Why writing is a lot like acting

yeahwriters:

(Billy Shakes did both!)

My first two years of college were spent at a theatre school in Boston, and because my roommate MacKenzie was a musical theatre major (we called them “MTs”) and more outgoing than I was back then, I ended up knowing a lot of actors and MTs.

Actors and MTs love talking about themselves and their “craft” (that word is now like nails on a chalkboard to me), so I ended up hearing a lot about their acting techniques and retellings of what they learned in their classes*.

As I listened to them talk, I felt like I could relate to what they were saying. To be a good actor, they told me, you have to really let go of yourself and the things that make you, you. You have to practice getting the affectations out of your voice and be able to physically move in ways that you never would and know things about your character that aren’t necessarily going to come across on the stage, but you should know them so that you seem more authentic.

And all of that completely applies to writing. If we do a good job, we give a convincing and believable and compelling performance. It’s just on a page instead of a stage.

In some ways, I think that for writers, it’s a lot harder. Actors only have to play one role, but authors have to play all of the roles of all of the characters in their stories. We’re also in charge of the set design, the blocking, the directing, the costumes (although I try not to mention clothing unless absolutely necessary to characterization). Not only do we, as writers, have to let go of who we are as people—sometimes we have to let go of the whole world we inhabit, so that we can enter and create another one.

(Of course, there are a lot of things that are harder about acting, like only having one chance to deliver a performance, a constricted amount of time to do so, and being up in front of a bunch of people. I’m not trying to undercut the difficulty of being a good actor!)

*MacKenzie liked to talk about acting sometimes, but she wasn’t like most of her bla-bla-bla-ing classmates!