The Great Acting Blog: “Acting & Writing”

Two things happened in the last couple of weeks which got me thinking about acting and writing. Firstly, I finished writing a feature length screenplay which I started work on 21 months ago, in October 2009. I abandoned work on it last August, telling myself that, after 11 months of slog and with still no end in sight, I “couldn’t” write it, that it was “beyond my ability”, hard luck but well done, now the only correct course of action would be to quit, hope no-one notices, and put it down to experience. Let me qualify that by saying that although I would not describe myself as a “writer”, I have written a bunch of full length stage plays and screenplays over the years, along with dozens of shorter pieces (two of my plays have been presented before a paying public, and I have produced a number of shorter works, although I have never produced a feature film). My point is that I did not walk away from it because I thought I couldn’t write screenplays in general, I just couldn’t write that particular screenplay – it got to the point where even thinking about working on it created enormous feelings stress within me, that’s how helpless I felt in the face it. However, this month an intuition lead me back to this abandoned screenplay, and after opening the file and reading what I had already written, I saw that there was nothing wrong with it, all I had to do was finish off the last couple of scenes, and the script would be complete, and since I knew exactly what those scenes needed to be, it was simply a question of sitting down and literally writing them out. I did, and now, as I say, the screenplay is whole, and, for the life of me, I don’t know what all the fuss was about.

The other thing that happened was that I had been chatting to an actor who was moaning about his lack of employment, and his lack even of the possibility of employment. I asked him why didn’t he write and stage his own play, to wit he looked at me as though I had just landed from Mars. My comment to him was not linked to the completion of my own script, I certainly wasn’t thinking about that when I said it, it’s just that the idea of producing your own work is such an obvious one: when an actor complains about his lot, what he is really complaining about is his lack of control, therefore, he should give himself over to something that is in his control, namely mounting his own production. The actor in question then went on and demanded to know how could he possibly write a play. And I’m sure other actors say similar things all the time.

Let me ask you a question: if a director asks you to improvise a scene, could you do it? If the answer is yes, then you can write a play, because all a play is is an improvisation which is written down. The only difference is that once you have written the improvisation down, you can re-craft it, if you so choose that is. If you were in the rehearsal room or on set, and you were asked to improvise, you’d go for it and be damned, you wouldn’t sit around worrying about it. At the very worst, you’d look at what you’d done, and work out how you might improve it. You may even look at your improvisation and try to see a pattern in order to make sense of it – and the longer we improvise for, the more far reaching is the pattern, therefore our ability to understand it and draw a conclusion improves, which in turn enables us to shape the material still further. This is exactly the same as writing a film or play. Try it. Just write some dialogue, then look at whatever you’ve got, and try to workout what you think is going on, and then continue your work accordingly. I remember Harold Pinter saying how, when starting work on a new play, he would only start with a few lines of dialogue, draw a conclusion from it, and go on from there.

Time spent in a wine bar moaning about employment, could be time spent writing, and if you write for long enough, eventually you’ll end up with a completed script. Then you can employ yourself. And if there’s anyone out there thinking about writing drama, but was intimidated, or even if it never occurred to them, I hope my simplification may offer a humble starting point. I’ll certainly look to take my own advice in future.