A post over at Anne Mini's place set me to thinkin' about method acting and method writing (which isn't what the post was about at all, but I am Tangential Boy and my weakness is straight lines).
For those not acting-inclined, the short and vastly oversimplified version. Classical acting: the actor seems angry. Method acting: the actor is angry.
Which immediately complicates the overt application of method acting techniques to writing, because if I'm actually in a blind fury I will most likely smash the computer and set it on fire rather than sit in front of it and write about someone who's in a blind fury. However, I seem to be in a period where I'm working with first person more often than not,1 and the description of Sandy Meisner's modified method acting technique as "living truthfully under imaginary circumstances" does seem applicable.
Unfortunately, the reason it seems relevant is because I sometimes create such queer characters (in all senses of that word) that personal chaos or real world distractions can send their truthful voices out the window, down the street and into a storm drain. I'm trying, with mixed success, to rid myself of the posh and lazy Ah, I can only Write when the Muse sits upon my shoulder and feeds me peeled grapes while I sip absinthe and ponder the shores of Messolonghi attitude. It's such a grind, though, when I want to adopt the voice of a ridiculously wealthy and bitchy surgical hermaphrodite and she's just not there. It's disheartening. But if I don't put words down nothing gets done, and at some point I've got to make peace with the fact that all first drafts are shit.
I've come to recognize that reluctance for what it is: a form of cowardice. Afraid to risk courting The Suck, I'll avoid the written arena entirely. Bad writer! No biscuit. It was lion-hunting, marlin-hooking, shotgun-eating Papa Hemingway who spoke that fecal truth about first drafts, and I suspect he applied the same bravado to the empty page as he did to most other things in his life. Likewise, I think that the empty page occasionally un-manned him.
Eventually, after scraping off the shit, the voice shone forth. Bluff and hearty public machismo produced private moments of clarity and turmoil:
I read those words and--later, when I'd finished the book--I wondered just where Hemingway went to get them, and how he got there. Agnes von Kurowsky, the nurse he fell in love with while hospitalized in Milan during World War I, didn't die. She just married someone else. The accidents and deaths of close friends didn't start until 1939. I think I recognize something beneath that paragraph, though, that echoes a certain kind of anxiety: the tone of someone who can imagine the worst, conjuring up fear and anxiety, then amplify it and revisit it, again and again. That's just amateur and entirely unfounded speculation on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if Hemingway purposefully soaked himself in the deeper and more unpleasant emotions in order to capture a voice on the page.2 There was a reason he wrote with double daquiris, after all.
Every writer needs to adopt techniques that work for them. I'm still fumbling about for mine, and I sometimes wonder whether I'm making things more difficult than I need to...living truthfully in imaginary circumstances when those circumstances involve, say, the destruction of a major city or the death of a loved one can take its toll.
Or, perhaps I'm taking it all much too seriously. Most of my characters do go out and have tremendous amounts of raucous fun, even while the world is ending...maybe I need to focus on that part of the chorus for awhile. It can't be all mass devastation and death all the time, now can it?
1Right now (of course) there's a third person "not" I'm working on, but it's a story I started almost a decade ago and it doesn't count because I say so.
2Which is a decent analogue of Stanislavski's affective memory technique.
For those not acting-inclined, the short and vastly oversimplified version. Classical acting: the actor seems angry. Method acting: the actor is angry.
Which immediately complicates the overt application of method acting techniques to writing, because if I'm actually in a blind fury I will most likely smash the computer and set it on fire rather than sit in front of it and write about someone who's in a blind fury. However, I seem to be in a period where I'm working with first person more often than not,1 and the description of Sandy Meisner's modified method acting technique as "living truthfully under imaginary circumstances" does seem applicable.
Unfortunately, the reason it seems relevant is because I sometimes create such queer characters (in all senses of that word) that personal chaos or real world distractions can send their truthful voices out the window, down the street and into a storm drain. I'm trying, with mixed success, to rid myself of the posh and lazy Ah, I can only Write when the Muse sits upon my shoulder and feeds me peeled grapes while I sip absinthe and ponder the shores of Messolonghi attitude. It's such a grind, though, when I want to adopt the voice of a ridiculously wealthy and bitchy surgical hermaphrodite and she's just not there. It's disheartening. But if I don't put words down nothing gets done, and at some point I've got to make peace with the fact that all first drafts are shit.
I've come to recognize that reluctance for what it is: a form of cowardice. Afraid to risk courting The Suck, I'll avoid the written arena entirely. Bad writer! No biscuit. It was lion-hunting, marlin-hooking, shotgun-eating Papa Hemingway who spoke that fecal truth about first drafts, and I suspect he applied the same bravado to the empty page as he did to most other things in his life. Likewise, I think that the empty page occasionally un-manned him.
Eventually, after scraping off the shit, the voice shone forth. Bluff and hearty public machismo produced private moments of clarity and turmoil:
The nurse went into the room and shut the door. I sat outside in the hall. Everything was gone inside me. I did not think. I could not think. I knew she was going to die and I prayed that she would not. Don't let her die. Oh, God, please don't let her die. I'll do anything for you if you won't let her die. Please, please, please, dear God, don't let her die. Dear God, don't let her die. Please, please, please, don't let her die. God please make her not die. I'll do anything you say if you don't let her die. You took the baby but don't let her die. That was all right but don't let her die. Please, please, dear God, don't let her die.This, just a couple of hundred words before Lieutenant Henry's final walk back to the hotel alone in the rain, broke my heart. Torn from its arc and context, it doesn't seem like much. To me it is a moving expression, in its cadence and its repetition, of a man in extremis, facing the crushing inevitability of loss, repeating what he knows to be a futile mantra.
I read those words and--later, when I'd finished the book--I wondered just where Hemingway went to get them, and how he got there. Agnes von Kurowsky, the nurse he fell in love with while hospitalized in Milan during World War I, didn't die. She just married someone else. The accidents and deaths of close friends didn't start until 1939. I think I recognize something beneath that paragraph, though, that echoes a certain kind of anxiety: the tone of someone who can imagine the worst, conjuring up fear and anxiety, then amplify it and revisit it, again and again. That's just amateur and entirely unfounded speculation on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if Hemingway purposefully soaked himself in the deeper and more unpleasant emotions in order to capture a voice on the page.2 There was a reason he wrote with double daquiris, after all.
Every writer needs to adopt techniques that work for them. I'm still fumbling about for mine, and I sometimes wonder whether I'm making things more difficult than I need to...living truthfully in imaginary circumstances when those circumstances involve, say, the destruction of a major city or the death of a loved one can take its toll.
Or, perhaps I'm taking it all much too seriously. Most of my characters do go out and have tremendous amounts of raucous fun, even while the world is ending...maybe I need to focus on that part of the chorus for awhile. It can't be all mass devastation and death all the time, now can it?
1Right now (of course) there's a third person "not" I'm working on, but it's a story I started almost a decade ago and it doesn't count because I say so.
2Which is a decent analogue of Stanislavski's affective memory technique.
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