Writing and Acting: How Improvising Helps My Writing

I’m a massive historical fiction fan. Until a few years ago, mainly Roman historical fiction, but in early in 2013, I came across a paragraph on the internet about a factual woman from history who achieved truly inspiring feats in her life. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered just how she had accomplished it all.

As an actress, creating backstory for characters I play is essential to inform my work, and so I found myself filling the gaps in this woman’s life to satisfy my own curiosity. I began researching the geography, era and culture, which I knew nothing about, so that I could be historically accurate, and the more I read, the more I began to acknowledge the need to write the story down.

My creativity floundered immediately as I perceived ‘rules’ about how to write a novel – sometimes from advice I found online, or in other books, or just how I thought it ‘should be’ done. Mercifully, my partner, who is the author and playwright Jen Toksvig, pointed out that the story initially sprang from my acting and that my creativity was at its best there.

Jen runs a theatre company who use improvisation as a tool to create work, and so I began improvising the bits of story that I found most exciting. Mostly whilst I was in the shower, or driving.

Improvisation, for those who might not be familiar, is an acting tool that frees the performer to discover more about something, usually a character. If I’m playing a role in a play, and want to learn more about her than the author explicitly states, I might imagine her in a situation outside the realms of the text and invent how she would react, what she would say, who she might meet.

The early stages of fleshing out the idea for the novel became one big improvisation; I would speak the action aloud, as if I was telling someone a story and would edit and modify as I discovered more about the characters and plot.

Not long after that, I read a blog written by Stella Duffy who uses her skills from the theatre to write her novels. Stella’s blog showed me that improvisation could be a tool to create much more than just plot or short sequences, and so I began also to improvise dialogue. I have pages of unedited dialogue that I have written verbatim as I imagined the characters talking in my head, and I use edited sections in the text as I build sequences into chapters.

The trick with using improv as a writing tool, I am beginning to learn, is to remember that, as in real life, all my characters NEED similar things to live, and they all WANT other things to feel fulfilled. They may well meet whilst they are questing for their WANT, or attending to a NEED, but all credible fiction has characters who are driven by these two things, in my opinion, just as characters in a play do.

Acting is also a lot about copying, I actively seek to perform as well as my acting heroes and watch as much as I can of their work, and so research for my novel has become not just a factual exploration, but a stylistic one as well. I have surrounded myself with my favourite authors and constantly refer to their work to inform my own. I suppose in trying to emulate those who I find most transforming, I hope to create something my potential readers will enjoy similarly.

Manda Scott, whose Boudica series is a particularly notable example of this, manages to write so cinematically that I forget that I’m reading at all. I can see the landscapes she paints, and hear the words her characters speak so clearly that I feel that I could be stood next to them. It’s been an interesting lesson to try and break down what I find most readable and how I might create something in a similar fashion.

Really, acting is mostly about being. About letting the work flow through you, and not getting in the way of it. So that’s what I’m trying to do at the moment for the book, which means there are periods of time when I write nothing, because forcing it only creates unbelievable swathes of material.

The freedom with choosing to write about a character that really existed is that there are plot elements which have to happen at a certain time, and this frees me to find the journey between these moments however I see fit. When improvising scenes for acting, the trick is to not force ‘interesting’ scenarios as it nearly always kills the spontaneity and credibility of the exercise. But if I play a scene knowing how it must conclude, and I play simple, obvious choices, the audience will relate to the characters and the decisions they make because it’s what they might have chosen as well.

Hence when I write, I try to remember that my biggest lesson from improvisation is also my most useful tool for writing: to let my characters make the obvious choice, because that way the reader will go on the journey with them. After all, I already know how the story must end; my task is only to figure out how to get there.

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Louise is an actor, singer, drummer and uke player originally from Bristol, and now living in London. She currently works back stage in the West End and is in the process of writing her first novel, using her performing experience to inform her writing.

Follow her on twitter @louisevoce   visit her website http: www.louisevoce.com

The blogs mentioned in this site:

Stella Duffy:  stelladuffy.wordpress.com twitter:  @stellduffy

Jen Toksvig:  www.acompletelossforwords.com twitter: @toksvig

Manda Scott:  www.mandascott.co.uk  twitter: @hare_wood

 

Tags: featured, writing and acting

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips