By Valerie Peralta
On my first day of acting class, the instructor asked my classmates and me – a hodgepodge of millennials and Gen-Xers – “What is acting?”
After nodding to responses such as “a portrayal” and “a group of characters bringing a story to life,” Gail answered her own question: “Acting is action.”
I quickly learned that it’s difficult to convey disdain while saying, “I’m so glad to see you, Garret” using only my voice without falling into histrionics. However, if I lift my middle fingers to my lips and blow a kiss immediately following the greeting, the audience will understand the underlying emotion. Some might even laugh.
The mantra “acting is action” evokes prose’s “show don’t tell.” And just like there must be something at stake for every protagonist, in acting there must be an objective behind every action. As a writer, I know these principles. Yet, they strike me as even more crucial when I stand in front of my classmates delivering lines with my body as my medium.
Uta Hagen’s six steps, found in her influential book A Challenge for the Actor, serve as a guide for actors to bring their characters to life, to lift the words of the script off the page. Again, these steps – Who am I? What are the circumstances? What are my relationships? What do I want? What is my obstacle? What do I do to get what I want? – are no surprise to anyone who has ever created a character for a narrative of any length. Every creative discipline informs the others. Still, the last step – What do I do to get what I want? – haunts me.
While writing my first attempt at a YA novel, I couldn’t bring myself to allow the antihero to be as cruel as my instructor assured me he had to be if the story was going to go anywhere. I refused to write that this neighborhood bully pushed a smaller child to the ground or hurt his former friend’s dog in retaliation for defying him. My instructor was right. When characters don’t act, when they realize, notice, ponder, think to themselves, do nothing but breathe in the direction of another character to make him fall or leave a gate open so a beloved pet might wander away instead of punting it into a lake to be eaten by an alligator, well, the story is boring and no one wants to read it.
Characters, whether on the page or the stage, must have agency. In a post titled “Just What the Humping Heck is ‘Character Agency’ Anyway?” on his blog Terribleminds, author Chuck Wendig insists that a character with agency “is active more than she is reactive. She pushes on the plot more than the plot pushes on her. Even better, the plot exists as a direct result of the character’s actions.” To be effective, my characters must act. As a writer, I must summon my courage, set aside my desire for a happy world, ignore my worries about what others might think of my writing choices, and release my characters to exert their power.
This is not to say that characters can’t permit their emotions to drive their actions.
In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig bases an entire novel on the protagonist’s regrets. In the end, after living out many of the opportunities she had previously regretted not following through on, Nora deducts “…it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself.”
We cannot relegate our characters to merely thinking, emoting, or even squawking about their angst. No. We must empower them to take a deep breath and act.
Read Valerie’s other work at Reckon here.
Valerie Peralta is an intermittent practitioner of just about everything she does striving to be more tortoise and less hare. After copy editing for two decades, she’s finally trusting her own words on the page. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Fairfield University; her work has been published by The Blended Future Project and is forthcoming in Heart Balm. She lives in South Florida within running distance of the Everglades.
One response to “HEALTHY HABITS: Move With a Purpose”
It had not occurred to me until I read this that action spurs the plot of a novel forward just the same as it does a TV series or a film.