These polar opposite art forms have more in common than you think!
I’m sure it’s no mystery that acting and writing are intrinsically connected. Both art forms involve complete immersion in alternate realms, times, or scenarios. They ask the artist to cast aside the feedback of their senses and enter new, unfamiliar planes. However, despite their similarities, they are largely regarded as completely disconnected industries.
Writing is an introvert’s wonderland. From the sanctuary of their laptops, writers can go on a whole smorgasbord of fantastical adventures. Without having to move an inch or speak to a single other human being, they can travel to the past, the future, or to an alternate version of the present. They can journey to space, wade in the Caribbean sea, or temporarily relocate to a dimension where the laws of physics work in reverse.
Acting is an extrovert’s playground. It is an opportunity for the most daring of daydreamers to partake in an ephemeral, communal hallucination. Without taking their chances with the local psyche-ward, they can make real money by diving headfirst into a delusion in which the rules of our reality do not apply. To make things even more interesting, they do it all before an audience of spectators, and in the case of film, they allow their creative fugue state to be recorded for future viewings.
When I put it like this, both career fields sound like cleverly-handled attempts to disguise a maladaptive yearning for other worlds. As an writer, an actress, and a Gemini, I will not confirm nor deny it.
All of that is to say, in my experience with both sides of the pursuit of reality abscondence, I’ve discovered some inspiring areas of overlap. In many ways, one informs the other, and for that reason, I’ve gotten some of my best writing ideas in acting classes. If you’re feeling disconnected from your characters, stranded in the middle of a creativity drought, or otherwise disenchanted with the practice of writing, I think an acting workshop might be just what the literary doctor ordered.
It Gets You Out of Your Head
As previously stated, writing is an art form that requires very little physical engagement. When we write, our fingertips run miles as our legs atrophy beneath a desk or cafe tabletop. Stillness induces a meditative state in which the body can be detached from so the mind can wander. It’s useful, until it leads to spirals of overthinking, over planning, and perfectionism.
Spending a lot of time in the headspace, as acting and movement coaches would call it, can cause a creative person to lose touch with their creativity. Characters who move from their headspace are often described as analytical, calculating, and excessively methodical in their actions. They’re rigid, and in a performance, appear to inwardly outline each movement before they make it. They’re your mathematical geniuses, your mad scientists, and your spy agency directors.
Creative people naturally thrive in the heartspace. This is a space led by passion and expressive, flowing thought and feeling. In Psychological Gesture, associated with acting teacher Michael Chekhov, it is the Leading Center for a character who has an internal want, need, or impulse to experience the world through a loving, romantic lens. I’m sure a few in media and within your own works come to mind.
I also find that artists do well when they are connected to the final Leading Center, the gut. This is an imaginal center that inspires a character to move with purpose, confidence, and an impulsive, instinctual drive toward their goals. It directly opposes the headspace, which would rather ruminate on every minute detail of a situation before taking action. The gut is built upon innate intuition and a playful kind of riskiness.
Acting classes pull me completely from my hazy, unpredictable head and grounds me in my heart and in my gut. It lovingly demands that a performer connect with the entirety of their body, and in a performance, balance all three energetic cores to create a well-rounded character. This connection almost always comes back to the keyboard with me, and instead of meticulously laying out another plot outline, I find myself following my gut to a blank page, then using my heart to fill it.
Acting Techniques Are Great For Character Building
In all of the acting workshops I’ve been in, the instructor will inevitably present the master teacher with whom they most closely resonate. What’s really fascinating here is that these teachers tend to have vastly different opinions on how one might completely abandon the self and let a whole new person integrate with what remains.
Some encourage young actors to stay intrinsically connected with their own unique personalities, translating a character’s essence through the prism of their own. This, in turn, creates a performance no other actor can replicate, because it is a unique amalgamation of two individual beings. Others will swear by the complete and utter dissolution of the actor’s traits, leaving a hollow husk to be filled with a character’s light. For just a brief time, the actor is possessed, letting a voice that isn’t their own emerge in soliloquies, monologues, and lines of dialogue.
This sounds a whole lot like two different approaches to writing, doesn’t it?
Some authors infuse each work with a distinct and recognizable beam of themselves. Others are more like chameleons, morphing and changing on a syntax-deep level to serve the story best. How does this happen? Well, coaches like Michael Chekhov, Uta Hagen, Stella Adler, Konstantin Stanislavski, and Sanford Meisner attempt to break it down. In many of their books, recorded lessons, and technique breakdowns, they provide actors with a means of understanding, incorporating, and inevitably becoming characters in a way audiences will believe without a shadow of a doubt.
As writers, we seek to do the same thing, don’t we?
For example, when crafting and becoming your next character, consider Chekhov’s breakdown of the Leading Centers. Is this a headspace character or a heartspace character? Does it affect how they move, the tone of their voice, the way they handle conflict? Using an actor’s means of breaking down the complex human psyche into something portrayable, you can get to know your characters on a level deeper than ever before.
So much of acting is devoted to the study and replication of natural, unconscious human behaviors. All characters — no matter the species — have human hearts. They have complex psychologies that inspire their actions, backstories that dictate their present way of being, and desires that lead them down certain paths. Through acting, you’ll unpack what makes someone who they are to an exhaustive extreme. If you do the same for your characters, they’ll cease being characters, and become fully-realized human beings.
Acting Methods Helped Me Establish An Ideal Writing Strategy
Acting techniques can also help you discover what kind of writer you are, and what writing practice best suits you. We’ve all heard of planners and pantsers, but those terms don’t even scratch the surface of one’s best route to a successful writing session.
Uta Hagen finds that an actor is at their strongest when they have every, single facet of a character ingrained within before stepping onto the stage. She believed an actor should be well acquainted with the world of story, but they should also pull directly from personal experience to produce the most earnest possible performance. Her Six Step protocol is not only amazing for facilitating character immersion before a scene, but it also challenges a writer to consider if they require this kind of immersion before entering a new literary world. Do you need to know everything about your story before showing up to the first page, and if so, to what degree? Hagen also supported the idea of emotional substitution and transference. She believed that an actor needs to dive into the darkest depths of their lives and reignite dormant emotions in order to serve a role. In this way, the character becomes infused with their own unique, authentic means of processing said emotions.
Sanford Meisner, on the other hand, advised actors to engage more with unplanned emotional reactions and improvisation. He believed a more authentic performance comes from an actor who hasn’t prepared to the degree an Uta Hagen student might be inclined to. If he were a writing coach, he’d probably tell you to just start writing and see what happens. Build on the work moment-to-moment, letting it flow with the same unpredictable but natural waves that life does. He was all about spontaneity and trust in a human’s innate ability to react. This makes for an engaging performance that never gets dull, boring, or predictable.
Stella Adler is the master teacher I’ve always resonated with most. I even took a workshop at her studio in Manhattan. She believed in the power of imagination above all else. Upset with Uta Hagen’s ideology, which left many actors swimming in the throes of real trauma after leaving a role, she designed a method in which actors engage with their imaginations to craft a performance. She prompted her students to expand their horizons and get to know their character by living in the world they inhabit for a while.
When engaging with the Stella Adler technique, instead of using one’s own emotions, one might consider what it would actually be like to swim in an alien ocean, fall in love with a vampire, or assassinate the leader of an authoritarian regime. She wouldn’t insist an actor relate riding a dragon over a fantasy kingdom to riding a horse when they were seven. In that moment, the actor should really be riding that dragon. In that moment, the writer should really be riding that dragon.
There are so many wonderful teachers with so many ideas about how to fall into a fictional world, and communicate it to audiences in the most convincing and immersive way. Acting relies entirely on an onlooker’s ability to effortlessly believe what they see, even if just for a little while. Writing relies on the exact same thing. Perhaps you’ll find your best route to facilitating such an experience through an acting class instead of a writing retreat.
Finally, Acting Made Me Comfortable With Rejection
Acting is probably one of the most notorious career paths for being overwhelmed with negative outcomes. As actors, we grow very comfortable with the phrase, “We’re going in another direction.” It feels like a polite way of smacking someone across the face and telling them they belong in the trash bin. It’s easy to take as a gut-punch right in the self-worth. Self-worth, contrary to popular belief, is a given, and I even wrote an article about maintaining it in an industry defined by its gatekeepers and characterized by rampant rejection.
Still, it was the art of acting that helped me realize rejection truly is redirection. It’s not only a very good thing, but a very powerful tool in navigating onto a path that is actually right for you.
During my Junior year of university, I was given the opportunity to see one of my full-length plays produced by the school’s Department of Theatre Arts. I’d stood on the audition stage many times, inevitably only landing two small roles. Now, I was on the other side of the room, flipping through resumés and reviewing performances in search of the perfect cast. As an actor, I watched with empathy and instinctual understanding. I expected at least one or two of the auditions to be genuinely cringeworthy, as many of mine had been.
However, around the second hour, something interesting became apparent.
All of the auditions were good. I’m not exaggerating, sugar-coating, or gazing back through a rose-tinted pair of binoculars. I really mean it; every actor was amazing. They each brought a new take to the characters they’d been provided monologues for. It was incredible to watch the voices that had manifested in my chaotic little head come to life in so many different artistic dialects. Some chose to play the villain as quiet and menacing, others as booming and dominant. Some brought the protagonist in a sassy direction, others in a reserved one. The task here was not to judge the actor for their talent. Talent — like worth — was a given. The task was to find the actor who spoke in a voice familiar to the one I’d become acquainted with, or to discover someone holding puzzle pieces I didn’t even know to be missing.
Right here, I learned that everything really is subjective, and collaborating on art is based on a special kind of synergy. It’s an instinctual, effortless, and intuitive yes, nonverbal consent from both parties that a partnership is aligned. Stepping into the literary industry, especially when it comes to the pursuit of traditional publishing, comes with a lot of no’s. There are hundreds of agents, dozens of publishers, and millions of audience members. It’s impossible to line up with every single one of them.
Casting my first play helped me remember that these folks are searching for the writers that resonate with them in the same mystical way I resonated with the actress we’d chosen to play the main character. Though all of them were undeniably talented, and all of them brought something new and beautiful to the story, she was the only person who conjured an unwavering yes from me. Because of that, the rehearsal process was an effortless, triumphant collaboration in which we seemed to get one another on every level.
Whenever I audition or submit work now, I know that those reviewing it aren’t staring in baneful judgement. Should they reject, they aren’t ridiculing me or signing off on a doctrine that deducts worthiness points. They are simply searching for a perfect match that puts a real, true, honest glow in their heart. If I’m being honest, I wouldn’t want to work with someone feeling anything less.
There is an industry professional out there who will feel a spark when they read your work. There’s a sea of readers who will, too. The fact of the matter is, you don’t want to please every single person in the world. You want to engage with those who earnestly enjoy what you create, just as I earnestly saw my character’s eyes glimmering through that actress’s. Rejection is redirection. Let your work lead you to your people, just like her performance led her to me and to the audience that adored her.
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