Today we held the eighth of our half-day memoir workshops. Our topic was “See into the Private Chambers of the Heart.”
How strange we humans are: mysteries to ourselves and one another. Are cats or giraffes mysteries to themselves? I think it’s our blessing and our curse: we can love one another and hurt one another in equal measure.
I wrote a post some time back about “tender spots,” and why this is the basis for the Imaginative Storm approach to exploring character. (It’s vanished from Substack, so I’ll repost it on Wednesday.) Today we pushed the exploration further, inspired by Susan Batson’s book Truth: Personas, Needs, and Flaws in the Art of Building Actors and Creating Characters.
Susan Batson is a highly respected acting teacher, and Navé was lucky enough to take workshops with her in New York many years ago. I love how, in the subtitle of her book and in the book itself, building actors comes before creating characters. An actor’s job is to portray human nature as it manifests in one specific person, and in Batson’s view, to do that an actor must have a clear understanding of human nature as it manifests within their own skin.
Like actors, writers create character—though actors are working with characters already created by writers. Novelists might invent characters from scratch—or, very often, use material people they know for inspiration—but memoir writers are, like actors, working with characters already created. You already exist; the people in your life already exist. Like actors, memoir writers have to find ways to interpret these characters so as to give our readers—our audience—a visceral understanding of what makes them tick.
I say a visceral understanding, because this is an understanding that words are inadequate to convey. What a challenge for a writer! But you may know that we have brain cells in our guts (viscera) as well as in our heads, and they offer a different kind of understanding. Explanatory words communicate to the head brain; emotions and sensations communicate to the gut brain. So, like actors, our job is to portray, using emotion and sensation, rather than describe, using reason and judgment. That’s how you get your reader’s mirror neurons to fire.
Susan Batson teaches actors to look for three primary components of character: Need, Public Persona, and Tragic Flaw. How does this map onto the Imaginative Storm concept of tender spots?
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