When I refer to writing as being acting I mean every word is delivered by a particular character, or “voice,” even if it is a third person omniscient narrator.
It could be the voice found in a business letter, some web copy, a newsletter, or poem – anything that involves writing. No matter how objective and dry the text may want to be (technical writing, for example), it is still a character delivering it – in some cases a very objective and dry one. It always has a voice. The question is, “Who is that voice?”
I’m not talking about going into some great psychological-emotional examination of character as if you were an actor getting into a role (unless perhaps what you are writing is fiction and you’re developing a character).
For the most part, it’s a variation on the kid’s game, “let’s pretend.”
For whatever you are writing, you put on some kind of persona. I suppose we all do so in our daily lives, behaving one way at work, another in a meeting with a client, another at home, another at a party. But it’s the persona that gives you the voice and the voice dictates the style – even the language. For me, it all becomes much easier when I’m “in character.”
Mimicry
I think what lies behind it is mimicry. As with many, if not most writers, I began as a reader. Once started, I was soon reading just about everything I could find – old novels, new novels, science fiction, crime, mysteries, classic literature, books in translation, and on and on. Also, when I turned on the radio or watched television, I listened. I also listened to the world around me — immediate family, relatives, friends, neighbours, and anyone else I might stumble upon.
What I heard was a myriad of voices, some with puzzling syntax, unexpected contractions, emphases put in places that were strange (to me).
When I started writing, almost all of it was mimicry. I was channeling and regurgitating all these voices I had found in words on the page or had heard spoken.
Of course, all of the writing I did was utterly wretched. But I was learning and, even better, I was having fun. The best learning is about discovery and the more you discover the more curious you become.
I kept doing it because, for me, it was fun and after a while it ceased to be mimicry. Somehow, it had become mine. I couldn’t tell you how but all of those styles I had come across, all the characters I had found and all of the voices I had heard, were mysteriously filed away so they could be called upon as persona templates, in a sense. They were starting places, if nothing else.
When I write something like a business letter I become a businessman with his or her own voice. I write in a business-like fashion less because there are certain expectations and styles associated with a business letter than because that is how the character I become would write – a business person would write in a business-like way.
When I did editing work on some legal documents, I became a lawyer. I was anything but an actual lawyer but I employed his or her voice and his or her way of looking at text because in a sense I was playing a lawyer as an actor would. I was also trying to approximate how a lawyer might think as he or she looked at the text.
In fiction, if I’m telling a story in the third person I might become my grandfather. He was great at telling stories. He was a natural raconteur (he was Irish, of course). Or I might assume another persona. But all writing comes from someone and I have to become that someone in order to write.
You might say, “Why not be yourself?” The answer is, I do. But “I” emerge from the totality of the writing, the sum and not the parts.
To take an example from fiction, ask yourself if you believe the narrative voice found in the novels of Cormac McCarthy is the same voice he uses in the world, the one you would hear him use in a casual conversation or while in a grocery store. His narrative voice comes, I believe, from a persona or character he assumes as he writes. It is both him and not him.
It’s Just “Let’s Pretend”
All writing is acting. A narrator is a character – even if he or she is passively objective. A classified ad requires writing and that means it, too, requires a persona/character. For your wallet’s sake, that character will practice brevity. Business writing requires a business person’s approach and language.
Fiction also – even obviously – requires that you become someone. When a work of fiction uses a first person narrator, it is particularly important. Your story will succeed or fail depending on who that narrator is and how well he or she can engage your reader. It’s also true for second and third person narratives even though, as in the third person, that narrator is someone who tries to efface him or herself in an attempt to tell the story objectively.
You don’t need to go to acting school. You just have to remember what it was to be a child playing “let’s pretend.” You need to be the voice you’re using.
If there is any trick to writing, it’s in not writing like a writer. That may be the one persona you don’t want to put on. Unless, I suppose, you’re writing for other writers. But that would be kind of boring, don’t you think?
(Writing is Acting appeared on an earlier version of BillWren.com, and later was published on Medium, October 27, 2014.)
