ACTING Like A Writer

Sometimes I wish writers had the equivalent of rehearsals, like we do in theater.  Cast in a play, you meet your fellow cast members, you do a "table-read" (everyone just sits around a table and reads through the script), you have scene rehearsals, then run a whole act, then run all the acts together, then have dress rehearsals.  In the process, you have time to get "off-book," to memorize your lines and be ready to rehearse without your script in hand.  You ease into the final product a step at a time - lights and sound effects added near the very end, first rehearsing without any set, then set and props and costumes added a bit at a time until the picture is complete.  You have a director who tells you how to imagine the character, the scene, who guides you.  You have crew members who take care of props and lights and sound.  You have fellow cast members, who, in playing out their characters, give you meat for your own.

It is terrifying, and exhilarating.  You can feel the story, the performance, coming together around you and the rest of the cast.  It's very social.    From the first day, you have to work to connect not only to your own character, but to the other characters and the actors who play them.  Sometimes it's easy.  Sometimes not. Actors get together after rehearsals and in cast parties, and meet ahead of rehearsals to run lines together or just to vent.

As a writer, there's a lot of that I could go for.  As many have said, writing is a solitary task - one person, one keyboard, one pen and paper.  From first draft to typing the last page, it's just you.  You can take your writing to a writing group, or get first readers (for my last book, I had nine) - but when the feedback comes, it's just you deciding what stays and what doesn't.  No director is going to call "cut!" and tell you how it should be.  No others are going to act out the characters for you to give you a new perspective.

I've often said that being involved in theater has been good for my writing - as an actor, learning to embody a character has given me a fresh perspective on how to create a character on the page, and I think my characters have improved as a result.  Being a producer (and occasionally an Assistant Director) has given me a sense of the scope of story construction that, though I'd studied it before, I don't think I fully appreciated until I'd ushered in a few productions.  It's also been incredibly humbling - watching the skill and intelligence with which so many actors approach their roles, how artfully they work with and bring out the best in less skilled members of the cast - how dedicated they are, going onstage with high fevers, broken toes, family crises, and heartbreak.

I know that the writing process has many parallels to "rehearsal" - the drafts, the editing, the revisions - but it is, in contrast to theater, anti-social - the writer, as one member of a critique group once said, "is God on that page."   And being God can be lonely.

I wish sometimes, at the keyboard, for a director to guide the mood of the scene, a scene partner to bring her/his energy to the scene so that my characters can feed off it, be guided by it.  I wish for an after-rehearsal gathering to vent, a cast party to celebrate the creativity.   But I know that, as a writer, that's not how it can be.   The truth of any particular story I write is in my head, and only I am responsible for bringing it out.  The difference between the creative act in theater and in writing is this:   in the theater, you are responsible to be with  the rest of the cast, to be present to them, aware, work with them.  As a writer, you are responsible to the story.   The actors works to be able to 'read' his fellow cast members, the writer must work to be loyal to that seed that sparked the story within her.   The actors act, the writers write.  They rehearse, we re-draft. They perform, we publish.   And then we all wait for reviews.