January 05th, 2025

                 
                                     IS WRITING A FORM OF ACTING?

There’s an anecdote about Robert E. Howard, the author of a million sword and sorcery tales featuring his creations like Kull, Solomon Kane, and, most famously Conan the Cimmerian. Supposedly, while writing his tales, he would often get quite caught up in the composition.
​So caught up in fact that he would do things like tying a blanket around his neck to mimic a cape, and begin acting out his scenes. He would shout and swashbuckle and parry imaginary blows while delivering his own ripostes.
There’s no way to know for sure whether Howard actually engaged in such antics, but it hardly matters for the purposes of this little blog entry. I’m simply remembering it in relation to a question I’ve been posing to myself, off and on, for the last few weeks, or maybe months. And since I have you here, I’ll pose it to you, now, too:
Is writing acting? I mean, does it involve a form of theatrical conceit similar to acting? Must the writer adopt the mantle of the various characters they write about, must they *play* these characters? I’m not too conscious of my mannerisms while writing, but I will occasionally catch myself mumbling a character’s lines, even making gestures. When, say, a character strikes another character, I might find myself clenching my fist and delivering a phantom blow in the air. I never get caught up enough in the act to accidentally hit my computer monitor, but the enacting of some scene does sometimes happen, in a small way.
Anyone who’s written has also no doubt experienced the feeling of being skin-close to the characters they’ve created. They’ve also probably experienced a feeling of seeing a character at a frustrating remove. Maybe they’ve even been repulsed by a character they’ve created, and, if they were quite unlucky, this character happened to be the protagonist. What kind of masochist would deliberately spend time with someone they despise for the months, or sometimes years, it requires to write a book? The answer might be that one did not know their character would prove to be so repulsive when they first created them. Assuming our creations take on a life of their own and start refusing orders from the conscious creator—a state desired by most writers—this could easily happen.
This sense of revulsion at one’s creations is not exclusive to writers, by the way. Al Pacino claimed to have despised the coldhearted Michael Corleone, whom he played over the course of three films spanning several decades. Ditto Christian Bale, who played the irredeemable Patrick Bateman in the film version of the novel “American Psycho.” His agent, in fact, warned him that the role would prove to be career suicide, but Bale went ahead with it anyway...
I’ve already read Uta Hagen’s “Respect for Acting,” and will probably work my way through the rest of the classics in the genre before the sun sets on 2025. There were a couple of very interesting tidbits I managed to extract from her book. The first was that if one simply performs an action, it will usually lack verity. One must perform the action with a goal in mind in order to animate the action. An action, then, is not a goal, but the movement from desire to the obtainment of that desire, or at least the attempt to obtain the desired object or state. This rule obtains even if one merely has to walk across a room. Walk across the room because the script says to, and the act of walking will be bloodless. Walk because you want something—even if it’s just the OJ from the fridge—and suddenly the act becomes something else.
How does this apply to writing? For me, the answer is simple enough. Replace Hagen’s “goal” with “story” and you have a similar principle. Any action done simply to be done—or any description given, any exposition frontloaded for that reason—will lack gravity; the reader, no matter how ill-tuned to story mechanics, will somehow inherently sense it. Make the action, description, the seemingly offhand tidbit somehow one with the overall thrust of the story and you have something else. You have unity, symmetry, beauty, or at the very least motion that appears to be leading somewhere. This rule probably holds even for the most meandering of genres: the picaresque. A man fighting windmills is ridiculous. A man fighting windmills who doesn’t see the ridiculousness inherent in his act is poetry.
The other gem mined from Madame Hagen’s book regarded research. Certain “method” actors like Robert De Niro or Daniel Day-Lewis are by turns lauded and lambasted for their over-the-top immersive research. De Niro became a cab driver for a time to help immerse himself in the volatile mind of Travis Bickle; Day-Lewis, in preparing to play a paralyzed man, reportedly broke a rib while sitting rictus-stiff in a wheelchair for too long.
My own suffering for my “art” (I must use sneer quotes, as I have a hard time regarding myself as an artist) never involved much more than reading books. That said, I have strained my eyes and my attention span to their very limits reading sometimes incredibly boring texts.
But, to paraphrase Ms. Hagen, a month’s agony is worth a moment’s verisimilitude. I’ve found, in fact, that reading a five-hundred page book to learn the exact right single word sometimes makes it all worth it. This word could be something as simple as the slang name for some trade used only among insiders; it could be a certain breed of dog, or even a description of that dog’s coat. Even if that appropriated word only appears once in my story, it somehow acts like an incantation to enliven everything around it. A sort of “Open Sesame” to which I only gain access after many hours of patient and seemingly fruitless labor.
Of course, for the layman, the sine qua non of good acting is the ability to make oneself cry, maybe even on-cue. Have I ever cried writing, or made myself cry? I’ve come close once or twice, but it’s not something I’m proud of, though a lot of writers apparently are.
Right behind self-induced tears on the list of impressive feats performed by actors is massive changes in physical appearance, either extreme weight gain or extreme weight loss. I’d hazard that if one were to poll one-thousand professional writers, there would be a lot more gainers than losers. And that very little of that gain would have been in the service of their craft, or trying to get inside a portly character’s head by gaining a gut. I suppose in the loosest sense,  every writer whose sedentary lifestyle has caused them to gain weight has suffered for their art. Notice I didn’t put the scare quotes around *art* there, if only because some scribblers can actually refer to themselves as artists without gagging.
Putting aside writing as acting when assuming the mantle of a character, the very act of creating fiction itself might involve some theatrical conceit.  
There’s a creative nonfiction writer I know who talks about the obstacle he encounters every time he tries to write fiction. “I simply cannot say this or that action happened, unless it has happened.” He feels like a liar when he does. If he got a DUI, he can write, “I got a DUI.” He can even write that “Bill got a DUI,” provided Bill is just serving as his alter-ego for the piece in question. But he cannot write “Bill got his PhD,” unless he (the author) acquired one himself. Much less could he write, “Bill got abducted by UFOs” or “Bill was a private detective.”
For those of us more inclined to fiction, Bill is one boring SOB. That’s okay, though, because from Bill’s perspective we are all quite full of shit.
Maybe that is the one overarching link between the actor and writer, the place where they sit in perfect apposition. Both are liars, relying on deception to achieve their goals. Granted, it’s a deception desired by the audience, and welcomed by them when done well, but it’s also distrusted by that same crowd.  
When I put it this way, both acting and writing (including songwriting) sound a lot more like prostitution than artistry.
Maybe that, then, is the way in which writing is very much like acting, if not quite being a form of acting itself. Practitioners in both fields tend to feel some ambivalence about themselves, both about the quality of their own performance, and more generally what they do. A sense of, if not shame, then at least a feeling that it’s probably meet and proper for them to leave through the backdoor after they're done entertaining the audience.
Maybe that’s better than the front door, though, as one can steal into the house as easily as out of it. Willie Dixon seemed to think so....

​