Art is a
wonderful part of the human experience. My two preferred vehicles for producing
art are acting and writing. They are both forms of artistic expression, and yet
they are, in some ways, quite different.
Actor:
An actor is a problem solver. Every night,
every performance, something will go wrong. It could be a tiny thing that the
audience will never notice, or it could be an apocalypse. Whichever it is, the
actors on stage will figure out how to deal with it and move on. The actor
knows this, and it is one of the things that plays on his/her nerves before a
performance. Who is going to make an error tonight? Will it be you, or you, or
me? If it is a big error and the actor does not think quickly enough, chaos
will ensue. Chaos is generally a bad thing on stage (unless it is in the
script).
Writer:
A writer is
a problem creator. Writers leave mayhem in their wake. A writer will deliberately
make something go wrong for their characters, maybe several things. Then the
writer has to figure out how their character is going to solve the problem(s).
Stories aren’t very interesting if nothing bad happens to anyone. Writers are
agents of chaos. Chaos is glorious on the page.
Certainly,
actors do more than simply fix problems that come up during a performance.
Actors bring the playwright’s characters to life. Actors have to learn lines,
and movement. They have to interpret scenes, and their role in the play as a
whole. They have to learn how softly they can speak and still be heard by an
audience. They have to learn how to make the writer’s intentional chaos
believable and effective. They have these and many other skills in their
toolboxes. But one of the tools in that box is the ability to manage the
unintended chaos that sometimes attacks a performance.
Writers too,
do more that just create chaos. They have to learn how to develop a plot and
characters, how to fill in the world around those characters so the reader has
a sense of place and time. They have to be knowledgeable in the mechanics of
grammar, spelling (even in these heady days of spelling and grammar checkers).
They need to develop a style and make their narrative flow. But creating
conflict for your characters is essential. I heard one writer say that you
should put your characters in peril . . . and then triple it.
It takes
different parts of your brain to be an actor than it does to be a writer, just
as it takes different parts of your brain to be a musician than it does to be a
composer. That’s okay. We all have different parts to our brains. We each learn
how to make, or deal with chaos in our daily lives. While we may not all be
able to be sculptors, or actors, or nuclear physicists, each of us can excel in
more than one thing. That is what is great about being a human.
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