I Picture Writing to Be Like Putting On a Play Where You're Every Actor · 10:37pm Apr 5th, 2014
It may sound obvious, but bear with me for a moment while I explain what I mean.
My eyes are somewhere in the back row, watching the play. Onstage are the actors. They look exactly as I want them to look, they act exactly as I want them to act, but most times, I don't see things through their eyes. I'm at the back of the audience. From there, I'm invisible; everyone is looking forward, watching the play. The actor's words come from my own mouth—an act of ventriloquism. Sometimes, when the situation calls for it, I become the actor on stage, but most times I'm back here, watching the audience watch the play.
Is that weird? I feel as though acting is an intrinsic part of writing. As the man in the back of the audience, you don't have to physically act, but you do have to act when you speak their lines and when you imagine the characters' movement. My voice, eyes, and mind are independent of one another. Sometimes I watch myself speak as one character from another character's eyes, while my ears and mind are somewhere in the audience.
This... abstracted view of my own stories is how I remain close, yet distant, to my characters and story. I could be one character's corpse or another's mourning, but I'm always the cold, uncaring man at the back of the theater, watching the audience watch my characters dance and die. I may let horrible things happen to good people in my story, but they aren't the ones I care about. The ones I care about are the audience, and all I want is to see them moved, one way or another.
Sorry if that got a bit pretentious sounding. I couldn't think of a way to describe it that didn't sound either stupid or pretentious, so I went with "not stupid". I've always pictured my relationship with my readers, my story, and my characters in this "theater setting". This was all prompted by someone who asked me what inspired my writing, so I guess the answer is "seeing people moved".
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Interesting summary. I pretty much do the same thing. I'm just a poor narrator
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>tfw that's already a gif
You know, I kind of wish I'd thought of putting it that way.
Hm. I like the analogy. It definitely feels like acting in a stage play when I write in first person. Maybe that's why it's my instinctive choice of perspective.
That's not weird at all. I was writing a script for a final project in my theater class, and I realized that writing a script is a lot like writing a story. So, of course it would make sense to go the opposite way as well.
Any writer of any story is, for all intents and purposes, God. Nothing happens that is not as we will it, and everything in fiction is ultimately linear in the extreme.
The trick is to put on a show capable of convincing readers otherwise, that it is the characters who think and act, that a dice really could fall on any of six sides, that choice and consequence and coincidence spiral around us all in a collage of colour and condemnation.
In the words of The Fallen One Whom Shan't-Be-Namelamealamed:
What a !