way conversation is part of what I love about writing these. Maybe Substack has a larger readership but people tend to interact with it more passively? Anyway, if you’re a new subscriber and receive these in your inbox and ever have anything you’d like to share with me – thoughts on how any of this connects with your own creative practice etc – let me know! I love hearing from readers.
Anyway. Some thoughts on editing this week. I started exploring some ideas here a while ago about happiness and living in a perpetual state of wanting, and an idea that the psychologist Marie-Louise Von Franz called “the provisional life.” I really loved reading your responses and thoughts on this, and felt emboldened enough by how much those ideas resonated with readers to start developing a couple of projects off the back of them. One is a scripted comedy-drama about the pursuit of happiness, and that’s the one that was recently longlisted for the David Nobbs Memorial Trust New Comedy Writing Award, and I’m now in talks with a few production companies about possibly developing it, so fingers crossed that that continues moving in the right direction.
The other is an audio project which I’m now making as a podcast with the brilliant Ed Morrish for his company Lead Mojo, which made other innovative comedy podcasts like John-Luke Roberts’ Sound Heap and Rosie Holt’s NonCensored, both of which I’ve loved being a part of. I won’t explain everything about the project here, because it’s going to take months for me to make it, and there’s no point my giving everything away before I’m ready to launch it, but it’s a bit of a strange beast and Ed’s been incredibly helpful and supportive in steering me towards the best version of it. In the last week, I finally figured out what the essence of the show was while editing the pilot episode, and it’s made me think about what an important stage of the creative process editing is.
First up, those who’ve been subscribed to this newsletter from the beginning will know that the Therapy Tapes are named after a podcast I tried to make in 2019 that I abandoned because I couldn’t get my head round it. Ever since then, I’ve been determined that if I was ever going to make a podcast myself, I wanted it to be something with a narrative that used sound design and editing to tell a story that went to unexpected places, rather than just being a sit-down-and-chat podcast. Admittedly, last year Aurra Studios hired me and Alison Thea-Skot to make just such a podcast, and I loved making that and am proud of the show and sad we don’t get to make any more, so I bear no ill will to sit-down-and-chat podcasts – I just knew that if I was ever going to make something from scratch myself, I wanted it to be something stranger than that because that’s where my personal taste runs.
So the podcast I’m making for Lead Mojo is finally an attempt to deliver on that thwarted ambition, and centres around real conversations with interesting strangers – it’s not a “This week my guest is…” podcast, it’s an investigative podcast where I track down anonymous people who meet a predetermined set of criteria and then interview them about their lives, whoever they are and whatever they do. In this way, I wanted the core of the show to be a genuine human interest story about somebody doing something unusual. In the pilot episode, I chatted to a wonderful person called Keegan who had fulfilled his childhood dream of building his own robot.
When it came to the edit, I had to solve a basic problem – the conversation we’d had was really interesting, and explored all the ideas and themes I’d hoped it would explore. It wasn’t necessarily that funny, however, which is to be expected – I hadn’t set out to have a funny conversation but an interesting one that advanced the podcast’s ideas, hence why I was interviewing people from outside of comedy and showbiz rather than booking weekly guest comedians. But it did pose a potential problem for what was supposed to be a comedy podcast. Ed and I had decided early on that I shouldn’t try to make the conversation funny – often the only way to do that is either to impose a contrived and slightly competitive layer of jollity onto things, or to deliberately make things awkward and steer the conversation into uncomfortable territory that might create some unexpectedly weird moments, and I didn’t feel comfortable doing either with someone I didn’t know and genuinely just wanted to sit and listen to.
I knew that it was me, and the absurdity and unwieldiness of the project itself, that needed to be the joke, rather than anything Keegan said or did. The show needs to have total respect for its guests, and then find ways for me to be an idiot around them. I was excited to realise, then, while editing our conversation together, that there were certain incidental background moments that had happened on the edges of what we spoke about that contained the seeds of bigger, metafictional narratives I could impose onto the episode that would recontextualise everything we talked about. With a bit of sound design, I was able to make it sound like our conversation took place under very different circumstances from what it did, and by writing and recording various footnotes and asides, I was able to sculpt the conversation from something earnest and interesting but not particularly funny into something with a real core of silliness. I was able to do this while leaving the essence of our conversation – the human connection, the things Keegan talked about and shared – intact and unedited, so that I hope the finished product combines those two tones into something unusual and original. That process has really shown me the way forward with this project – the recording of the episodes can be undertaken with total sincerity, and the moulding of that clay into something funny and weird happens in the edit, not in the conversation itself. I’d love it if the lines between what’s real and what’s invented in the finished product are actually quite tricky for listeners to define.
People often underestimate the power of editing as a storytelling tool. The assumption tends to be that writing/devising and shooting/recording are where you do the bulk of the creative work, and editing is then just a technical process where you put everything in the right order (presumably the order you already decided on when you were writing/devising). This holds more true in a purely scripted project than on something that merges reality or documentary elements, perhaps, but even then, the edit is essentially the stage where you find out what your project actually is. The writing stage is where you map out what you’d like it to be, the shoot/record is where you do your best to capture those intentions, and the edit is where you sit down and go “Right, this is what we actually have, so how do we turn that into the best possible thing?” Often that means throwing away what you intended in the writing stage and discovering entirely new possibilities and combinations and connections you could never have anticipated until you started putting things next to each other and seeing how they actually related to one another. Miranda and I are finishing off the edit for Good Boy, the short film we shot back in February, and early on in the edit realised that the order I’d written the scenes in didn’t actually tell the story in the best way. One scene was moved earlier, two other scenes were swapped round, and the narrative built and developed and flowed so much better than if we’d remained committed to my initial idea of what order things should have happened in.
The edit is, essentially, a third writing stage, where you can completely destroy and rebuild what your project actually is, but this time, rather than conjuring ideas out of pure speculative imagination, you’re limited to building them out of concrete material. The more flexible you can learn to be in an edit, however, the more you’ll realise that that limitation is quite a small one. You are ultimately confined to the stuff you actually got on the day, but you’ll learn that the possibilities for what you can do with that stuff, and how you can make the different ideas speak to one another in different ways, are almost infinite.
A Cool New Thing In Comedy – This Sunday I’m filming my two most recent shows, Blink and Joz Norris Is Dead. Long Live Mr Fruit Salad. at Moth Club for Go Faster Stripe! Tickets and more information are available here, and if you book an all-day ticket you get access to all FOUR shows being filmed that day, including Sean Morley & Benjamin Alborough’s Terry Wogan Screams and John-Luke Roberts’ A World Just Like Our Own, But…
What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – I think my entry for this section this week is the same as it was a few weeks ago when Chris Cantrill and Sam O’Leary screened Good Luck Yonpey at Adult Film Club. This week, Charlie Perkins screened Good Luck Yonpey at the Paddock, and it got me just as hard as it did the first time. It’s a masterpiece.
Book Of The Week – Currently reading Respect For Acting by Uta Hagen, because I’m trying to transform into the Greatest Actor In The World, obviously. She says if you have to cut an onion onstage, you should never use a real onion because it will get in the way of your acting. You should use a potato that looks like an onion, and then remember a time you cut an onion, and let the memory make you cry. I dunno if I buy it, to be honest, but hey, sure, whatever.
Album Of The Week – I Inside The Old Year Dying by PJ Harvey. This is Harvey’s first album since 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, and I think it’s likely to be my favourite album of the year. It’s spooky and beautiful and weird and brilliant. It’s all about ghosts and goblins and lost children in the Dorset countryside or something like that. It’s mad and I love it.
Film Of The Week – Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny. This seems to have really divided critics and fans. I thought it was great fun! It does nothing to rewrite the rulebook, but I was surprised by how little it felt like a cynical cash-grab. It feels like a film with heart that had effort put into it, and yes it’s another legacy sequel tentpole blockbuster based on exploiting our nostalgia for old IP, but it’s a lot more sincere and fun than a lot of the other films in that territory, I think.
That’s all for this week! As ever, let me know what you think, and if you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, I’d hugely appreciate it! Take care of yourselves until next time, and all the best,
Joz x