Writing Characters from an Actor's Perspective: Introduction · 6:44pm Apr 28th, 2014
As authors, the very nature of how we craft our stories encourages us to treat our characters like dolls. We can write a million page character bio, study a hundred books about successful characterization, and watch people for hours, but not a single one of these things changes the fact that when we write, all the action must come from our fingertips. An author writes with one voice: their own. Characters are but one facet of this voice.
Contrast this with an actor, who is thrown together with a director, the script writer, and a bunch of cast and crew, all of whom have their own voices. Each person must work together to bring a small part of the larger story to life within the confines of the script. A book is a solo. A play is an orchestra.
So what is the role of the actor? Not to decide what to say: on Broadway, actors are legally bound to speak exactly the words in the script. Not to come up with some kind of vision for the play: that's the director's job. All they can do is take the script and the circumstances and play out their role as truthfully as possible within the given set of imaginary circumstances.
Now what do I mean by truthfully? I mean, if there is an event onstage, then it is in the play. No questions. If the set falls down, then in our imaginary circumstances of the play, a building collapsed. The actors must respond authentically and keep going on with the circumstances they encounter no matter how ludicrous they may be. Anything less is a lie.
Other actors' decisions are their own: it doesn't matter if you were planning to kiss Juliet on cue, if she suddenly decides your delivery up to that point was too piggish to believably kiss you, then you're getting slapped and you've got to deal with it, Romeo. Actors must walk the line between doing what they are expected to do and being aware of what has actually occurred in the moment.
The addition of extra voices reflecting on the action as it is being created is what makes acting fundamentally different from writing. However, that does not mean we can't use some observations from acting to enrich our own stories.
The simplest observation is this: if you write something, then it is in the story. If you have written it, then you must allow your characters to deal with its consequences in their entirety. All too often, we as authors want to steer the plot. The book must go where we want it to. In the process, we don't look for details that would make a reasonable character do something else. We've all seen the result: plot holes.
How do we prevent this? The authorial defense against plot holes is the time-honored pre-reader. When someone tells us that things aren't making sense, we go and rejiggle them so we can still get from point A to point B. It's a top-down approach. However, the other side of the coin can be found in acting: the bottom-up approach of allowing characters to react to their circumstances as they develop.
But until we observe that each character is an agent in and of itself, creating this reaction is difficult. Authors can get away with only knowing the motives of a few key players. In a play, however, there are multiple actors on the stage, each of whom could not act without knowing what his character -- star role, or extra -- wants. This means in a play that everyone knows how it ends, but in the moment, they are each vying for what they want, and they're playing for keeps. This is why plays are different from night to night and from theater to theater: sometimes Romeo chews the scenery all through act one, other times, Juliet stops him cold. By law, the words are always the same, but the actors fight out the delivery every show, and that makes all the difference.
It is the technique of fighting this battle between characters that I hope to examine over the course of this series. With some practice and reflection, I believe the reader stands to gain spirit and authenticity for stories of any kind. This Wednesday: The Actor's Toolkit, or Why Dialog Doesn't Matter.
Thoughts? Questions? Concerns? Throw them in the comments.
I love these kinds of blog posts
I realized at about halfway through a response to this that I was addressing the wrong point. It has to do with perspective still, and the nature of it within a narrative both on stage and off.
I would also point out that the perspective of an actor is necessarily limited as is a character's. But, where a character has no clue what is going to happen, the actor has rehearsed and rehearsed so that, barring the stage collapsing, he or she is ready and while another actor's response may not be what they expected, what they say will be the same regardless.
A character on a page has no such luxury.
I will tinker with my other response too, even if it doesn't really address anything you brought up and really only follows a tangent on perspective that came in around the time I was thinking about the insight of an author as to the mood and thoughts of other characters within the scene as opposed to that of actors and their necessarily limited viewpoint.
Interesting blog series you'll be starting. Continue.
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That's the idea
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I think the point you're missing is what I'm actually going to start covering on Wednesday: from an actor's perspective, the literal words are nothing. You memorize them in the first few days of a month-long performance schedule so you don't have to think about them at all while you and your scene partner tackle the real meat of the problem: determining your subtexts and how they interact. The words are constant, the subtext is not. Good actors should still be surprising their scene partner with subtext even into the final performance.
A character on a page has the luxury of having words put in their mouth by an author who knows what is to happen, knows exactly what each character's response will be, and has spent the last month staring red-eyed at five drafts of the same scene, polishing every letter for maximum effect. They never stutter. They say exactly what they are supposed to, when they are supposed to, and forget nothing. Any limits on a character in a book are imposed by the author.
Also: I like tangents. Tangents lead to comments. Comments are victory.
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I love it when people enjoy this kind of blog post!
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Perhaps I am thinking along different lines. I see the characters as people, not as actors. They have no idea what's about to happen, from their perspective. Celestia could lower the sun at noon and they'd have to react to that. It might be scripted in the author's mind, but the character in the story has no idea that's the case. To them, the sun just dropped out of the sky for no reason. They might never stutter in their daily lives, but to them, it's not because I had a hand in shaping their world. It's because that's how they are.
It's easier for me to think of them like that. Then they can suggest things that they would do as though they were standing on my shoulder and whispering in my ear. I might want them to do something, but when I try to make them do something they wouldn't do, they stop whispering and I'm at a standstill. I have to go back and find where it was that I made them act out of character and fix it before they'll talk to me again. Sometimes, this leads to a story ending up in a very different place from where I had initially planned it.
I'm getting better, though, at planning stories that will take the characters where they want to go given the things I set in their path. I may control the world, in other words, but they determine their own path through it.
To the rest, I have next to no conception of what an actor goes through on stage. I have a severe case of acting fright, honestly. So perhaps it was hubris on my part to try to imagine that and make comment on what I, personally, am ignorant of.
I am interested in reading more, though. I have a character in an upcoming story who is an actress and I would be interested in seeing how they live on stage so that I can make a guess as to how they would live, given everything else I give them, off stage with that to affect their perceptions. She is a young actress though, late teens. I would appreciate greatly any insight you might have into how acting has affected your off stage life. Nothing personal, of course. Just how it might change your perceptions of the world around you.
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Not quite sure if I'm following. I'm not saying to write as though Twilight is actually an actor who is playing the role of a small town librarian who saves the world on the stage that is your book. I'm saying that actors are people who have to take written text and bring it to life. Therefore, when you write the text, you can use some of their techniques to open up a new way of understanding what you write and how all your characters come together.
It's one thing for your intuitive understanding of a character to whisper in your ear as you type. It's quite another to actually have the words you wrote shoved into your hands and be told "you're Diamond Tiara today, so show me what that actually means." In one case, you're talking the talk, and in the other, you're walking the walk. If you work on the walk, you get better at the talk of the walk. The author's problem is that we get so wrapped up in the talk that we mistake it for the walk, and then you try acting and you're on the strugglebus. I'm still on the strugglebus as far as that is concerned. but getting better, I hope
Should probably come clean up front: this is based on a one semester acting class and our two assigned books. My prof/director is a graduate-level actor who's been in all kinds of plays, but I've only ever done three scenes in class, and the closest I've gotten to participating in a live theater performance was ushering. Most of this is based on the theory and stories my prof shared with us in class, reworked to be useful for writing. Useful? Yes. But I can't quite sell myself a professional actor
Most of the real off-stage impact I can remember is that acting is frustrating. I tried to meet with my scene partner every other day outside of class for rehearsal. Without an outsider who knew acting to tell us what we were doing wrong, private rehearsal can get grumpy. Neither of us quite knew if we were doing it right, especially because we were just starting out. Nights with no progress are sooooooooo frustrating. It's even more frustrating to come in and have the director (prof) give advice based on a completely different understanding of the subtext because he's read the play and acted it a good five times
Acting is also freeing in a way. You can come into the scene, and all the externalities of the words are taken care of in the back of your head. You get to attribute your actions to another non-present entity, so you don't have to be afraid that what you try will stick to you personally. Your face is present, but 'you' aren't quite there. Trying new stuff is expected, so on occasion, you can crank the ridiculousness up to eleven so long as you can keep a poker face.
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This might be an interesting story. Twilight wants a vacation, so she hires an actress to play her for a day. Shenanigans, naturally, follow.
I think I see now where I've been getting the wrong impression, and I quite agree, then. It's a different way of looking at how the characters interact.
I look forward to the rest of the series! Perhaps I will be a little less confused about the whys and the wherefores you're talking about.
This is kind of what I was looking for, actually. I suppose an actor, at least a stage actor, would have a cleaner mind. By that, I mean to say that a stage actor would be more able to leave behind the troubles of the past, because they have to do it each and every day. Does that sound about accurate?
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I am actually not sure. It sounds plausible on paper, but at the same time, there is also a break between stage and reality. You don't "move on" everyday so much as step into a place where your troubles aren't allowed (or you shouldn't let them follow, at least) and then you have to step back out at the end of rehearsal and there your troubles are again. I think escapism would be more likely than solution. But then again, acting does encourage you to analyze a situation, so it could act as a therapy tool for a troubled person to work through their problems.
Actors also make use of 'as if' statements, relating the imaginary circumstances of the play to the real circumstances of the actor's life in order to more truthfully play the part. If one's problems are big enough, it would not be unreasonable for an actor to find themself tying life problems into stage problems. That's a powder keg situation. Worse: I get the sense that actors like dealing with touchy subject matter, so the likelihood of encountering a situation that hits a little too close to home is high. People cry.
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Thank you again. That actually opens up more avenues that I had not thought to explore with regards to her character. I will have to sit down and look at her life to see what might be affected. I mean, she's led a pretty happy life so far, but... In an author's mind there's always a but when we say that... that's about to change. Or it's about to change for someone close to her. The actress is actually a secondary character whom the main character has fallen in love with.
Sorry. Rambly. Back to editing. Active setting, metaphor and simile are really powerful tools for conveying emotion. It's enlightening to see how using them lights up an otherwise dull action. But not overusing them. Spice is used sparingly, not everywhere.
... Rambly again. Bye!
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Feel free to PM if you find more questions. I'm not the most experienced person out there, but I'll do my best.