Let’s start by admitting I was never really any good in my acting class.
At university I took an arts degree with a heavy dose of drama – the kind you see on a stage, not the kind you experience in life. It was actually one of the disciplines I seemed drawn to most, and I took some kind of theatre-related course every year, even if my “major” was in English, History, or Classics. Yes, I actually majored in all of those disciplines, at one time or another. I am, and was, a dilettante*.
So, I ended up taking several acting classes, and even doing some acting on stage while I was at university. Most of my stage time was spent with the Queen’s Players. We did cabaret – basically skits that were strung together with some kind of thin plot, peppered with popular songs. That stuff was fun. For me, it was about getting a laugh.
Are you having a laugh?
But let me tell you, that instinct did not serve me well in acting class. While I was busy trying to figure out how to get a laugh out of the part of Vladimir in Waiting for Godot (easy), or looking for the yucks in Taming of the Shrew (a little harder), my professors were tearing their hair out. They wanted me to think about the characters I was playing. They wanted me to connect my memories and experiences to the universal experiences portrayed by the characters. In my final acting class, my prof pretty much just gave up on me when I still managed to wring a laugh out of a scene I did from Long Day’s Journey Into Night (difficult).
He was kind of right. I should have been paying more attention to what my character’s goals were. I should have been channeling my sense memories, so that I could more faithfully reproduce emotions.
So, my apologies Professor Euringer: mea culpa. (That’s Latin for “my bad”, right?)
Still, I did learn something
But I was listening. It may have taken another 20 years, but all those lessons about how to create a real, believable character bore fruit. Just in my writer’s brain. Here’s a few that are especially relevant:
Internalization: What are the character’s goals? In life? In this scene? What motivates them? What makes them tick? Why do they think they exist? What is their purpose, not just to the story, but to themselves?
Externalization: How to describe their physical presence? Their quirks of movement or speech? How do I let their voice come out in dialog so that it seems unique, individual?
Observation: Just like actors, writers observe people. We watch them to see how to get our characters to seem different and real.
Emotional memory: What emotions or sense memories can I as a writer tap into, so that I can better let my characters have a rich emotional existence? Even if they don’t show it or talk about it, I like my characters to have a backstory and an inner life. I know, it sounds crazy, but I do this, even for minor characters!
Those are just a few of the key ones, and I didn’t even realize I was doing this until recently. So yeah, if you’re a wannabe writer, I’d recommend acting classes. They just might help you build great, believable, emotionally-rich characters.
And you can still go for the laugh. That’s where my professors were wrong. It’s okay to do both.
So why am I not acting anymore? That is another story.
*I mean this in the original Italian, less pejorative, sense of the saying, as a ‘person loving the arts.’ The root of the word is: dilettare ‘to delight.’
Photo by Azahel Calzada De La Luz
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