This post breaks deconstruction (aka Armando which seems like a silly name when you don’t have the context and even sillier when you do) into two ways to make pulls from the Monologist (the Armando). First, choose how close you want to stay to the monologue: Primary, Tangent, or Abstract or close, medium, or far to keep it simple.

Then decide what kind of thing you’ll pull—theme, character, object, relationship, location, emotion, or voice/sound. Mixing one distance with one lens gives you a clear, playable initiation every time.

Part A — pulls by distance (close, medium, far)

PRIMARY — Close; replay what was done or said and heighten that pattern to absurdity
TANGENT — Medium; take one specific element from the monologue and relocate it in time, place, perspective, or scale
ABSTRACT — Far; take a concrete image or detail and use it in a nonliteral, surreal, or metaphor-made-literal way

Part B — lenses you can use to pull with

  1. THEME — use the monologue’s central idea as the basis for a new scene
  2. CHARACTER — create a generic or archetypal version of someone from the story
  3. OBJECT — start from a physical action or prop and let it drive the scene
  4. RELATIONSHIP — reuse a non-primary power dynamic from the story in a fresh context
  5. LOCATION — set a different premise in a place that was mentioned
  6. EMOTION — match a key feeling from the monologue and apply it to a new situation
  7. VOICE/SOUND — borrow the speaker’s cadence, repetition, or sonic vibe to shape a new scene

The key thing is to just pull one thing at a time until you are at least halfway through your piece. Doing callbacks too early before you have really explored the ideas from the monologue will leave you with nothing grounded to work with. No one needs a one-way ticket to Crazy Town.

For the record, people rarely enjoy an exact replay of the monologue. Even if you pull the speaker in a nearly identical way, you have to find a twist on it. It is called a deconstruction because you are pulling the monologue apart and once you have a few nice new pieces to work with, you can start to put it back together again. Happy building!