What If We Taught Writing the Way We Teach Acting?

Actors studied movement, script analysis, emotional connection, our bodies, our voices. In my writing MFA, we got . . . workshop.

My ritual before trying to make a bit of art used to be: Eat a light dinner, drink a cup of tea. Put on comfortable clothes. Take some deep breaths, into my belly, my ribs, and my chest in sequence, feeling my torso expand around my spine. Stretch every muscle I can think of, until my body is loose and humming. Warm up my voice, hitting every extreme of tone and register. Tongue twisters, jumping jacks. Stand with my feet firm on the ground and feel my presence fill the room, but my attention expanding no farther than its walls. And then hold hands in a circle with everyone else I am making that art with.

It was college, and I was an actor. I spent some of my days studying acting and my evenings, when I was lucky, applying what I’d learned onstage. Since it was college, I was also a stage manager, production manager, prop designer, set painter, and keyboard player in the pit orchestra. (Thankfully, rarely all at the same time.) And I was a writer, too, not of plays but of short essays and moody, plotless stories. I spent some of my days learning about doing that too.

Today, the only one of those things I still am is a writer. Recently, I got to read an advance copy of a book by a friend who’s also a theater refugee. Isaac was a director, and we met when we were theater bloggers, both making our somewhat-parallel ways from one art form to the other. He’s circled back around in a way with this book, a magnificent history of method acting (coming February 2022, I am obliged to mention).

As I read, I felt connected again to the student and artist I used to be—who read plays all day; whose voice hit the back of the theater; who, for a few years, worked helping playwrights develop their plays. I felt nostalgia for my immersion in the craft of acting, for my later immersion in the professional world of theater, for the fact that I haven’t seen a play in two years. (I also learned so much about theater history in the book that I never got in college, but whether that was my fault or my professors’ is hard to say.) But mostly I was struck by the stark awareness of how different training is for actors and for writers. And how, I realized, I don’t think it should be.

Isaac writes in the book of how the Method—all actor training, really—breaks the creative process down into discrete components, each of which can be practiced, studied, and honed, then reconstitutes them into a clearer, stronger artistic practice. Actors in training get to try out different techniques and approaches, learning to develop a character through movement, script analysis, or emotional connection; they take classes honing their bodies and voices. In my MFA writing program, we got . . . workshop and some books.

In undergrad, both acting and writing pedagogy were exploratory and exercise driven. Those are the moments of those classes I still remember now, however many (many) years later.

In writing: We were told to conjure a character not of our gender and assign them a few other alien-to-us characteristics. I wrote a scene in which a man wakes up hungover. I had never been drunk. (But I still gave him the full-body shaking that’s my own signal that I’m about to throw up.)

In acting: Paired up, we repeated a meaningless phrase back and forth. We started with a simple observation: “Blue glasses,” which someone must have been wearing. “Blue glasses,” “Blue glasses,” “Blue glasses,” back and forth as meaning coalesced like a single photon bouncing between two mirrors until everything was bright, as we learned to be open to our scene partner’s emotional nuances and open to the feelings that welled up in us in kind.

In writing: Find a spot in the classroom, conveniently in the visual art building and thus full of varied furniture beyond just desks and chairs, and write a scene from that physical point of view. I lay under a drafting table and put my character there, hers a kitchen table. The next week, we were told to expand the story by fifty percent, building out from the scene breaks and line breaks, rather than just continuing on from the beginning or end.

That last one unlocked something for me, pushing me into a discovery I couldn’t have made by my own decisions or free imagining. Stretching and scrounging when I thought there wasn’t any more story there, I surprised myself. I learned then the power of structural games around creativity, where you set some rules or constraints so your imagination has somewhere to start. Later that year, I wrote myself a recipe for a story: an orange, a rose, spaghetti. I ended up with a strange little meditation around a florist’s assistant’s home life that I really loved. (Everything else I wrote that year was sublimation of an unrequited crush or inadvertent retelling of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” so this was an important bit of variety!)

I left both acting and writing after graduation—the former because I knew that if I wasn’t getting great parts in college, I’d have no shot in a bigger pond; the latter because, well, I needed an actual job. But after a few years in new-play development, the recession left me unemployed. I took a job as a receptionist. And I got back to writing.

I learned then the power of structural games around creativity, where you set some rules or constraints so your imagination has somewhere to start.

I spent several coffee-shop mornings staring at a blank screen, expecting to start a novel. I’d spent all of college writing; this felt like what should come next, like something I should know how to do. But essays came easier, subject matter already out in the world—a whole lifetime could be made writing from the real world’s constraints and recipes. The same friend who would write the book on the Method went to get his MFA in nonfiction and I thought, Well if he can, so can I, and I decided not to worry about student loans. So I got my MFA in creative nonfiction too.

Looking back now, I see a much lonelier and more self-directed style of study in my MFA program compared to undergrad or acting. It was as demanding as that coffee-shop blank screen, with only the added pressure of deadlines to get my fingers typing. Be ready to bring work in to workshop, three times a semester to start, and to receive feedback from twelve to fourteen peers and the professor at the head of the table. Classes that weren’t workshops were mostly seminars, hopefully craft-focused book clubs. Most of our time, in this very full-time program, was spent out of classes, doing our own work. I wrote, I read, I taught, I photocopied for professors to make a little dent in my debt.

It couldn’t have all been without lessons, though. In workshop, we learned to give feedback mostly through observation and emulation: What about our professors’ feedback was helpful to our peers and to ourselves? Could we learn to see our classmates’ work as they did? Sometimes a professor would deploy a particularly useful turn of phrase, like, “That one little detail takes up all the air in the room,” and I’d tuck it into my quiver.

But any of that work was undertaken as independent study. The only rules in most workshops were to read and respond. (One professor barred the phrase “I loved,” thinking it led to unconstructive feedback, but we all just worked around it with “I appreciated” and the like.) Mainly we sat around the table and told each other what we thought; when our own work was being workshopped, we took notes and took home a stack of marked-up pages. A few weeks later, it would be your turn again and you’d pass out twelve copies of your next essay. The biggest lesson was discerning which feedback would be helpful to you and which would not. But again, that study was self-directed.

It seemed natural at the time that exploratory exercises were absent. We were engaged in serious business. We were adults, near-professionals, past the baby stuff of play. (In acting class: Under dimmed lights we pretended to be wolf pups, crawling and snuffling and wrestling for reasons I still don’t totally understand.) By this point, we were meant to know how to face the blank page. And I faced it, of course, bravely and desperately. And it sometimes worked out. I learned a ton, found myself as a writer, etc., etc., etc. (This is a whole ’nother essay, but don’t do MFAs unfunded!) But now, I can’t help but wonder how much stronger a writer I could’ve become with training, with technique. And I see my post-MFA, self-driven development as the cobbling together of techniques that I was never taught and had to find myself.

Before getting to work on this essay, I sat and wrote three pages, longhand, of garbage. Thinking through my day, my next few months of freelance income, my work this week—whatever was on my mind. I do this because I read about it in The Artist’s Way, a book thought of as self-help rather than craft. I write these brain-barf morning pages because, in trying it, I discovered it does good things for me and my writing. It clears my head and helps me see what’s in there, but freewriting also teaches and enforces a crucial writing skill: The ability to write quickly and without getting caught up in evaluation (or worse, self-censorship) as I’m trying to make progress.

I see my post-MFA, self-driven development as the cobbling together of techniques that I was never taught and had to find myself.

No actor finds every exercise helpful. Over the course of a semester or workshop or degree, you often try a grab bag of practices and techniques: emotional responsiveness, deliberate choices, using personal memories to conjure emotion or conjuring emotion through posture or movement or mantra. You might learn to relax your body and clear your mind, or fill your mind with a character’s history and circumstances. You play wolf pup or child or clown. All or none of these might make their way into your personal creative practice, but it’s usually somewhere in between. And in the meanwhile, in the classroom you practice skills: movement, voice, dialect, script analysis, stage combat. From that accumulates your craft.

Writing is no less skills-based, but so often we use those skills in silence rather than in the rehearsal room. Writing happens in your head, at your desk, in your room, insulated by so many layers of privacy. We get flickers of collaboration through feedback—working with an editor or in the circle of a particularly compatible writing group—but those are way stations between the private acts of generative work. Actors’ work itself is communal and collaborative, done under the guidance of a director—your process isn’t meant to be your own. It isn’t “stand there and produce feelings,” but writing isn’t “sit there and produce words” either.

Writing is imagination, observation, memory, research, mimicry, generation, revision, and so much more. It is magic, the product of electricity zapping through our wet meat brains. What would writer training look like if it was more like what’s offered to actors? That’s a question too big for an essay, a question I might spend the rest of my teaching life trying to answer. But exercises and techniques shouldn’t be relegated to self-help books, and the books that teach them shouldn’t be relegated to the self-help shelf. If the wolf-pup exercise was meant to erode our self-seriousness and inhibitions, to put us in the practice of experimental play, maybe writers need some of that too. Like actors do, we can play before we expect to perform.

Instead of waiting for the muse, we can invite her in, pave the road and grease the door hinges. Blast a hole in the wall so she can waltz right in. And train ourselves to listen.