Good day, my dear friends,
My Substack is an evolving beast, and as you know by now, I’m writing for both you the reader of Boo Walker novels, and also anyone interested in the art of creation. So many writing mentors have helped me along the way, and it fills my heart to pass that kindness along.
To that end, I’m trying to find the right balance. I especially hope those of you who DO NOT have a desire to write a book give my craft essays a shot. I keep thinking of them as companion pieces to my novels, almost like when you turn on the commentary while watching a movie you enjoy.
But if you have zero interest in the craft and just want to keep up with me and my book, TV, and movie recommendations, the On the Craft designation in the subject line will provide warning, so that you can move on with your day. Though I don’t want to set a hard rule, I’ll likely switch back and forth each week.
As a reminder, you can listen to the audio version of this article, where I riff and expand and doodle a bit more, by clicking the button above or via podcast feeds on Spotify or Apple.
For those brave enough to leap into my mind, I hope you enjoy the following essay on how I tap into my characters—my version of character acting. As always, I don’t hold back. It’s funny how my craft discussions always turn into psychotherapy sessions.
Let’s go!
We hear actors talk about immersing themselves into a character, often using techniques rooted in the methods of the great character actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski. But why don’t we talk more about the topic as writers? Aren’t we also playing roles?
When I write, I want to feel the hurt, the joy, the loneliness of my characters. When something terrible happens to them, I want it to wreck me. When they succeed, I want to thrust my fist into the air in victory.
It’s like a split screen, this experience. I am aware of Boo, the author. I can feel my fingers moving, hear the keys, smell my coffee, but I’m also in the fictional dimension.
The experience of writing from such a deep point of view is absolutely delightful, a thrill ride if there ever was one. I’m Neo plugged into the Matrix.
My wife and son know to enter my office at their own risk. What they see if they sneak in is a guy who is only half there, his physical body leaning toward the screen, music blasting through his headphones, his fingers hammering at the keys, his mouth mumbling, perhaps speaking dialogue, changing accents. Mad-scientist vibes. And when the part of me that’s still in the room catches sight of them out of the corner of my eye, it’s a whole thing. I scream and leap out of my chair. Maybe defensively swing at the air as if I’m being attacked.
Who doesn’t want to fall that deep into the story? I want to laugh, to drool, to mumble, to shiver. Whenever tears are streaming down my face while I’m writing, I know I’m doing something right. Many of you know exactly what I’m talking about.
And you can bet that the words you deliver to the page while under such a trance carry with them a dense energy. Sure, I’ll need to edit every line later, often when I’m not as immersed. As I get to the polishing stage, I am operating mostly from an analytical place, back from Hyde to Jekyll. But I have far more to work with if what I initially put down came from deep immersion.
As a reader, I know when a writer is there, in the scene, fighting it out alongside his character, and I adore the experience. It’s from this place where the rules don’t matter, where the author is having such an out-of-body experience that his brain waves are moving at a totally different rhythm than an hour before.
Ray Bradbury said,
“I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for 25 years now which reads Don’t think. You must never think at the typewriter, you must feel, and then your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. You collect up a lot of data, you do a lot of thinking away from your typewriter, but at the typewriter you should be living.”
There are many of you out there who get by just fine playing a documentarian, writing out what you see taking place in your imagination. That’s great. Probably far less exhausting. Depending on the author and the situation, some content might be too painful to explore from any other position than as an observer. Other authors might simply adore the idea of being a journalist with a Press badge on their jacket, a camera around their waist, as they travel through the many worlds of their imagination to chase down the next lead. There’s an appeal to that too, isn’t there?
Let me be clear: masterpieces can be written either way.
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Lately, I want a more somatic experience, and I think that’s what Bradbury is getting at. Ever seen someone trip and fall? Didn’t you wince? How about watching someone bomb a public speech? Your reaction was quite visceral, wasn’t it? That’s what I’m talking about.
How do we bring that to our writing desk?
The first step is to leave all your baggage behind.
Lee Strasberg, who brought Stanislavski’s message to Hollywood, said,
“Tension is the actor’s enemy. It inhibits spontaneity, restricts emotional expression, and makes it almost impossible for an actor to fully inhabit their character.”
By tension, he means all the baggage in your life that keeps you from getting into a creative place. Before we slip into our character’s skin, we must climb out of our own. Let go of fear. Of needing to write a masterpiece, of needing to pay bills. Let go of the fight you had earlier with your cousin Mildred. Let go of your rage over politics or current events. Or your dread over your forthcoming colonoscopy.
To do so, think meditation. We have to slow our world down. The only task on your to-do list is to write from a place of pure presence, to be right here, right now in the story. Of course, we will spend our entire life trying to get closer to deep presence. I’ve certainly worked with my fair share of gurus and head docs to carve away at it.
So we have to do the big work, the life’s work, addressing the wounds that plague us and comforting the damaged inner child inside. We have to come to peace with ourselves and our place in the world, slaying the tension.
More immediately, as we prepare for a writing session, we need to shake off all the shit tugging at us, the monsters in our head, the urges to rush through so we can get to other tasks. Sure, sometimes, I have a ravenous desperation to jump into the story, and I’ll do just that, but sometimes, I sense resistance and have to take time to clear the air.
I might be so distracted by reality that I need to go move my body, take a long walk. A jump in the frigid ocean. Or maybe play loud music that’s far more edgy, something that will rattle me and catapult me out of my head. I always keep my guitar and banjo handy as another way to welcome in the magic. Snacking and napping are other incredible options.
No matter what the method, I do what it takes to give the practice of writing the reverence it deserves. We, my dear writer friends, are sitting down to break bread with our muse, to make magic with Spirit, to dance with God. Treat it like that, and you’ll reap the reward. So will your readers.
Let’s back up, though. There are other preparatory steps we can take to fertilize our immersion soil.
When I start a new project, I change the name on the Alexa device in my office to my protagonist. Right now, my wife has to reach out to “Cara” to get ahold of me from downstairs. When your spouse starts calling you by your character’s name, it gets real.
We can find so many tiny ways to shift our mindset and help us become the character. I wrote a book a few years back that’s partially set in Winchester, England in the late 1800s, and I would do my best to mimic the accent. Not only at my desk but as I went about my daily life. “Hullo, old girl, spot of tea before the carriage arrives?” Can you imagine the amount of patience required by my wife—that ol’ gal—to put up with me?
Ask yourself what you can apply specifically to your character. Another common angle is to write first-person entries into a journal. I love to do that for all the characters that matter in my story. You get a sense for what it’s like to be in their head. I’ll have entire conversations between characters while I’m putting up the dishes or taking a shower. Another no-brainer is that I always have a sense of what my character looks like. I keep an applicable picture I stole from the internet close by in my Scrivener files.
Michael Chekhov, a protege of Stanislavski, suggested that an actor find a physical movement that represents the character. Think Heath Ledger’s lick when he played the Joker. If you have a character with a bad leg, what if you went outside and limped around the cul-de-sac for a while before you sat down at your desk?
What if we applied even more of our senses and attached them to a character? Smell a rose every time you are about to leap into a particular character’s point of view. For a book I wrote years ago, I would strap on an eyepatch when it was his turn. I know, right? Ludicrous!
We’re looking for entryways to access our character. Let’s say you have a cool cat protag who wears black leather, stilettos that could kill. Every sidewalk is a runway. Name a tune that plays in her head when she struts. How about Madonna’s “Vogue?” There’s your entry! Blast that tune before you write and tell me if your writing doesn’t land richer on the page.
My favorite and perhaps most effective way to enter the fictional realm is by brainspotting. I can’t expound on the technique too much here, but I’ll give you a taste. While living in Spain, I connected with Ruth Chiles, who is one of the leading experts on brainspotting in the world. We’ve been working together for years now, and I’ve used brainspotting to clear personal baggage and to enhance my writing craft.
I often describe it as a form of meditation, perhaps meditation on steroids. At risk of oversimplifying, you close your eyes, focus on a particular memory, thought, emotion, or even a spot in your body, say the area around your root chakra or your heart. Your eyes will naturally fix on a point in space related to your focus. Then you open your eyes, hold that gaze, and sit there and fall into pure awareness. That fixed eye position becomes a doorway, signaling the brain to access the related neural circuitry.
For example, if you’re hunting a wound in your life, perhaps something yucky from your childhood, you brainspot that pain, own it, become it, welcome it. And eventually, either that day or after many more sessions, the tension and pain fade away.
Ruth and I started playing with ways to help me drop deeper into POV. I close my eyes and focus on a character. What do they smell like? What do they believe? How does it feel to walk in their shoes? What is their deepest desire? Whatever captures their essence. Once I feel locked in, ten seconds or a minute or five minutes later, I’ll open my eyes and see where they were pointing. There’s my doorway. I’ll hold that gaze and morph into character. I’ll typically brainspot till the pressure has built and I can’t take it anymore, till my character and I are demanding to be set free onto the page. Then I twist toward my screen and start doing the Tango with the keyboard.
I’ll even use this technique when I’m outlining or considering my work-in-progress from a wider perspective—as the author and not one of the characters. I’ll close my eyes and focus on the essence of the story, perhaps the theme, message, governing verb, or setting, and then I’ll open my eyes, find the brainspot, and simply stare, breathe, and be for a while. Eventually, something clicks, and I see more clearly. The decisions I make from that place are typically rock solid.
If we truly immerse, we become our character. Our fingers are their fingers. I might even reach back and scrape the long hair I don’t have into a ponytail. I feel my energy filling their physical body. My legs are their legs. When we walk in a scene, we walk together. And I feel their feels. It’ll hurt sometimes. You’ll be zapped after some writing sessions. But you may also take a giant step closer toward your own destination, that best version of your storyteller self, a mere vessel of creativity.
No matter how you get there, you improve with practice. With the project I just wrapped, I was bouncing back and forth between four character points of view. I first did the hard work to get to know each character, then began chipping away at the story.
At first, the shift looked something like this: Boo does pushups, combs hair forward, brainspots, writes; Boo wraps a scarf around neck and dons Sherlock Holmes hat, writes; Boo puts on lipstick, lights a Virginia Slim, brainspots, writes; Boo sits with a horrific fictional memory for five minutes, deploys a shoulder tick, then writes. But my muscles strengthened, and I got to this wonderful place where I could jump from one character to the other like a quick-change artist. Blink and I’m Bianca, blink again, George.
It goes without saying that all this requires resilience and skill. Work those imagination muscles. Role play every day. Have fun with it. Don’t let actors have all the glory.
What are you doing to immerse yourself into character? What tricks did I miss? As always, I’m writing from the trenches, still learning every day.
(This essay was originally shared via Writer Unboxed, where I am a regular contributor.)
So long,
boo
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