Watching Actors

Fiction writers could learn a lot about creating characters by studying the Stanislavski method of acting.  This method emphasizes the psychology of character: what motivates the character’s behavior.  Writers could learn how to put themselves into the character — enter his world, live his life, master his actions, his thoughts and feelings.  What would the character do in a certain situation? 

I love watching actors.  They embody characterization and character development.  I watch movies and TV to watch actors,  their characters and the characters’ stories.  Superb actors, those in which you can see the character in their eyes, are a particular joy to me, and often inspire me to write.  I recently watched two actors, one I knew well and the other a discovery, create unique characters that evolved through each of the stories.

While in the hospital, I watched a lot of cable TV and became addicted to the series Monk.  Adrian Monk, prone to OCD behavior as a successful detective, was married to a beautiful journalist.  Her murder sent him spiraling down into a black abyss that intensified his OCD to the point that it became debilitating for him.  The series begins with his return to detective work as a consultant to the San Francisco police.  He’s not cured but has a loyal nurse, Sharona, who insures that he stays focused.  The challenge for actor Tony Shalhoub in creating and sustaining Adrian Monk as a character is to make him a real human being and not a caricature of OCD symptoms.  And filter the world and all the people around him through his OCD lens.  Shalhoub’s work in this series is a revelation.  He makes Monk a subtle being, gentle but fussy, tortured by his wife’s unsolved murder and driven to try to bring order back into the world.  At the same time, he knows he has no control over anyone but himself, and yet, his OCD can prevent him comically from chasing a suspect or can become an obstacle for him to overcome in order to save Sharona from a determined killer.  Shalhoub uses his body, the way he moves it, to convey Monk’s fastidiousness more than being actually fastidious, in contrast to his big, compassionate brown eyes that reveal his suffering, and his empathy for others who suffer.  I thought this was brilliant characterization work by Tony Shalhoub, and I recommend the series to writers for it.

Viggo Mortensen is an actor I trust.  I know that if he’s chosen to play a character that it will be interesting and honest work.  He chose to play the Father in the movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  The movie is impressively faithful to the novel but does cut down on the amount of repetition in the father and son’s life on the road.  Mortensen is a father in real life.  His task in this movie was to convey the father’s motivations in gesture, glance, the bow of the head, the defiant set of his jaw.  The only major female character, his wife, is seen only in flashback to give context to their journey.  Mortensen’s acting adds depth and breadth to that context in the way he responds to those memories.  It’s in his eyes, in the way his hand rests on his sleeping son, in the way he looks at a piano in an abandoned house.  Mortensen has become that father, the man who resolutely teaches his son to be all that is good about humanity, to hold that goodness in his heart, to keep the fire alive, in a world overrun by humans reduced to being animals.  Kodi Smit-McPhee, the young boy who played his son, was astonishingly superb, and Robert Duvall, who plays an old man they meet on the road, makes characterization by an actor look effortless.  Visually, this movie can be a huge downer, but the acting makes it all worth it.

Watching actors can inspire me, energize my imagination, or teach me something new about creating and sustaining a character…. and I hope helps me create real people as my fictional characters.

The Brick Wall

Rejection: running into it stings at first.  It’s the brick wall that’s a foot thick, impossible to demolish or climb, but there could be ways to get around it.  If only I could read the clues….  I received the results of one of the contests I submitted The Shadow to last fall.   It did not even make the finalists.  Sad.  Well, there’s still a chance with the two others…..

Last Friday, I mailed out the science fiction short story I completed recently.  The publication promises an answer in eight weeks. 

This Friday, I’ll submit an essay to another publication. 

The job search steals time away from writing…..eeeeerrrrrrggggggghhhhh!

The Past in “Battlestar Galactica”

(For BG fans who have not yet viewed the final season, I do NOT reveal how the series ends in this post.)

My scientist friend suggested at the end of last year that I might enjoy the science fiction cable TV show Battlestar Galactica.  I don’t subscribe to cable but by that time, the first three seasons were out on DVD, so I began at the beginning with season one.  Earlier this month, I put off watching the series finale for a week because I really didn’t want the series or my experience of watching it to end (even though I knew the finale had aired long ago).  I don’t recall ever being a huge fan of the original TV series, but I am of the new one.  I was riveted, watching for clues for how it would end.  The “clue” that interested me the most was when the Cylon hybrids said, “This has happened before and will happen again.”  Or something like that.

The past as the future as the past.  For example, Star Wars occurred “long, long ago in a galaxy far away.”  With BG, I half-expected a twist in the final episodes that revealed the timing of the story wasn’t the past but a simultaneous present, and they would discover this as a result of a singularity or something.  Starbuck or Apollo or Baltar would find themselves suddenly on a street in downtown Los Angeles.  Simultaneous time and alternate realities fascinate me, but apparently not the writers and producers of BG.  I suspect they wanted to explore a creation myth.

Science fiction often is used to address issues occurring in the present, most often set in the far future.  To set a science fiction story in a past time usually means the story grapples in some way with a creation, i.e. creation of a species, a society, a world, etc.  In Star Wars, viewers witnessed a family saga set against intergalactic conflict with overtones of spirituality, how they went from one type of civilization to another, and the worlds they found along the way.  In BG, viewers witnessed a creation myth with a heavy emphasis on religious belief.  It was also an intergalactic quest.  I especially admired that the writers/producers left more questions unanswered than answered, giving this series a highly provocative final season. 

Another element I especially liked about this show was the gritty, beat-up appearance of the sets — things appeared to be used — and the absence of a lot of high-tech gadgets.  Here is a civilization that knows how to “jump” from one point to another in space, but still uses paper for notes and clunky telephones for communication.  And they developed artificial intelligence that evolved.  I loved the main conflict between the humans and Cylons, a polytheistic civilization vs. a monotheistic one, the creators vs. the created.  And in almost every episode, there is an echo to our own planet, our own civilization, linking us to them.

The future in Perceval is in the near, not the far, future and I have chosen not to make it high tech or populated by extraterrestrials.  Rather than science fiction of the past, I’ve written a future historical.  Science fiction inspires me, fuels my imagination, and takes me to into dreams….

The Three P’s

Just what I needed right now: a pep talk via an article entitled “Don’t be afraid of striking out” by Robert Dugoni in the February 2010 issue of The Writer.  The relevant quote for me:

“Writing is also a profession of failure.  Rejection is, at some level, inevitable.  As writers, we can’t become paralyzed at the thought of rejection.  We can’t fear it, or seek to avoid it.  Rather, we must confront it head on, charge into it with reckless abandon.”

Rejection and failure are facts of life.  They make acceptance and success all the sweeter.  But dealing with them is harder in some ways than dealing with acceptance and success (which have their own issues at times).  Dugoni suggests looking at rejection and failure as a baseball player looks at striking out.  One must try in order to have a chance to succeed.  Try to hit the ball.  Dugoni writes on to say that writers need to learn and practice the three P’s as they try for acceptance and success: patience, perseverance and persistence. 

Learning to deal with rejection and failure must have been my karma from a past life and that’s the reason my life’s purpose, my soul’s desire, my bliss, is to write stories, to tell stories to other people.  To be a writer.  I cannot imagine being even remotely happy doing anything else.  However, humans are capable of doing many things, and I’m thankful that I can also do things that will earn the money I need to pay the bills.  I still need to practice the three P’s.

Patience.  Sometimes I may be too patient.  I waited far too long for the agent, to whom I sent the complete manuscript of Perceval, to read my novel and respond back.  Lesson learned: set boundaries.  The agent apparently thought he had no deadline and then clearly forgot he even had the manuscript.  So, it’s perfectly OK to tell an agent or editor that they have a specific amount of time in which to read my submission and respond. 

Patience: I think back to when I first hunkered down in my apartment to write short stories.  I thought I was a brilliant writer and it would be a piece of cake to get published.  That was 1983.  I’ve seen a lot of rejections since then, been struck by various realizations that I was not a brilliant writer and I had (have) a lot to learn.  But I continued to write, because I had to write.  I believed my time would come, I only needed to be patient.

Perseverance seems to be the easy one for me.  I don’t even think about it.  Persistence on the other hand is to persevere again and again, doggedly, stubbornly, to stand firm in one’s resolve.  I must write so perseverance comes easily, but must I submit my stories and essays in order to be a writer?  If publication is the goal, yes.  If sharing my stories is the goal, yes.  I must persist in submitting my writing, in working toward my goals for my writing.  I must persist in my perseverance as a writer.  Persistence, as Dugoni describes it succintly, is to be a bulldog. 

Woof, woof.  This past week, a nagging tug from my imagination regarding the first chapter of Perceval.  The tug wants me to begin that chapter in a different place.  To return to the first novel and make it better.  Suddenly, I’ve rejected the current manuscript of the novel myself.  My imagination pushes me forward, to open a new file in Word, to haul out the paper copy and begin reading with a red pen…..