The Writer as Actor

A question that is frequently asked is whether good writing can be taught. Another way of asking the question is: what part of good writing is innate talent (the kind of thing that you either have or you don’t) and what part is craft that can be learned through discipline and application. I think that there are two aspects of writing that seem more like a gift than others. One is the ability to join together apparently disparate ideas or images to form a new one. The other is the ability to temporarily be someone else. In the exercise of this second quality, the writer becomes the character he is writing about in order to speak and think and act like her. The process is not unlike that of an actor who “gets into character”. The actor must access the personality of the person he is portraying. This empathy, this chameleon-like ability to change, to transform into another being, is the gift of the good writer and the secret of great art. Here I think of Cervantes and the dialogues between Sancho and Don Quixote and how the narrator disappears and we have two different persons talking to each other. I imagine Cervantes switching back and forth from Sancho to Don Quixote with schizophrenic delight. The reason why I think that this is the secret of the great novelists is that it is this ability that allows them to create such real characters. How do you create a character that will live in the imagination and life of the readers? You need to become that character as you write. Actually, you need to become every single character that you create, even if that person is a post office clerk that takes up one sentence in your novel, that utters one line.

Wendell is a character in Marcelo in the Real World, who is not a good person. In a recent visit with students at Boston University, I was asked if it had been hard for me to create and write about someone like Wendell. It must have been difficult to imagine someone so evil. Unfortunately, evil characters are not that hard to access. Such is the nature of humankind. Much harder I think is to access someone who is good and pure like Marcelo. It is as if goodness and purity are more removed from our every day life. I mean, not a caricature goody-goody goodness, but a real goodness, the kind of goodness that is believable, that is real. I think that in the process of temporarily becoming a Wendell or a Marcelo in order to write about them and hopefully make them real to the reader, in that process I learned a little more about myself. I also learned that there are some aspects of writing you can practice and learn and get better at and others, well, others you pray will be given to you.