“Good morning. My name is Brother Caleb…”
When Stanislavski invented Method Acting, he revolutionized the profession. Still, the concept seems so obvious that it usually doesn’t strike people as brilliant. After all, that’s literally what acting is—getting inside a character’s head and putting on their affectations for a while.
But Stanislavski knew that this could be done in degrees and the person who is willing to immerse himself totally inside a character rather than merely playing a part will be the better actor. Acting is a strange art-form because the actor must deny what he is doing even while he is doing it. He cannot be seen to be acting, filling a role, pretending. He must seem genuinely concerned about the factory shutdown or his wife’s affair, even though these things are all a fiction.
The best in the business aren’t really actors, they’re body snatchers. Or better yet, soul snatchers in that they must transform their essence and become someone else.
So it is with writers. Writers must enter the minds of their characters and become someone else, but they must create those characters as well. And there is hardly ever just one character to contend with; writers are schizophrenics who act out many different personalities on the page.
If actors are better able to perform their craft by delving deeply into the inner workings of their characters, writers can benefit from this exercise just as much or more.
I am currently writing a story about a Christian Monk from the Early Middle Ages who has himself sewn into animal pelts and wanders the desert seeking repentance for a mysterious sin. Now, I don’t live near a desert (unless you count cultural ones) and I’m not about to sew myself up in animal hides, but I have been attempting prayer, reading scripture, and practicing fleshly deprivation to try to get inside this character’s head. (I am not a religious person, you see, and I love carnal pursuits.) I also turned up the temperature in my house whenever I was writing to mimic desert conditions and hit myself in the chest a couple of times with my fist because early monks were quite fond of self harm.
And I think I could have gone even further if I’d wanted to. I could have dressed more modestly and tried speaking a little Latin. Am I crazy? Sure. Crazy like a thought-fox.
But all this is only surface area. The psychological state of this character is the most crucial thing. Considering his thoughts at every moment in the story was more important and beneficial than all the sweat stains in the world. Inner space is the key to empathy. Using my own emotions and memories from my Christian past to understand the monk’s attitude and anticipate his actions gave me a lot to work with.
Anyway, I don’t know if I’ll ever try this again. The process has been frustrating, but I believe it has allowed me to write a better story—one with passion that comes from a place of vicarious honesty. It’s been a hey-ride and I’m open to giving it another go in the future.
I’ll post the story soon enough and you can decide for yourself if you think it was worth it.
Merchant of Rhetoric 