If a mad tattooist is to attack you, it's a mistake to discuss the rumors about a mad tattooist, but a stranger an admire your skin, and force you to strip, because the audience still won't know what's intended.
-From Impro For Storytellers by Keith Johnstone
There is a line that's important not to cross with specificity. Too much explicit leading in a scene diminishes the surprise. It blows the joke. Too little, and you might not be communicating enough with your scenemate.
Young improvisers tend to do this swing of the pendulum: OK I need to be specific and add information! And then everything about a premise is made perfectly clear very early on... which means you get locked in to a trajectory. And the funny reveal has been ... well... revealed. So now you're just doing the things we expect you to now. The magical has become procedural. The tension has been dropped.
This gets easier as trust and confidence with who you're playing with increases.
But, hell, most things get better with that, right?
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