Chaos on the Page; Chaos on the Stage

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.

Star Liner

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