The Encyclopedia of Interactive Performance

When you’re improvising, you need ideas. Some ideas are related to what’s already going on. Some ideas are better when they’re completely unrelated. Random access is the ability to generate a random idea instantaneously.

Doing random access is tricky at first. The conscious brain wants to be in charge of everything. Unfortunately the conscious process can get in the way of speedy spontaneity. The good news is that there are some things you can do to build up your ability to do random access.

A conscious process that is admittedly slow, but will help you find a random idea is the alphabet tool. Think of a letter of the alphabet. Think of a word that contains that letter. There’s your random idea. The alphabet tool is a stop gap that you can use while developing a faster technique.

To build your ability to do instant random access, make the random access drill a part of your regular warm-up. Set a timer for one minute and see how many unrelated ideas you can get to pop out of your mouth without thinking. No relying on crutches like naming things you see in the room or calling out things that are blue. Wait for ideas to show up without any conscious thought process. It may be slow going at first, but it gets faster and easier the more you do it.

When you can quickly call up random access words, you have the seeds for all kinds of offers: names, activities, locations, professions, book titles, relationships, wildcards. Any offer can be inspired by a random access idea. It’s one of the secrets for how to think quickly.