The privilege of writing inner experiences: part 1
Sharing in the thoughts and feelings of another
Many forms of art are acts of invention that start with nothing more than an idea or concept and give it tangible form. Painters must see images in their minds as they apply color to canvas, as sculptors must see three-dimensional shapes before chipping stone, carving a form, or building a frame upon which to layer clay. Composers, too, often inwardly hear their melodies, harmonies, and rhythms before capturing them in musical notation or making a recording.
Writers of fiction have, in some ways, one of the more challenging variants of this process. Producing believable and engaging prose means that writers must first manifest scenes in their imaginations. Imagination here isn’t just visual, either: authors must also imagine the sounds, smells, tastes, and touch sensations to give the scene its fullest life. Not all of those details make it on the page, of course, or survive the revision process, but all these sense impressions help writers to be fully present in the scene they’re creating.
Authors must then go one step further by stepping into each character’s consciousness: stepping into their heads to commune with what they’re thinking and stepping into their hearts to visualize or, shall we say, emotionalize, their inner feelings (rather than sensual feelings). As I pointed out in my recommendation of author Fiona Valpy and as I’ll explore further in another post, this work can be emotionally challenging for the writer. Various authors testify to how they grieve for their own characters, especially when the story compels them (that is, the authors) to inflict suffering upon their beloved protagonists.
This is not to say that musicians, painters, sculptors, and other artists don’t also feel or emotionalize during the creative act. Many certainly do, and some (especially in music) succeed brilliantly in infusing that consciousness into their art. But no art forms other than those built on the portrayal of characters in stories—that is, writing and acting—ask the artist, in every case, to deeply share the inner experience of another person, even if that other person is imagined. (Leave a comment if you think of another art form that makes this demand.)
And as far as consuming media is concerned, written fiction stands alone as the one form through which readers (and listeners with audiobooks) also get to share that inner experience of another. It’s a big reason why people read (or listen to) fiction in the first place.1
Written fiction stands alone as the one art form through which readers (and listeners with audiobooks) get to share that inner experience of another.
Challenges for actors and writers
To return to the matters of artists, rather than consumers, actors have a distinct advantage over writers in the portrayal of another’s inner experience: as Tom Hanks so aptly demonstrates in the previous post’s clip from Sleepless in Seattle, the outward expression of such inner experience happens through body gestures and facial expressions that are intuitive and instinctual to all humans. None of us, that is, had to be taught how to be and look angry, happy, disappointed, embarrassed, and so on—we just knew! When we feel it, we show it.
What distinguishes actors, of course, is that they train long and hard to register those states (and many subtle variations) on demand while also maintaining enough presence of mind to hit their marks, follow their cues, remember their lines, and stay in character, all in the presence of other actors doing the same thing in the middle of a complex set, often working inside an industrial warehouse that’s swarming with crew members, while sometimes wearing uncomfortable costumes, make-up, and prosthetics and enduring the heat of the lighting equipment. Whew! Still, actors are able to draw upon their innate humanity to express those feelings through their bodies and vocal tones.2
Writers, on the other hand, have a unique technical challenge alongside the emotional one: they have to translate that inner experience into written language rather than expressing it through their bodies. Outwardly, this mode of expression isn’t anywhere near as demanding as acting: as a writer, I don’t have call times and am never dragged into a two-hour make-up session at 4am after filming until midnight the day before and spending an hour removing all that same makeup and costuming just so I could shower and get a couple hours of sleep.3
Yet I think that writing is, on the whole, more demanding inwardly. Writers usually work alone, for one thing, especially when writing a first draft. And although writers, like actors, must go deeply into a character’s emotional experience to live and feel it within themselves, they must also hold onto that experience while stepping back enough to observe and capture those inner dynamics in words while also keeping in mind the overall character, context, and story arcs.4
Writers have to hold themselves in that emotional space for extended periods of time and without necessarily getting to a point of resolution.
Like reading, too, this process works in slow-motion—in super slo-mo, really. In the previous post we saw that it takes much longer to read a written scene than it does to view it in a movie, especially when the written account includes more about a what’s going on inside a character’s thoughts and emotions. (Just think of how many thoughts course through our minds in a matter of seconds, and how many words it would take to write it all out!) And we saw that reading makes it easy to go over passages that you already read when you want to savor them or feel them more clearly, which slows the process down further.5
If such time dilation is true for reading an already-finished bit of work, then how much longer does it take to write such a scene for the first time? A lot longer, in fact, which means that writers have to hold themselves in that emotional space for extended periods of time and without necessarily getting to a point of resolution. Such a dilation is very different from acting a scene in real time.
Again, I’ll explore this subject further later on. Coming up next, though, Part 2 of this post will give a personal example and why the process is really a great gift.
On this particular subject I recommend three of Savannah Gilbo’s posts on “interiority.” First is Show, Don’t Tell: What This Advice Really Means, in which her main point is that “showing” isn’t just about the senses but primarily about what’s going on inside. Second is How to Reveal Your Character’s Inner Life on the Page, which has lots of practical advice on the actual writing part. Third is 3 Common Interiority Mistakes (and How to Fix Them), the title of which is self-explanatory. These posts are also available in episodes 82, 94, and 102 of her Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, actors sometimes have to do all their work with nothing to interact with at all. An excellent example of this can be found on the documentary DVDs for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in which Ian McKellen, playing Gandalf, was asked to act his parts inside Bag End in a soulless green-screen studio with naught but an audio feed through an earpiece. Meanwhile, the other fourteen actors in the scene—thirteen playing dwarves and Martin Freeman playing Bilbo Baggins—did all their work together on a full set. This arrangement allowed the filmmakers to merge the feeds two interlinked cameras in real time, a definite innovation in filmmaking technique. McKellen, however, a deeply heartfelt man who so loves working with other actors, became deeply frustrated by the sheer loneliness and almost quit as a result. You can watch this segment on YouTube (starting around 3:00 and until about 16:10):
I got a little taste of movie-making as an extra in Finding Happiness, a pseudo-documentary of Ananda Village where I live. (A picture of myself and my young son appears on the DVD case, in fact.) I got to do make-up for about 15-20 minutes at a time for a few choir scenes (as in the video below) in which I’m occasionally more prominent (I’m standing directly behind the group women in green). We also did multiple takes so that the camera could get shots from different angles. In another scene (at the Market) I also learned that for filming an outdoor scene with many extras, the crew puts up a powerful (and hot) light that’s brighter than the sun so that the highlights and shadows remain the same through several hours of shooting.
I say “on the whole” when comparing writers to actors because some roles require actors to dig far deeper in themselves than usual. For the role of Frodo in The Return of the King, for example, Elijah Wood had to show the power of the One Ring essentially destroying Frodo’s soul. On the flip side, consider the hockey-players-turned-actors who portrayed the members of the 1980 US Olympic Hockey team in Miracle. When filming of the scene in which the US defeats the Soviet team, the actors had to find it within themselves, take after take, to explode with the kind of overpowering elation that the real players felt in that singular moment of victory. Repeated acts of such high-level excitement are just as emotionally demanding as negative emotions like grief, fear, or terror.
To give another example, in the book The Song of Bernadette, Bernadette is roused from her first vision of the lady because her friend, Jeanne Abadie throws pebbles at her. The amount of story time from when the pebble strikes and Bernadette says, “What is the matter?” is probably five or six seconds. Werfel spends two paragraphs within Bernadette’s consciousness during that short span, which takes about 80 seconds to read. That’s a ratio of around 15:1 of reading time to story time. But oh! the story moment and Werfel’s writing are so lovely that I often re-read the passage, as I do with the passages of Bernadette’s visions elsewhere in the book (especially Chapter 7).