Write like an actor: do the prep!
Actors and writers are working in the same language: the language of emotion
But first . . .
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To whet your appetite, here’s last week’s prompt. If you’d like to work with it yourself, click here for the YouTube video. Our archive now contains nearly 150 prompts!
A few days ago I was talking with my son, who is at college studying to become a filmmaker. He wants to make a film about my grandfather, his great-grandfather. A documentary or a feature, I asked. No doubt in his mind. “Emotions are our shared language,” he said. If you want a story to really touch people, it needs to be dramatized.
He used to want to study international relations. He changed course, because, as he says, politics doesn’t change the world. Stories do.
Not every story, of course, and not every storyteller aims to change the world. But I’ve been thinking, for some reason, about how when I was a child Gone With the Wind was generally accepted to be one of the greatest films ever—and now it’s unwatchable. I’d argue that the miniseries Roots, and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and the movie Sounder, played a vital role in that cultural shift.
Whether or not we hope to change the world, we hope to touch people with our stories. To do that, we need to speak the language of emotion. But even though we’re using words, emotion isn’t a language of words. It’s a language of feeling, a language expressed in the body.
If I write, “I was scared,” you don’t feel my fear. But if I tell you I was shivering and couldn’t move and lost my voice, you feel an echo of it. Your mirror neurons fire because they recognize the sensations. This is what’s happening when you see someone smile and you can’t help but smile yourself. It’s why laughter is catching.
In our book and self-paced online course Write What You Don’t Know, we have an exercise called “Emotion in the Body.” We create a list of emotion words (fear, anger, ecstasy, despair, joy, etc.), ask you to choose an emotion you can call up right in this moment, and describe how your body feels.
It’s not rocket science—it just takes the willingness to feel. What are the emotions you want to convey? Feel them in your body first, then use that body-language to convey them.
As any actor will tell you, it’s all about the prep.
Actors use their bodies in real time to speak the language of emotion. As writers, our job is to translate that bodily emotional language into words.
Despite all my education in and out of school, it never occurred to me that writers need to do prep. I don’t know why more teachers of writing and literature don’t tell you this! Maybe they’re afraid the emotion will get out of hand, which is not what you want in a classroom. So teachers focus on head-based, analytical techniques and technicalities. But these are not what make you a powerful writer.
In the Imaginative Storm, we’re not trying to tell you how to write. We’re suggesting ways to access the emotional content of your real and imaginative experience, and express it in words.
Here’s one you might like to try. Step One is to close your eyes and feel your immediate surroundings for, say, 3 minutes. If you’ve never done this before, you’ll be amazed by how your sense of scale shifts. The familiar is no longer familiar, and you quickly feel disorientated. You may even feel vulnerable, without your eyes to guide you.
Now, Step Two. Holding this prep (that’s what they always say in acting classes: hold your prep!), set a 10-minute timer and write about a time when you were in the dark. Literally in the dark, or metaphorically in the dark—wherever your imagination takes you.
I hope you’ll find what our Memoir Series participants found when we set this prompt a few weeks ago: that your writing, rough as it is, has far more life and power than if you’d simply sat down and described the experience without doing the prep. Why? Because you’ve brought your body and your emotions into the work.
You can prep your senses as well as your emotions. Try setting a timer for 5 or 10 minutes and make a list of sounds you love. Along with all its other benefits, a timer helps you sink into the work and not be distracted. So, as you list them, you’ll hear the sounds in your imagination: your child’s footsteps running down the hallway, your cat’s chirruping meow, maybe even the sound of helicopter blades above the beach. (Andrea, I will never forget that item on your list. Everyone else, you should have seen the ecstasy on her face as she spoke it aloud.)
Now the auditory centers of your brain are excited! You’re super aware of sound, and because you’re thinking only of sounds you love, there’s nothing to block out. Set your timer again, and go back to a familiar scene, maybe one you’ve been struggling to bring to life, and focus on what sounds were there or might have been there. You’ll feel that pleasure in the sounds you like, and a visceral resentment of those you don’t like elbowing their way into your consciousness. Those emotions, connected to the sounds, will color your words.
Try it. Explore the dark, explore the soundscape. Please post what you write as a comment here. I’d love to read it!
The next workshop in our Memoir Series is on Monday, February 26: “Explore the Mechanics of Social Intuition.” We’ll be focusing on social interaction, especially unspoken communication with all its delights and nuances and pitfalls. These workshops are all stand-alone and limited to 10 people, so they’re intimate and revelatory. You can learn more by clicking here.