Using Method Acting in Your Writing

The first time I ever acted on stage was my freshman year of high school, when I played a 90-year-old nun in the show (warning: terrible pun ahead) Nun of Your Business. I’d never acted before, and knew next to nothing about it. I figured it couldn’t be that hard to pretend to be someone else, but it proved to be more of a challenge than I thought. As a 14-year-old, I had no idea what it was like to walk around using a cane. I still had all my teeth. Hell, I wasn’t even Catholic.


Lucky for me, I wasn’t the only one feeling like a fish out of water. So, to help us get into character before rehearsals, our director would have us sit in a circle and ask us mundane questions like ‘what’s your favorite breakfast food?’ or ‘what kind of errands did you run today?’ And we’d have to answer them from our character’s point of view. Now, as a frigid old woman who could hardly walk, I didn’t run many errands, but I waxed poetic on my love of all things breakfast, particularly buttermilk pancakes. I still remember that. I also remember insisting that I did not wear dentures.


Writing, it turns out, is a lot like acting. You have an entire cast of characters, each of them unique, and you have to manage to keep them all straight. You have to make sure they don’t blend together, and that each has a very distinct personality. I’ve been hard at work editing my current WIP, and was having a little trouble with one chapter in particular, where I couldn’t seem to get the mother to sound like herself. Up until that point in the manuscript, she’d been kind of sarcastic and grumpy. In this particular scene, the main character was in need of some comfort, and I couldn’t figure out a way for this older woman to offer her support without sounding trite and completely out of character.


So what did I do? I went back to my high school days of method acting. I sat myself down, closed my eyes, and tried to envision myself as a 47-year-old woman who’s hiding a fugitive in her basement, whose eldest son has turned out to be a major disappointment, and whose world is crumbling around her faster than a leaning tower of Jenga. I may have considered even putting on a frumpy dress and an apron for this, but couldn’t find any. (But if dressing up helps you, then by all means, go for it.) I envisioned what she’d had for breakfast that morning, and what kinds of errands she’d had to run. Knowing the scene took place in winter, I thought about how snow might affect her mood. Then I read through the entire scene out loud, much like you’d do at a play rehearsal. The problem, I found, was that a script is all dialogue, save for very specific sections of blocking. In between my lines of dialogue, I’d have a paragraph describing the lump in someone’s throat, or how badly their head hurt. When the thing I needed to work on most was voice, all those extra words just got in the way.


How did I solve the problem, you ask? I opened a new Word document, copied and pasted the scene I was working on, and deleted everything that wasn’t dialogue. And after I read through that, I realized why I couldn’t get the mother to act the way she’s supposed to. The problem was that the paragraphs between the dialogue were concentrated on the main character, as she’s the one narrating. So her voice was pulling me away from the one I needed help with. Once I took away my MC’s narration, the scene began to fall into place. I had a much better grasp on the mother’s voice. Keeping those emotions I’d dug up at the front of my mind, I was able to rewrite the scene in a way that stayed true to who both the characters were.


I haven’t acted since I started college, but I’ve found method acting to be a useful took I like to keep in my writer’s toolbox. It’s come in handy on more than one occasion, and I hope you guys can take advantage of it as well. Just start with the basic question of what’s the best breakfast food, and see where your imagination takes you!

Mugs, Writing and Rain, Oh My!: A Vlog

Basically, I vlog because I'm too lazy to type. And my feet hurt. Which is irrelevant.

Writing Slumps And Dumps

I have to admit, I've been pretty annoyed lately. I've been down in the dumps about this awful writing slump of mine. After spending months on TANGO, writing or editing nearly every day, it's been weird to just sit around. Now that the story's complete, and agents are looking at it, I vowed to work on another project. So I started TAC (The Age of Consequence, the second book in the series), then decided it might be best to take a little break from that world and start a side project to help keep myself balanced. Personally, I find working on two very different projects to be very helpful in terms of keeping myself sane. I don't know why, it's just the way I've always been.

So I went through my graveyard file (yes, it's legitimately named that, and color-coded gray) and dug out an old favorite of mine, Abra Cadaver. I'd written about 35k back in 2007, but reading through it, realized how terrible it was. Determined to fix it, I labeled the rewrite, Saving Grace, as my summer 2010 project.

And after a week, I gave up.

I had no fire for the story, and no idea what to do with it. Everything I tried to write came out sounding like crap, and I was left feeling deflated and angry.

Where was my muse? Why had it abandoned me? It was as if anything outside the TANGO realm refused to be written. I couldn't work on old stories, and where I'm usually bombarded by new ideas daily (I think my writer friends, and readers, are probably sick of my writing ADD), I hadn't had one in months. I felt dried up and washed out, and it was a feeling I did not enjoy.

My best friend offered a few suggestions, all of which I turned down. Not because they were bad ideas, but because I know how I write, and I know what does and doesn't work for me. She suggested I work on some shorter pieces, or take a break, or use Write or Die to coax something out of the darkness of my pen. And I'm sure some of those things would have worked for someone else, but they just couldn't fix me.

In truth, I usually just sit around and wait. I tried to write through it, but that idea failed. Hoping inspiration would strike seemed like the best bet.

And I turned out to be right.

I'm usually inspired by really ridiculous things that somehow weave themselves into a legit plot once I start writing. TANGO sprung from my Nazi Germany class. This latest idea of mine came from a commercial for America's Most Wanted, of all things. I wasn't expecting it, but in the two days since I saw the commercial, I've written a prologue I'm actually really happy with. And while I still haven't worked out the plot's finer points, I've got a direction, and I'm running with it.

I think we all go through slumps in our writing. No doubt, they're incredibly frustrating, and make you want to bash your head against your desk. The best advice I can give, however, is to be patient. Ideas are like love - they come to you when you least expect them.