Inside the Writers Studio

I’m not an actor, but I watch them on T.V. I’m talking, of course, about Inside the Actors Studio. I’ve seen every episode, listened and watched intently as each one of these stars – from my favorites, like Kate Winslet and Philip Seymour Hoffman, to actors I don’t give a crap about, like…well, we won’t go there – has expounded on their own individual process of creating a character. I especially enjoy listening to Method Actors, the ones who totally immerse themselves in their characters, who don’t hold anything back. The ones who, for a few precious weeks or even months, shed their skins, reach deeply into some secret, hidden pocket of themselves, to actually become someone else.

As writers that’s exactly what we do every time we sit down to write a story. We’re not just telling tales, or even just creating worlds. We’re giving birth to characters who are real to our readers, who live and breathe and laugh and cry with them. Our readers get to know these characters even better than they do their own friends, because they see them at their most vulnerable and most intimate moments. Falling in love. Taking a shower. Praying to God. Or cursing Him. Committing murder. Masturbating. Curled up in the fetal position on the kitchen floor, wailing the loss of a husband or lover or brother. Or a child. Or of their innocence. The moments we rarely – if ever – see other human beings experience are naked and exposed in the pages of a novel through its characters.

And that is the challenge every writer faces. In order to make our characters and these moments real, we have to expose ourselves to our readers. Our hopes and our dreams and even our sex lives. We have to dig deep. Anything that’s happened to us, anything we’ve done, any beautiful, hideous, erotic, or frightening emotion we’ve ever experienced has to be fair game in order to make our characters believable. We need to draw on sense memories, just like Method Actors do. We need to play the What If This Was Happening To Me game, regardless of how horrifying the “This” that’s happening really is. We need to live these moments, not with our characters, but inside their skins, and we can’t hold anything back.

Our readers deserve the best and the worst that’s hidden inside of us. Let’s make sure we give them nothing less.