I’m not big on rules or posts that say “do this” and “do that,” so this post is to simply describe how I approach writing. It might be better to say it describes what writing feels like to me.
What is that approach?
Exactly what the title says: writing is acting. This isn’t an idea I picked up in a book, or in a class, or found online, though there may be people out there who have professed or do profess this approach. It is simply something I found myself doing as I wrote.
What I mean by “acting”
When I refer to writing as being acting I mean every word is delivered by a particular character, or “voice,” even if it is a third person omniscient narrator. It could be the voice found in a business letter, some web copy, a newsletter or poem – anything that involves writing. No matter how objective and dry the text may want to be, it is still a character delivering it – in some cases a very objective and dry one. It always has a voice. The question is, who is that voice?
I’m not talking about going into some great psychological-emotional examination of character as if you were an actor getting into a role (unless what you are writing is fiction and you’re developing a character). For the most part, it’s a kind of variation on the kid’s game, “let’s pretend.”
For whatever you are writing, you put on some kind of persona. I suppose we all do it in our daily lives behaving one way at work, another in a meeting with a client, another at home, another at a party. But it’s the persona that gives you the voice and the voice dictates the style – even the language. And for me, it all becomes much more easy when I’m “in character.”
Mimicry
I think what lies behind it is mimicry. As with many, if not most, writers, I began as a reader. Once started, soon I was reading just about everything I could find – old novels, new novels, science fiction, crime, mysteries, classic literature, books in translation and on and on. Also, when I turned on the radio or watched television, I listened. I also listened to the world around me — immediate family, relatives, friends, neighbours and on and on.
What I heard was a myriad of voices, some with puzzling syntax, unexpected contractions, emphases put in places that were strange (to me).
When I started writing, almost all of it was mimicry, a channeling and regurgitation of all these voices found in words on the page or heard spoken.
Of course, all of the writing I did was utterly wretched. But I was learning and, even better, I was having fun. The best learning is about discovery and the more you discover the more curious you become.
I kept doing it because, for me, it was fun and after a while it ceased to be mimicry. Somehow, it had become mine. I couldn’t tell you how but all of those styles I had come across, all the characters I had found and all the voices I had heard were mysteriously filed away so they could be called upon as persona templates, in a sense. They were starting places, if nothing else.
When I write something like a business letter I become a businessman with his own or her own voice. I write in a business-like fashion less because there are certain expectations and styles associated with a business letter than because that is how the character I become would write – a business person would write in a business-like way.
When I did editing work on some legal documents, I became a lawyer. I was anything but an actual lawyer but I employed his or her voice and his or her way of looking at text because in a sense I was playing a lawyer as an actor would. I was also trying to approximate how a lawyer might think as he or she looked at the text.
In fiction, if I‘m telling a story in the third person I might become my grandfather. He was great at telling stories. He was a natural raconteur (of course, he was Irish). Or I might assume another persona. But all writing comes from someone and I have to become that someone in order to write.
You might say, “Why not be yourself?” The answer is I do. But I emerge from the totality of the writing, the sum and not the parts. To take an example from fiction, ask yourself if you think the narrative voice found in the novels of Cormac McCarthy is the same voice of he uses in the world, the one you would hear him use in a casual conversation or while in a grocery store. His narrative voice comes, I believe, from a persona or character he assumes as he writes. It is both him and not him.
It’s just “let’s pretend”
All writing is acting. Even a narrator is a character – even if he or she is passively objective. A classified ad requires writing and that means it, too, requires a persona/character. For your wallet’s sake, that character will practice brevity. Business writing requires a business person’s approach and their language, unless they are speaking to customers when what they need is a customer’s voice and point of view.
You don’t need to go to acting school. You just have to remember what it was to be a child and playing “let’s pretend.” You need to be the voice you’re using.
A question often asked in marketing about companies, products and services is, “What’s your story?” The other question you need to ask is, “Who’s telling my story?” This second question is often taken to mean whether the teller is you, your customers or your competition. The other way to look at it is, if the answer is that you are telling your story, who are you and do you sound like who you think you are?
It may be that, if there is any trick to writing, it’s in not writing like a writer. That may be the one persona you can’t put on. Unless, I suppose, you’re writing for other writers. But that would be kind of boring, don’t you think?
Listen to this post
No one likes being left out so this is my Barack Obama post on the day of his inauguration as President of the United States. But what to write that hasn’t been written about already?
