Monday musings: Method writing · 8:54pm Aug 17th, 2015
There are 2 school of acting in English-speaking films: the American way, or method acting, and British acting. As the Guardian says,
This difference is encapsulated in the classic confrontation on Marathon Man where Dustin Hoffman was delaying proceedings by searching for his character's motivation. His scene-mate was Sir Laurence Olivier - tired, perhaps, and exhausted by theorizing. At one point he whispered to Hoffman, "Just pretend."
(Or, alternately, "Try acting." That's an interesting link, BTW, for different reasons--it says that Americans assume that people who speak intelligently are evil. I've always assumed it's because people who aren't evil probably aren't very intelligent. 
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The method actor works from the inside out, trying to understand the character's motivation first, so he can discover how the character walks, talks, and drinks his coffee. The British actor works from the outside in, trying to find a combination of clothing, mannerisms, and speech patterns that fit the lines and each other. A famous British actor (I can't remember who, and neither can Google) told the story of how a character fell into place once he found the right hat for him, and told actors to "let the hat do the work!" A joke about the Star Wars prequels is that the British actors were so much better than the American actors because the Americans were trying to discover characters that weren't there.
Not coincidentally, these are the main two ways of creating characters on the page. Google quickly shows somebody else already thought of this and is trying to make a buck off it: Dick Bentley teaches a course at the U of Mass and by mail on "Method Writing".
"The method", imagining a character's past, her emotions and motivations, corresponds to what writers are usually told to do. The key point of both method acting and good character writing is the same: Each character, in each scene, must know what he or she wants.
But method acting adds more: the method actor is supposed to intentionally use pieces of his past to create the character. He tries to create the emotions in himself that the character feels by remembering similar things that happened to him. I confess I don't do this intentionally, though I might accidentally.
My first reaction is that for writers, "method writing" is right, and the British approach is wrong.
Here a Scottish acting coach gives 10 reasons why he hates method acting. Most of his reasons sound like laziness to me, and his arguments against "the method" only prove that it is the correct way to create characters:
3. Unnecessary Focus on Emotion
Acting is not emotion. Acting is action. The incorrect focus on emotion comes through an embarrassingly arrogant view of Stanislavski’s work that was developed by Lee Strasberg and called The Method. We do not have control over our emotions. We have less control over them when we’re under the kind of stress that actors feel on stage. If we could control them, we’d be robots and no longer need therapy, counseling or Prozac! You can fake emotion (badly) and you can force out some tears, but that’s not much of a basis for acting. Truly great acting moves the audience, not the actor.
Wow, this is such bad advice for writers. I believe your writing should move you first of all. A story is ready for writing when thinking about it would make me cry a little. Theoretically. If I did that sort of thing. 
(It's also wrong. Acting is not emotion? That's defining the problem away. But it's a physiological fact that appearing like someone appears when they have strong emotions sometimes requires having those emotions, because some facial movements aren't under conscious control. We do not have control over our emotions? Not if we refuse to try to have control over our emotions, no.)
It's true, though, that making the motions associated with an emotion can create that emotion in you. So maybe you can start with the cliched actions of a movie hero or villain, and get from there to emotions. Maybe.
I don't think so, though. Actions are always cliched. Every action has been done a million times before. Actions are generic, and give rise to generic emotions. Good character motivations are not generic. I don't think there's any way to pile up enough actions and mannerisms and odd bits of clothing to generate a distinctive character. Maybe for an actor, who (though you wouldn't know it to listen to them) already has a character complete on the page before him.
6. Psychosis
The Method’s ill-educated and misguided approach to tinkering around in the mind of the actor is frightening. Stanislavski gave all of that up in favour of an approach focusing on ‘action’. Your own psychological state is not the playground of an acting teacher; you don’t know what a potentially explosive minefield of unresolved issues that you are poking around in. Messing with that stuff isn’t brave, it’s stupid.
In other words, he says, Don't go poking around inside your own head; you might stir something up. Which I think is the main point of writing.
7. Self-Indulgence
When you’re a Method-actor, you do ‘research’. You go off and learn to fire guns so that you know how a soldier feels, you learn Swahili so that you can say three lines in the film, you talk to real prostitutes about their craft to play Prostitute Number 3 or interview real criminals to play ‘Second Crook from the End.’ It's an excuse to do something fun and call it work, but:None of this will help you play the scene. I’ll say it again, NONE OF THIS WILL HELP YOU PLAY THE SCENE.
That's stupid. If you've never spoken to a real prostitute or a real criminal, you shouldn't play one on television. 
But I think this is a disagreement about what storytelling is rather than about how to act. If the only point of storytelling is to entertain, regardless of whether you're telling truths or lies, then, sure, why bother portraying reality accurately?
He gives us one point to ponder. Point 9, the method takes you out of the scene: Pausing to recall your own similar experiences, besides slowing you down, may lead you back to the exact circumstances of your past rather than toward the things that belong in your story. I'm not saying you shouldn't pause to recall your own past while writing. I don't, not often.
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Comics have improved since 1776.
To be fair, that did kinda kill Heath Ledger
Personally, I write characters from their core personality, and their experiences, but with an interesting twist: those experiences, their past, don't have to be complete when I start writing them. That past just forms naturally as I write more of them, somehow. I dunno how that happens, but whenever I am in a situation where I need to know how a character would react to something, the relevant background just comes all by itself.
Even stranger... the events in that past often spontaneously click together to form interesting insights into past events. None of those are ever planned, either
My muse is a strange and mysterious creature.
I think this is the heart of the matter, for actors. It's a question of whether you can get into the character as written, or whether you feel that you can rediscover the character in your own way. Depending on the actor, the play, and the playwright or screenwriter it can probably go either way-- we know from our own readers that sometimes some people can just get it, even deeper than we can, and sometimes it's just words on a page for them (in which case, if they were forced to convey it, they'd probably need a trick to reconstruct what you already wrote.)
They're both actually getting to the same place, just via different routes.
As authors, we aren't reinventing, we're inventing. We need to construct it, and we need a lot of raw material to work with to do it.
That being said, I've fallen into the pit of prewriting for entertainment. You get all the "working on something" points while you read things and answer questionnaires about your character and setting well past the point where you're discovering anything you didn't already know about it. By the time you're taking the Meyers-Briggs as if you were your character, you are well past the point of "writing a story" and into "messing around on the internet," but it's hard to admit that. So getting too into "method writing" can be dangerous as well.
I'm not quite sure how I feel on this. I often don't make any conscious effort to try to get into my characters' heads when I write them—or at least I don't think I'm doing it. But a lot of what I feel are the most interesting choices in my stories come from places where I'm writing and suddenly decide that I can't see a character making a decision I'd planned for them to make, or suddenly seeming like they ought to feel something I hadn't been accounting for.
I've also thought, for a long time, that one of the better ways to flesh out an OC you want to write with is to start writing vignettes with that OC, possibly even straight-up fourth-wall-breaking conversations between that OC and the author:
And now I've got a bit of a feel for what this character might act like. Which really is kind of a method exploration for characters, even though I don't feel like that's what I'm doing.
I guess the point of greatest interest for me is whether it'd help to try to make this a more conscious part of my process, or whether it'd help to just keep going the way I've been going and see how things work out. I don't usually wind up feeling like characterization is one of my big weaknesses, but I don't have the clearest view of how my own writing works anyway. Hmm.
Something common to history and personal experiences seems to be "You can't make this shit up." And that right there is the great filter between stories written by those in the know and by those who read the cliff-notes.
Interesting post BH, and I think it helps affirm why I like method writing.
( Ed, you're fine. Anyway, people come to Bad Horse's blogs to argue.
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Everybody else, I didn't see the first two but judging from the third, Ed is deleting perfectly innocuous comments because he feels bad. I think we should totally pretend this isn't Bad Horse's space and share the magic of friendship with Ed until he feels awesome, like he should.
When I look at actors, I see two types: The Clooneys and the Oldmans.
With Clooney you always see Clooney first, then you see the character.
With Oldman you never seen Oldman at all, usually only realizing it was him when the credits roll.
I like Oldman better.
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That's just the makeup, though. American actors despise being unrecognisable on camera
a prostitute and a criminal? I have one friend who did both. maybe I should become an actor now
I don't usually feel remotely this way until after everything's drafted and written up. Odder still, I won't realize I made emotional connections till after I'm done. I lose myself while writing on the whims that befall me, and sometimes can't fathom the connection emotionally as well as I could as just a reader.
I've only really felt teary-eyed towards one fic while writing, and I recall you enjoyed it.
I suppose I'd fall under the British school of writing: Start with an idea and blow it up until you have a grand explosion masterpiece. :D
My initial reaction here, uncultured swine that I am, was to be surprised that this was a cultural divide. I know that method acting had its supporters and detractors, but I didn't realize before today that it was largely seen as an American/British thing. My next question was "wtf, why?" but luckily, BH's article touches on this.
So, being overly articulate comes across as unnatural or even evil, and (American?) audiences prefer something that's perceivedly more "natural." While interesting in its own right, I feel that this has great relevancy to Bad Horse's additional topic of method writing.
"Cuz y-you see," said Pav, out loud to himself, "when I'm... talking out loud, trying to convey a point with... speech, i-instead of... instead of being a written character, in a book, there's lots of... stammers, and starts-and-stops, and in general my point is probably not as, I dunno, tightly knit as... a... character in a book would talk. Not even Fluttershy." He laughed.
You do occasionally see dialogue written "true to life" like the above impromptu example, but generally only when dialogue and speech patterns themselves are the focus of the story. As an example, perhaps Conner Cogwork's Ah Ain't Got no Ack-cent, maybe? But more often than not, dialogue is how we show the character to the reader, and it is part of the story's pacing, and therefore like everything it is subjected to polish and fine-tuning.
I mean, that's not strictly to say that "method writing" and "editing your dialogue" are incongruous. It is a challenge though. I've certainly tried to roleplay scenes in my mind's eye, having each character just say whatever comes to "their" mind. And it leads to natural and organic scenes, but it has its problems. As a writer, I've got an outline that says that I want Twilight to foreshadow X, and I want the scene to end at Y so that it transitions nicely to the next scene. What if the dialogue is natural and great, but misses these criteria? Do I simply do a Take Two and get the characters to try again with something that fits my
railroadingvision? Do I toss out the outline and go with this because it's "what the characters want?" Or do I turn to discipline and say that I must use well-constructed dialogue to adhere to my original outline, ere I end up with a one-million word monstrosity?I'm not going to talk about this as an actor or prose writer, I'm going to talk about this as a screenwriter, the median between the two. And as a bonus point, I'm an Australian: We exist as the perpetual permanent middle ground between Americana and British culture, and acting is no different. I've seen a fair split of both styles consistently.
As a screenwriter, you're not allowed to put too much of your character's personality beyond the archetype into the script: You don't have the space, you don't have the format, and it's not your job anyway. 1 page of script needs to translate to 1 minute of screentime; It's why most feature scripts hover around the 100 page mark. Also? You can't (or shouldn't) put tone of voice in dialogue, like you would in prose. Or reactions past the broadest strokes.
I repeat: You have neither the space nor format to be able to convey a character beyond what they explicitly say and do. Which is enough for you as a writer, but for an actor interpreting it, there's a lot of work to realizing those words into a flesh form. It's actually really impressive to see happen.
One script I wrote, simple skit about a guy who catches a burglar robbing him so he negotiates what is and isn't allowed to be stolen for insurance reasons, has a moment written like this:
That sort of sets the tone for the script as a whole.
Simple scene. Very basic. I had a very clear idea for the characters in mind when I wrote it, and they stay true to that for the whole product. So what happened when we auditioned actors?
My God, there were so many variations. Some saw Rob as a desperate loser with no social skills. Others saw him as an anti-hero who was taking advantage of the poor guy stuck here dealing with him, like a used car salesman. One guy was smarmy, the other was desperate, another again was overjoyed, one was miserable, and all of them were absolutely correct. There wasn't enough on the page, and none of them contradicted what was written, and every different interpretation of the character added something to the story.
And you can read even just that scene again with all those different ideas for the character in your head, and every single one changes the entire tone and context of the story.
So, I'm inclined to say when you're writing prose, the method style is absolutely appropriate: You have to control every single aspect of that character and convey it to the audience in absolute terms. For that, nothing but complete consistency and concrete ideas will do. You're conjuring as vivid and definite a mental image as you can.
As an actor? The British style, I think. Working with method actors annoys the hell out of me, because they don't get good results, they get one accurate one, and they take longer to do so. It makes it harder for them to explore what works for the scene, and it makes them rely on natural emotions rather than commanding the ones needed for the scene. Some insist on total quiet on set so they can get into character and that pisses me off because, hey, it's not like lighting and art departments need to be constantly communicating with each other before a shot, right? British style? Just start the camera, I'm good.
So what about screenwriting then?
Screenwriters have to take the middle ground: You need to have a completely self-consistent and internal character. But you're not going to end up deciding who that character is or what they'll be past their choices and interactions. You're not the only person filling this character up: A director and actor will be interpreting your work when you're done with it to see what they can do best. Which means you can't afford to be as rigid as you would be with prose; You gotta write what's the most entertaining without breaking what little character you have established.
Anyway. That's my rant.
Thanks for this post, BH. I think that there are time to write by method and times to write by process. I generally think process is for planning and plot and that method is for characters.
I have a little example, in this case the internal thought process of a young girl in a space suit, who has never visited Earth.
This is an actual concern for actors in long-running series. They spend so high a percentage of their waking hours (particularly on soap operas) being someone else, that they have been known to alter their personalities and behavior. Recognition of this syndrome and the beginnings of treatment for it was something my cousin was instrumental in.
But in writing, you're modeling a whole world full of characters, and unless you're doing a seventeen book series, first person, of a serial killer, you should be fine. Although... thinking about it, writing in the third person omniscient, might give one a bit of a deity complex.
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I think the Method has some major advantages, but the best solution is somewhere in the middle. If you're a pure Method actor/writer and you want to portray the grief of someone who has lost a spouse of thirty years, you're out of luck unless you've personally experienced something like that. Which means such writers/actors would have a severely limited range of events that they could portray. There are some incredible child actors out there nowadays, and I'm willing to be that almost none of them have the life experience necessary to take a pure Method approach to their roles. They still turn in some damn fine performances, though.
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You know, it's funny you bring up dialogue, because I write dialogue like that. I have an incredibly clear sound in my head when characters are talking--I know what words they emphasized, where they hesitated, where they rushed forward, how they swallowed this syllable and drew out this other one. It gives me fits, because I have to pick apart exactly which of those pieces are important enough to make it in, and I usually end up using every trick I know to fit more of them in without it becoming grating.
The time I spent acting in high school really solidified it, I think, because it made me hyper-aware of the actions and voice hitches and bobs necessary to convey something--more British school than method acting. Method acting, though, was still a tool to discover what kinds of actions we needed to use in order to accurately act. Think about being actually angry in the right way, then pick apart how your neck tenses, how you lean forward, how your voice rises to the ragged edge and your hands clench. Now look at how your peer gets angry, break it into pieces, and try to imitate that.
That training serves me when I'm trying to get the words themselves on the page. That tells me what actions signpost the right shade of whatever emotion--so in that sense, the writing itself is 'British-style'. However, knowing what the right shade of the right emotion is is Method Writing. It's building an ever-more-complex mental model of the character, feeding it information, and getting the answers you need. A character that I write a lot turns into a black box and practically moves into my head, which is something I've heard a number of authors say.
And then they editorialize.
Motivation is like backstory. You can leave explicit descriptions of it entirely out if you wish. There's nothing that says that stories have to let the reader inside the character's head. You can just describe the character's actions and let the reader puzzle out the motivations for himself.
If you meet a really strange person in real life, one who holds contradictory beliefs and acts in ways you wouldn't expect given other things you know about him, you don't have to be able to get inside his head for yourself in order to write about him. You really just need to figure out what kind of hat he would wear.
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Most of my interactions with my characters take the form of spontaneous conversations in my head, usually with me as a participant. I have a story hovering just above the slush pile that is literally just a record of Rarity lambasting me on my poor hair care practices. This delves into the "psychosis" area listed above, I suppose.
I guess what I'm saying is that I am pretty deep down the rabbit-hole and am totally unqualified to tell anyone what to do.
And my real-life niece certainly does like tiaras, thank you very much.
A lot of very memorable film moments were created by people deciding they knew the characters best. "I love you." "I know." Heath Ledger's Joker. The pirates of Pirates of the Carribean, who stole the show from the rest of the cast (particularly Captain Jack Sparrow and Captain Barbossa). Robert Downey Jr.'s Kirk Lazarus.
Of course, then there's people like Slim Pickens. When he showed up on the set of Dr. Strangelove fully dressed as a cowboy and speaking in a thick Southern accent, the British crew thought he was method acting. He wasn't; that's just how he was, apparently.
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I do this a lot. It's perfectly healthy! Those brain circuits would just go back to modeling what I /should/ have said in that conversation if I don't give them something else to do.
I ran into a similar situation when working on my current project, which thematically is about progress vs tradition, where Applejack is the antagonist and takes the side of tradition (of course). I had been unsatisfied, however, with my portrayal of AJ until I realized that I had merely cast AJ into the role of the antagonist and created a strawmare. It wasn't until I thought hard about why Applejack would hold her views and understood her motivations that I really began to feel comfortable writing her.
I think this is a problem many writers face. As writers, we have a sense that our story must have ponies playing certain roles—protagonists, mentors, lancers, damsels in distress, antagonists, etc.—and It's easy to merely choose a pony and cast them into that role. However, authors will think of that pony only as it relates to their prescribed role in the story and won't fully consider that pony's motivation for taking on that role. When this occurs in romance stories, it leads to alien shipping syndrome, where "chemistry does not occur through shared interests, personal magnetism, or personality traits, but is instead instilled by parasitic brain worms." Similarly, there are some darker stories on the site, where the authors clearly had a very compelling story in mind, but weaken the story by choosing to use FIM characters. Although they might slap an AU tag on it, the stories are still considerably weaker than they could have been just because it leaves the reader wondering how these ponies in the fanfic are connected to the characters we know from the show. It's a problem when, swapping out your protagonist with an OC would improve the story.
To bring it back to the acting analogy, if you swap Christian Bale in The Dark Knight for another actor, you probably still have the same movie. However, if you swapped out Heath Ledger for someone else, the movie is probably considerably different.
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You do need to be able to predict how he'd act, though. Otherwise you wouldn't be writing about him.
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The poor girl probably has a drawer full of them by now and is too tactful to tell you they're not really considered cool in high school.
3327773 3327408 3327085 Look! Actors! Hide the props!
Would you guys want to put together a guest blog on how your acting helps your writing?
Why are you calling a school of acting thought that isn't followed by all American actors and was invented by a Russian "American Acting"?
Does he have any evidence for that? Because that seems like a baseless assertion, if people think it does help them play the scene.
Anyway, I'm not sure it's really accurate to take criticisms aimed at acting and apply them to writing.
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I said I was talking about English-speaking films. A method actor speaking English is very likely American. Wikipedia says:
True. I was mixing criticism of what he said together with criticism with taking what he said and applying it to writing. Separating the two is an exercise for the reader.
3328126 I come with my own props!
I've nearly written my own blog post on it a few times, but it always seemed a bit self-indulgent. Acting was something I did and was good at in high school, but that was ten years ago.
I think my writing ends up being very physical because of it, in the sense that I describe movements and gestures and expressions instead of using simpler dialogue tags. I seem to have an easier time than some people coming up with good motions and such to use to avoid the string of 'she said' or the string of obvious thesaurus use.
The other thing is that it drives my sense of timing. Everything I write is something I hear and/or see in my head as a finished performance. I end up taking great pains in employing a lot of tools to make the words on the screen match the beats and timing of the narrator and actors in my head. There're so many wonderful ways to put a pause in a sentence, and they all have their uses because they all encourage the reader to pause for different lengths of time. Em-dash, comma, full stop, ellipsis, an inserted dialogue tag (which is a great tool, because the longer the tag, the longer the pause you get), line breaks, horizontal lines, scene changes--I think of all of these as tools to get the timing right.
I worry about abusing italics, sometimes, but no one has complained to me yet.
One thing that's interesting is that this probably cripples me for writing a screenplay. I've got too clear a picture in my head, and it would be a constant fight with myself to pare it down to the level of description a screenplay should be at.
While moving yourself as you write is not a bad thing, the goal of a writer is to assemble words to affect the audience, which, strictly speaking, has nothing to do with the author's internal state at time of writing. With the death of the author and the fact that the author has the benefit of imagining an entire scene in their head complete with certain assumptions and interpretations of the plot and characters that the reader does not necessarily possess, there is no particular reason to believe that an author can call a scene done based on their own emotional response to it.
I see the proposition this way: do you meditate until your insides feel how you want them to before writing or do you study which words and techniques most accurately communicate your thoughts to your intended audience in the most impactful way possible? A new author wants to know "I want to write a sad scene, but I can't make it feel sad." Do you tell them to make themselves sad or do you sit down, analyze their scene, and help them rearrange the elements to bring out the sadness? You do not need to feel sad to do the latter, though reading though it later you might end up teary-eyed. And it must be asked: if the former, you learn how to make you sad, but when do you learn what your characters or the reader will find sad?
Acting is giving the audience the pieces they will read meaning/emotion into, and the only tool you have to do this is what you physically do. Cooking is not tasting. Acting is not emotion. The cook can taste and the actor can feel, but at the end of the day, neither of these is necessary to serving the audience a memorable experience and neither should be the primary goal.
(Granted, given my experience is with stage acting where the audience is not right up next to the actors to see every facial expression, it could be the small ticks and whatnot are more important in the film acting the article was referring to).
If I am remembering correctly from the one introductory acting course I took in college, "Action" and "going through the motions" are not equivalent. "Action" here is a technical definition, short for "essential action" or (if you forgive stage acting vs screen acting, which might moot the argument) from A Practical Handbook for the Actor:
The actor reads the actual text of the play, figures out some interpretation of what the character is trying to do, and then figures out how to honestly do that thing with the given dialog, props, and what is known of how the other actors are intending to play their parts.
They then spend the next ten hours pulling their hair out trying to pare it down to six essential words or less or the professor is going to be grumpy.It is less "pick up the quill, scratch a letter, send it" (referred to as what is literally/physically happening) and more "Teach my faithful student the magic of friendship." (the character's essential action, which the actor's job is to pursue honestly in the course of the scene given what is known about the character and the playwright's intentions). Every instance of an action has a surrounding context and motivation that makes it unique. The actor must find this uniqueness and bring it to life, which is far, far, more than making sure you make the frowny face at the angry part.
As far as emotion was concerned, we were more or less told to stop trying to give yourself feels and start figuring out what your character's goal is right now, how they are going to pursue that goal using the given dialog/movement/props, and most importantly start listening to your scene partner because if you react based on how you worked yourself up to feel rather than listening and reacting naturally to what is going on in scene, things get silly. If you listen to your partner and let the scene move you within reason, the emotion will generally take care of itself.
I think the missing link here is that authors have full control over everything with a lifetime to polish and edit. An actor must enter a scene of other unpredictable people and instantly react to them naturally regardless of what they choose to play that night and how well they do it. You generally will not know the right emotion until you have to react, and then you are already out of time. But if you know what your character entered the scene to do and have an idea of how they might feel about it, suddenly you do not have to worry about what emotion you are 'supposed' to be feeling and can concentrate on acting naturally within the always shifting imaginary circumstances of the stage and the goal you are pursuing.
This is more useful for stage actors who need to keep it together. If you break down onstage or on set, you still need to be ready with your lines at your cue or the whole production is thrown off. And if you are reacting to your past demons onstage, what are the other actors supposed to know to work with? Authors can afford to break down in the middle of a chapter and come back when they have recovered, so they have a lot more leeway here. Granted: you are writing your characters, not you (usually). There is a big gap between empathy and projection that should not be crossed without grounding.
Thank you all for a very enlightening discussion. This gives me a lot to look at as I try to construct a good midsize story for the first time in my career.
3327817 I want to see that rarity story
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Eh, it's not dead yet. You may yet get a chance.
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Sad will be the day, but thankfully she is yet a pre-10.
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I'm not an actor. I've worked with some, but I'm in and of myself a screenwriter.
Nominally.
I haven't had any success yet outside the short film circuits, but I think I've still done more than most. I would adore aiding a collaboration on how different prose and screenplays are to read/write and the reasons why.
3328406 Thanks for your extended response!
Personally, I think the idea of the death of the author does more harm than good when interpreting fiction, but it is in any case not relevant to the author while writing. The author should not buy into "the death of the author" while writing; he should have his opinion and his intent for what the piece should accomplish.
I was responding to the statement "Truly great acting moves the audience, not the actor." If someone said "Truly great writing moves the reader, not the writer," I would (and just did) say that's terrible advice. The acting coach's statements, taken as a whole, meant that it is not necessary for an actor to feel the emotions he's conveying, that one can do it strictly through technique and craft. My personal experience is that a story is no good unless it moves me before I write it.
That's trying to find the character's motivation, and that's related to method acting. It sounds from this Wikipedia page on "Practical Aesthetics" like A Practical Handbook for the Actor was meant as "Method Lite".
Do you want to get in on the guest blog post that I'm trying to get the other actors who responded to write, about how acting affects their writing?
My personal experience:
Has been that I don't have a really good sense of whether or not a story's working until I've written it. I mean, yes, I outline things to a fair-thee-well--I'm working on a Pony story right now without using an outline, and I'm so nervous about it, I'm gonna hire Present Perfect to pre-read the thing for me--but an outline only tells me what's going to happen, not what the story's going to be about. I have to get into the guts of it, type the words and get the characters talking and interacting before I can start getting an idea of whether the bits and pieces can do what I want them to do.
That's why I enjoy revising so much. 'Cause that's where the story becomes the story for me.
Mike
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I believe an actor or a writer's primary goal is communication, which I think happens best when the object of their efforts is the audience. The test of your writing or acting is in the other person, not yourself, and any vision you have must be expressed in a form that others will understand or you have failed in execution. You can have all the vision and personal investment you want, but what ends up on the page or stage is all that matters: people cannot read your mind.
On reflection, I think "not the actor" misses the point. It would better be expressed as "Truly great acting moves the audience" with no concern for whether the actor/author is moved or not. If the actor finds they need that extra oomph to do their thing effectively, then by all means they should work that into their preparation, but I personally do not find it profitable. As an author, I am more of the school of thought that there is a method to emotion and it can be built into scenes whether the writer feels it or not. When I write at my peak, I am more excited about all the interesting ways I can build the scene than I am swept up in the actual emotions that should be present.
You have never smiled when you were sad or psyched yourself up for public speaking despite your heart hammering away in your chest? What you feel is nowhere near as important as the face you choose to show, which is how actors are able to play anything other than stagefright.
Granted, what you choose to play tends to become what you feel, especially with a good scene partner.
And now I am wondering why I am getting Faith vs Works vibes
My time onstage showed me that "conveying emotion" has it exactly backwards. Emotion is a reaction that happens while we are going about our business. Very rarely does one raise their voice specifically to show they are angry. They raise it because they believe they did not make themselves clear to this doofus barista who clearly has a hearing problem. The audience hears the raised voice and has seen the barista mishear the order, so we conclude anger even if the actor is just adjusting their delivery without feeling much of anything. So long as the actor is acting truthfully within the imaginary circumstances of the scene, emotion conveys itself just like it does for everyone else every day. I rarely had a need to think about it. When I did, things got forced.
On further reflection, my lack of familiarity with the formal professional communities under discussion might have me addressing an entirely different topic than your intention. I can only hope the resultant conversation is productive regardless. Probably getting to the point where disentangling terms will become necessary.
I am certainly open to the idea. Feel free to PM with what you have in mind (and probably a space constraint), and I will see what I can come up with,
3330559
To build an emotion into scenes without feeling it, you would have to be working strictly logically. To do that, you would have to represent the emotion in your equations with a label. And an emotion that can be labelled is not much worth writing about. I think one of fiction's main competitive advantages over non-fiction is in presenting feelings that we can't name.
Even if this were not so, if you could work with characters going thru an emotion, and not feel it yourself, it would mean you weren't very sensitive to emotions, and probably not able to write about them. Even if the causation runs in the other direction--from your skillfully writing an emotional situation, to your feeling that emotion--you should still feel the emotion. You may eventually build up a resistance to it, after going over the same scene enough times, but I still think that at some point in the process you must feel the emotion. If you don't, the story's no good, either because it doesn't invoke that emotion, or because you aren't sensitive enough to write a good emotional story in the first place.
At any rate, I find this a very useful rule of thumb: Don't waste time writing stories that don't move you more strongly than the reader must be moved to appreciate the story.
3330559 Titanium Dragon just reviewed my story "Experience", and it seems to me that this was an exception, one that I wrote the way you described, having an effect in mind and working toward it. It's not a strong emotional story; it's a different sort of thing than I usually write. So if I'm writing a story that doesn't rely on emotions for its primary effect, I don't need to feel it emotionally. I doubt James Joyce wrote Ulysses with tears in his eyes.
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WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH BAD HORSE?
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Oh, what? More of this?
I hear it's from some hack that imagines himself to be the lovechild of Robert Heinlein and Douglas Adams. I found the story. I think it's about small horses of the self-possessive sort.
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That is a singleship, rather than a "single ship."
People in space have their own funny little vocabulary. For example, a 'kettle' is a pressurized reactor vessel, a 'bottle opener' is a spiked hammer used for smashing space suit faceplates, and 'politics' is any course of dialogue that can only be concluded through physical violence.
Also.. a 'hotgun' is short for a thermite pellet shotgun, also known as an "atmospheric relocation device."
3332681 ?
I may be holding myself for ransom again. Let me check.
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"Alright, NOBODY MOVE--or the pony gets it!"
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Van Buskirk? What're you doing here? Kinneson's gonna have a litter of Radeligian cateagles (see Fig. 1) if he finds out.
img00.deviantart.net/56c3/i/2011/229/2/c/meanie_gilda_by_peachspices-d46xxlx.png
Fig. 1
--Worsel, just here for the Spike fics (honest!)
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Now I say.. Just because I like to dabble in writing stories on the spectrum of Doc Smith to Larry Niven, not everything I write has to be about spaceships.
..crap
Man, I've been thinking about this blog ever since you posted it. I mean, I agree with everything you commented on it. Having a character without motivation and understanding of the character and why they're doing things and how they feel about them is... just unthinkable. Like, I really don't get how anyone could write a story like that.
Not that I am 100% proficient at showing all of those things in the stories I write every time, but at least understanding your own character. I don't know why this keeps popping up in my mind lately.