How Writing And Acting Overlaps

A few years ago, I walked to the first day of rehearsal for a play. I had not recognised the building from the address, but as I got closer the sense of place was overwhelming. The church rooms near the back of Highbury Corner used to house the nursery school I attended when I was three. Memories of tepid milk in miniature bottles, sand-box rivalries, and the scent of pee-soaked floors returned as vividly as the new cast members who assembled around the coffee table on that fresh, December morning.

Over the following month as we learned our lines and explored the characters, more memories returned. The dressing-up box and make-believe games, the fairy tales and nursery rhymes and bossing each other around the climbing frame. It didn’t take me long to realise that the intervening years had brought little change to my fundamental being, albeit with cleaner floors and colder milk. I loved stories so much that I still wanted to be part of them a whole lifetime later.

Working as an actor I was often called upon to improvise, or to collaborate in the process of devising a piece, and sometimes even to rewrite scenes that were not working (strictly at the invitation of the director). My imagination was always engaged, and it was usually a creative process whether working in film or on stage. The primary limitation as an actor was that I had to be asked to do it in the first place. Unlike many creative jobs, there is not much mileage in performing as an actor on your own to yourself. As a painter or a musician, even as a dancer, you can at least practice your art, enjoy the freedom of expression. But an actor is pretty stumped without an audience. 

 I started writing scripts many years ago, but found I was stuck in much the same situation I experienced as an actor; a script is a blueprint that needs to be produced, or at least sold with the possibility of being produced,  and I had had my fill of pointless meetings. But a novel…well, that could be written and it would be a thing in itself. Or so it seemed to me at the time. And, with that in mind, I started to write my first book.

It took me ten years, during which I carried on with my daytime/night-time job. Writing and acting worked well together. On a film or television show, I may spend weeks in a car park, or a quarry, while waiting to go on set. For a play, I am often on tour, a week in every city for months, or years, at a time. In short, there is quite a lot of waiting around. That is the physical, practical part of writing taken care of, there is time in which to do it, but what about the psychological aspect? When you’re drowning nightly as Ophelia, lobotomising as Ratched, or fighting demons as Chris MacNeil,  is it possible to find a different set of skills or imaginative space in order to write a novel?

The answer for me was that the two worlds easily overlapped. As someone with what might be described as a tenuous grip on reality to start with, switching between several imaginary realms was not only possible but enjoyable. As a child, my tendency to stare into space or chase dandelion seeds was considered irritating by peers and adults alike. Spending hours on set with a blank page while I chased imaginary dandelions felt like the retreat from the world I needed. Even in the rehearsal room, being too fanciful was frowned upon. But left to my own devices, there was no world I couldn’t happily explore.

Of course, technically the work is different, but there are many lessons learned as an actor that help with the writing process. The sense of time passing in ‘scenes’ has been instilled in me since the first television play I was in, The Other Window, by the brilliant J.B.Priestley. The creation of characters is also very much part of the rehearsal process. The playwright or scriptwriter will already have written the part, but the imaginative leap between what is on the page and how that character manifests physically is the work of the actor. 

Using dialogue and the gaps in between, to communicate plot, character, and emotion is another skill that an actor observes, and delivers, first hand. Sometimes that lesson will have been given by the best practitioners of the art in the world, but often it will be the actor’s job to help make the dialogue sing. Either way, actors have hundreds of hours of dialogue in their heads. Which might explain a lot about trying to have a regular conversation  with them, but is definitely helpful when it comes to inventing new dialogue for a book.

There has been, and still is, a lot more to learn about writing a novel than these experiences can accommodate. But I realise as I stare at my computer, or follow the clouds from my window, that a large part of me has remained in that pre-school stage of development, however long I continue to lounge in education. I will forever retreat to the puppets,  the doctor’s kits, and the playdough, hoping to be part of another story, even more fantastic than the last. As it turns out, you can be an actor on your own, telling stories to yourself, and you hardly ever have to wet the floor.

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Sophie Ward is an actor and writer who has worked extensively in film, television and theatre. Her first degree was in literature and philosophy and she has a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London on The Use of Fictional Narrative in Thought Experiments in Philosophy of Mind. Sophie’s non-fiction book, A Marriage Proposal: the importance of equal marriage and what it means for all of us, was published by The Guardian in 2014. Sophie won the Royal Academy and Pin Drop short story award in 2018. Her first novel, Love And Other Thought Experiments, was published in February 2020 by Corsair and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and the Booker Prize 2020.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020

‘Sophie Ward is a dazzling talent who writes like a modern-day F Scott Fitzgerald’ Elizabeth Day, author of How To Fail

‘An act of such breath-taking imagination, daring and detail that the journey we are on is believable and the debate in the mind non-stop. There are elements of Doris Lessing in the writing – a huge emerging talent here’ Fiona Shaw

‘A towering literary achievement’ Ruth Hogan, author of The Keeper of Lost Things

Rachel and Eliza are planning their future together. One night in bed Rachel wakes up terrified and tells Eliza that an ant has crawled into her eye and is stuck there. Rachel is certain; Eliza, a scientist, is sceptical. Suddenly their entire relationship is called into question. What follows is a uniquely imaginitive sequence of interlinked stories ranging across time, place and perspective to form a sparkling philosophical tale of love, lost and found across the universe.

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