It’s not that I think all writers should join a drama group - though don’t let me stop you if you want to. But a question in the Itch of Writing Supporter’s weekly Q&A Chat has got me thinking. Liz S said:
Hi Emma, your post on improvisation has been especially helpful to me. I wondered if there are other acting techniques writers could benefit from knowing.
I’m only a half-trained, ex-wannabe actor, but my first degree was in Drama and Theatre Arts, and my class of ’86 met up a few weeks ago for the first time in (gulp!) thirty-nine years. I think I’m the only writer, but most of us are still working with arts and performance in some way, or have slid sideways into related fields involving people and psychology. How much we still had to talk about!
Some of this overlaps with film, but a great deal doesn’t, so I’d urge you to think theatre: it’s a medium of words, as ours is, and of live bodies, in relationship with each other and 3D space - which is what we are trying to conjure up for the reader who wants to make a trust fall into the story. Film, on the other hand, is a medium of images.
So, pondering my and my mentees’ current projects, and what we want to write next, these are some of the things that we might take from how theatre and actors work:
Actioning. This has been most fundamental for me. In my day, following Stanislavski, we called it ‘intentions’ but ‘actioning’ is a much more helpful term.
The idea is that every speech, gesture, action and move that your character makes has a reason for being made. The underlying drive may be stated overtly, unstated but conscious, or unconscious, but the action is not, fundamentally, random - even if it appears to be. That reason can be (and must be) expressed as a verb; you go through your script labelling each one: ‘to persuade’, ‘to annoy’, ‘to connect, ‘to distract’ or whatever. For more about how and why actors do actioning, click here.
The more specific the verb, the better. This explains why the command to ‘cut the adverbs’ is sometimes is a good one: verbs are the motors of storytelling, and ‘she ran fast’ is less evocative, less show-y - because less vivid and specific - than ‘she raced’ or ‘she pelted’.
As a process, it has two great strengths for us:
Thinking ‘she’s angry’ or ‘he was aroused’ focuses your word-wrangling engines on describing or evoking the emotion: creating a portrait of an abstract thing.
Thinking ‘to force’ or ‘to seduce’ shifts your writing mind into creating the ‘causally related chain of events’ which is narrative. Character A sets out to do something: what happens next?
So thinking in specific verbs forces us to shape our scenes round characters-in-action, not portraiture or essay-writing, and character-in-action is the heart of storytelling, as Aristotle says in the Poetics.
But as Aristotle also pointed out, if a narrative is all actions and no characterisation then it’s not a story either, it’s just a plot of A + B = C. Working on choosing the right verb encourages you to think the classic ‘Why this? Why now?’ of this particular character. Given the situation, another character might act very differently and cause a very different reaction.
Characterisation. Famously, the great actor Beryl Reid could only get a handle on a character once she knew what shoes they wore: that gave her the walk, and from that the inner life and psychology grew. Reid started from the outside and worked inwards, but other actors start from inside - the psychology, the childhood - and work outwards to what that means for the walk and then the shoes. More about this here. Which way works best for you? How will you mitigate its disadvantages?
Dialogue. Dialogue is action, and action is the product of character. At a Society of Authors seminar on radio drama, one of the producers said that the first thing he does with a new script is put a ruler over the left-hand side to cover the character-names labelling each speech. Despite the fact that in production the actors will all have different voices, if the producer can’t tell on the page who said what, from what they say and how they say it, he rejects the script.
Thinking of dialogue as the product of a specific character with a specific intention at that moment helps you to give it the individuality that it needs.
All this is true regardless of the degree of naturalism or stylisation of this particular text: many plays are not naturalistic and aren’t meant to be, but different characters still speak in very different ways within an overall stylistic consistency.
We don’t have actors to help, so your dialogue writing must encompass and evoke all the things which in theatre the actor, director and playwright would thrash out in rehearsal: the rushes, hesitations, breaks, dodgy grammar, messy sentences and tones of voice. More on dialogue here.
Rhythm, pattern, sound and breath. Learning to speak dialogue - and indeed poetry and prose - with the degree of naturalism or stylisation that the text demands tunes your ear, and reading aloud stress-tests your writing for those qualities. Readers may well not realise what you’re up to, but they will sense it, if you attend to and work with the non-verbal qualities of language: it’s one of the things which can raise your good honest storytelling to something really special. This is one of many reasons I’m always suggesting that prose writers take poetry courses.
Thinking in Scenes. In theatre all the actors that are currently on stage are, well, on stage, and for that reason the scene is the basic unit of theatre storytelling.
Before controllable lighting the actors had to be got on and off stage, which breeds a natural shape: they come on for a reason, stuff happens, and they go off to cope with what has happened. As John Gardner describes, the scene works its way upwards to the point of climax, and then runs rather more quickly and steeply down to the close.
We have the luxury of blackouts and jump-cuts, but they’re not the only way to get from scene to scene, and how you move from one to the next makes a big difference to the fluency of your storytelling. It’s worth developing a repertoire of different ways to suit different occasions and projects.
In planning your story, it’s worth having a column - mental or actual - to keep track of ‘off-stage’ events as well as ‘on-stage’ action. It saves a lot of continuity muddles (as does keeping track of when characters discover things which the reader already knows, and vice versa.)
The playwright, director and actors have to figure out what each character is doing: they may be sitting still or have their backs turned, but they are still there.
If there’s lots of dialogue, it’s easy for our written storytelling to lose touch with the fact all the present characters are bodies existing in space, not just heads speaking and listening. Gestures and actions anchor us in the reality of the scene - and can also be used as speech tags.
The presence of even non-speaking, apparently uninvolved, characters still affects what the more active characters say and do - and what they don’t say, and don’t do.
It’s too easy for us writers to let some characters in a scene drop out of sight: best of all, think radio drama, where if a character isn’t heard - if they don’t act - for too long, the listener literally doesn’t know they’re there. .
Choreography: Again, this is about the bodies-in-space thing: thinking about actors on stage helps us to remember that our characters-in-action are, really, characters-in-interaction.
That doesn’t mean you want to or must explain every tiny move, in the sort of precise, half-page stage directions that George Bernard Shaw so loved - though you may well need to work it all out for yourself.
It’s often in editing that you can tell which physical actions and interactions have significance - the ones the scene can’t do without, the ones which reveal crucial things or set up narrative tension - and you can then concentrate the storytelling on them and cut the others.
Improvisation: We tend to think of first-drafting as imagining-on-paper, whether you’re a planner or a pantser. But good improvisers know that how well the improv event goes is also about establishing the habit of getting yourself into the right mental space beforehand. From ‘Say yes’ and ‘Start anywhere’, to ‘Be average’ and ‘Wake up to the gifts’, writers can learn a lot from improv, as my post about it explores.
Over-the-top runs: I’m never worried by students who overwrite in first draft, because it’s relatively easy to get rid of in editing. Similarly, many actors and directors will go over-the-top as a way of evading the Inner Critic kind of censor, and finding out what really matters: the director can guide them later in what needs dialling back.
Speed runs: Latish in the rehearsal process, the director may decree a ‘speed run’: the actors blast through the play speaking and moving as fast as is physically possible. As well as showing that yes, you do actually know your words and moves, it’s hilarious and energising. And by stripping the production down to essentials - there’s no time for nuance - it’s surprisingly revealing of the main arcs. Reading your work aloud, ‘like a reader’, at reader-speed, can have a similar effect: it gets you back in touch with the pleasures of the readerly experience and how the story unfolds.
Tech vs Dress: The aim of a dress rehearsal is to run the play, non-stop, exactly as it will on the first night. But first comes the technical rehearsal: it’s still a full run of the play, but it takes as long as it takes. Every entrance and exit, every lighting, sound and FX cue, every scene change, is thrashed out, the problems are found, then solved, the solution is checked and written into the prompt book if it wasn’t there already. On a big show there may be more than one tech, just as I have more than one hard-copy iteration of problem-finding and problem-solving. It takes as long as it takes.
Sitting in the upper circle: An actor may tap into and evoke real and powerful inner emotion, but their authenticity is pointless if their words can’t be understood, or their actions keep wrong-footing the other actors. Similarly, there’s not much point in the director being super-accurate to how a real royal audience takes place, if the theatre’s sightlines block the view from some seats: assistant directors will be dispatched to check. This is why you are writing your second draft ‘for your reader’: writing too, is a business of communication, and our duty to our reader means viewing what we’ve written from their side of the footlights as well as our own.
Voice training. Paying close attention to every comma, clause and lift of the voice, as actors do, is invaluable for prose-writers, but having had voice training also comes in handy when you’re trying to talk, or worse still read from your work, and the coffee machine starts up at the other end of the foyer. As well as my tips for reading aloud for performance, and getting hold of This is a Voice, by Jeremy Fisher and Gillyanne Keyes, any writer coming up to publication could consider a couple of sessions with a voice coach, who can help with preparing and reading work, and coping with nerves.
Getting nervous. Actors, famously, know all about stage fright - but it’s easy to assume that since we writers are not standing up there trying to remember our lines and not bump into the furniture, we’re silly to be scared of our work being published. But it’s not silly at all, of course: we are a social species: publication says, effectively, ‘This is my best work’, and has good evolutionary reasons for being terrifying. If you are finding the prospect paralysing, whether it means you never actually send work out at all, or you turn down events and opportunities to promote your work, don’t feel shy about getting a bit of help from a coach or therapist. Actors and musicians do it all the time.
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I love your alliteration. I'm wondering which one was a last minute addition, or whether you fudged two together!
I'm trying to write a play (as well as a novel!) for the first time and I'm now very aware of how I am not writing for an audience, but to inspire a director/producer/actor. In writing a novel you have to be all these things!
As a ex-actor, big thanks for reminding me of the skills I can use. I often find that if I am stuck for a character's expression, position or movement, I put myself into their mind and see what they do.