Comedy Career Q & A, Part 5: Hone Your Voice
Alicia: Creating a show was the thing that gave me a commodity rather than a specific thing that people could latch on and say that is for me and that could be for me whereas just having comedy as a generic thing can be really challenging.
So who is your community? Who are you? What’s your identity? What’s your personality? What’s your perspective? What are your feelings? Like who are you and what do you care about? Help us care. Help us get to know you and give us a sense of what you care about and what’s important to you and what do you want us to care about and not care about? I think having, the two biggest keys are having persistence and where you just keep going and you keep improving and you keep getting better and having a voice.
Able: Yeah.
Alicia: That’s unique.
Able: Yeah, in doing informational interviews with entertainers and teachers and stuff just because it’s been such a long time tap into creativity that I don’t know how to market myself anymore. So yeah, characters, like I can do a lot of voiceover cartoon characters and then songwriting. So, I’m trying to figure out how do I combine these things, do I combine them, where would I put myself?
Alicia: Yeah. I think another piece would just be creating videos. I would if I were you, just experiment starting to make videos and have that be the place where you and I did this once. I did a daily video and I only sent this to one person and only one person saw it. So it was like a safe experiment.
Able: Oh, okay.
Alicia: Because I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was just committed to, I’m going to make a video every single day and it ended up being a lot about my creative process itself. Oh, my God, I’m making this video. A lot of that and then a lot of spontaneous stuff happening and it was really interesting.
Able: Okay.
Alicia: But you might make a video every day, but it’s a voice discovery process is how I would think of it.
Able: Okay.
Alicia: It could be you’re doing videos of your music and eventually you’re going to go okay, this is really working and at some point you know you might do a week of videos and then there is one where you say this is it. I have to post this.
Able: Yeah.
Alicia: I’m about to sneeze. Oh I’m human.
Able: Bless you.
Alicia: So, you’ve got a week of videos and one out of seven might be a really good one to post and then suddenly you start to have a video every week that you put out there.
Able: Okay.
Alicia: And if it’s fun and funny and people watch it, you start to build people who have never seen you out in the real world who are starting to follow you and want to see you and you start to get a subscription base going. You start to get an email list going and then you start to get a following of people that are like oh, I want to see the musical, comedy, improv comedy act.
Able: Yeah.
Alicia: And follow you. So really having that inside out process could be the way that you begin to develop an audience of people who come to see you live.
Able: That sounds like a safe way to slowly build up an online presence for myself because I follow a few YouTube comedians, but actually I don’t know if they did that, but it looked like one of their first videos suddenly went viral and then they became famous that way.
Alicia: Yeah, you can’t have a viral video if you don’t have any videos.
Able: That’s true. Yeah.
Stay tuned for part six…
Alicia!
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