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Seven ways writers can learn from actors

For World Theatre Day, RLF Fellow Sanjida O’Connell takes a look at what writers can learn from actors when it comes to creating characters.

Sanjida O’Connell

“When I first left home and went to drama school, I thought I knew what acting was,’ the actor, Michael Sheen, said during his recent series, Michael Sheen Gets into Character. ‘It was about being clever and interesting. You got a script, and you just worked out the cleverest, most interesting, most entertaining way of saying the lines and playing the part.” Michael quickly discovered this approach to inhabiting a character on stage didn’t really work. He had a crisis of confidence, even leaving drama school for a time. But then he realised he had to go back to the beginning and learn how to make characters seem real and authentic.

As I listened to Michael, I wondered if the techniques that Michael and many other actors learn at drama school in order to become a character, could actually help writers create characters?

One of the main approaches to character-creation taught at drama schools is known as The System. It was developed by the Russian actor and producer Konstantin Stanislavski in the early 1900s. He wanted to formulate a theory of acting, an almost scientific approach to creating authentic, naturalistic characters “and then bring them to life, on cue, night after night,” as Michael explains.

Stanislavski encouraged actors to understand their characters’ motivations, objectives and inner lives. He introduced techniques such as the magic if —asking “What would I do if I were in this situation?”— and emotion memory, where actors recall personal experiences to evoke genuine feelings.

Stanislavski didn’t write down The System and over the years it was taught and adapted by others. Lee Strasberg, the director of the Group Theatre in New York, took the main elements of The System and created The Method. He placed even greater emphasis on emotional authenticity. The System uses affective memory, where actors are encouraged to relive their past, often painful, emotions to generate truthful performances. His work became the backbone of American Method Acting, influencing performers like Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro. Daniel Day-Lewis famously uses method acting, even staying in character off-set. When he played the character of Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York he is alleged to have covered his eye with a prosthetic glass to simulate Bill’s fake one and taught himself to tap his eye with a knife without flinching.

Stanislavski, meanwhile, had started to feel that mining one’s own trauma for entertainment was deeply damaging and had moved towards using external physical actions as a way of portraying emotional depth.

Most writers would rather be backstage writing than on-screen performing, but we do want to create characters that are authentic and that readers can empathise with. And most of us want to do this reliably for every character and every story.

So what can we take from The System and The Method to help us? Here are 7 suggestions.

1. Create a backstory

When actors receive a script, there often isn’t much information about the character. This often means creating a backstory for the character, sometimes in conjunction with the director and production team.

As a novelist, you can create the backstory and use it to inform your character’s personality, even if little of it will end up in your final work. Think about your character’s race, religion, class, where they grew up, what their childhood was like and anything else you think might be useful.

2. Create the character’s world

In his BBC Maestro masterclass, Harlan Coben describes how he walks past people’s houses and imagines who might live there and what secrets they could have.

As yourself – if you opened your characters bathroom cabinet, what would be in it? How tidy are they? What clothes do they wear? What’s their favourite TV show? Where do they like to go out to eat and what would they order? Where do they work and who with? Do they enjoy it?

The actor Anne-Marie Duff says that she likes to flesh out her characters as human beings, asking:

What did she have for breakfast? What car keys would be in my handbag?

3. The magic “what if?”

Stella Adler, who was one of Stanislavski’s students and the founder of the Stella Adler Center for the Arts, says that an actor (and, I’d add, a writer) should be able to drop their character into any scenario and know how they’d react.

Try dropping your character into scenes or create scenarios for them to test this out.

4. Interview your character

Do you know what your character thinks about climate change? Trump’s election? What do they wish they’d done differently in life? How do they feel about their partner / child / parents? If they had to write a letter to another character in your story, what would they say? Try interviewing your character and see how they’d respond.

5. Deep character

Think about what your character wants. The character’s desire is what motivates them and will propel them through your story. Why do they want it? What are they doing to accomplish it? How will they manage to get it? Will they be thwarted?

6. Emotional magic

Actor Sarah Moss and author of What It’s Like in Words (as Eliza Moss) says:

Don’t explain to the reader that your character is heartbroken, make the reader feel heartbroken for them.

But how do you do that, particularly when you may not have experienced any of the same events as your characters, or even share the same predilections as your characters?

In the film The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter, played by Antony Hopkins says:

I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Precious few of us would want that dinner menu, but who has not been completely irritated or enraged by someone at some point? Of course, the next logical step is not cannibalism — we can take that authentic scrap of emotion, though, and put it into a different situation and character to help us write, not what we know, but what we feel.

7. Physical thinking

Stanislavski believed that knowing how a character moved could help the actor drill down from the character’s exterior to their inner life. Imagine how your character would sit, walk, run, move.

In the film version of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club [spoiler alert] the same character is played by two actors, Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. Even though they’re meant to be the same person, look at how these two actors comport themselves: one cocksure and confident, the other diffident and demeaning. By altering posture and body language, we know exactly how the main character is feeling.

Think about what your character is going to do and how they’ll do it physically. A tip would be to look at old portraits or photographs to see how people hold themselves. For instance, imagining yourself standing straight and tall in a ‘superhero’ stance might help you feel confident and thus inform how your character could move and how they’ll feel.

What do you think? How do you create characters in your work? Do you think borrowing techniques from actors could help?

This article originally appeared on our Substack.

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