Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn From Actors (28 page)

In the car Laura couldn’t feel anything. Not even her own body. Her feet and ankles seemed miles away from the rest of her. She walked into the courtroom on someone else’s legs. Sat down at the table using someone else’s muscles. Devlon said a few words to her, but she couldn’t process them. Could only hear her own shallow breathing. The sputter of her heart.

Laura’s dad was there. And her aunt. Laura could feel them looking at her back.

It took forever to get everyone settled, including the judge. He called the court to order. Sat and shuffled a few papers. Laura slipped her hands beneath the table. Locked them in a tight grip.

The judge began to speak.

Devlon laid a hand on Laura’s shoulder.

The world slowed … slowed, until it nearly stopped turning. The whole scene felt surreal, like she hung near the ceiling, looking down at herself. Laura squeezed her eyes shut, clinging to the judge’s words, every muscle within her pulling,
waiting
for the “Not Guilty.”

“… I find the defendant, Laura Ann Denton, guilty of second degree murder …”

What?

Laura’s muscles locked. For a split second her mind went white.

Guilty?

No, couldn’t be. She’d heard wrong—

The judge’s voice burned her ears. “I will set sentencing for two weeks from today …”

Devlon gripped her shoulder until it hurt. Laura’s muscles unlocked, then turned to water. She started to tremble. First her legs, then torso, then whole body. She turned to her attorney, head shaking. Wanted to scream
Why? How?
But her throat wouldn’t make a sound.

Noises behind her. Someone weeping. The prosecutor stood, looking so proud of himself. Judge Myers left. Cantor started packing up his files.

Laura couldn’t get up.

A bailiff came to put cuffs on her. They’d take her back to juvey.
Back
.

“I can’t go!” She jerked away. “I didn’t
do
it!”

“Calm down.” Devlon’s voice.

Calm down!
For what? So they could drag her back to that little cell? The hard bed and stained walls? So they could throw her in
CYA?

Wails spurted from her mouth. “I didn’t
dooo it!”
Laura fell to her knees.

Hands reached for her. Many hands. People calling her name, lifting her up. Her ankles wobbled, and the world dimmed. She caught a fleeting glance of her father watching her, forehead crinkled and tears on his face. “Dad!” She flung out an arm toward him, but someone caught it, pinned it. She felt the cuffs, and the world dimmed more, and her head tipped back, the room spinning …

S p i n n i n g …

Rocks in her stomach and chest, breath blocked in her throat and people yelling and her knees giving way and the courtroom going black, blacker, until she saw noth—

Exploration Points

Some questions for you to answer:

1.
Note the varying rhythms. Which rhythm carries the scene, Laura’s Inner Rhythm, or the rhythm of action? How do you know this?

2.
Study when complete sentences are used, and when only phrases are used. How do each of these help convey Laura’s Inner Rhythm?

3.
Toward the end of this scene Laura’s Inner Rhythm moves into chaos as her mind becomes overwhelmed with the guilty verdict. How does the change of Sentence Rhythm here depict that chaos? How does the last word depict her fainting?

4.
Rewrite one or two of your own scenes, using Compression. See how many vivid verbs and nouns you can find to improve the scene, while using fewer words overall.

Moving On

All of the techniques we have discussed so far depend upon one important requirement: your ability to connect with your character’s emotions. But what if your character must endure or do something that you’ve never personally experienced? How do you find the Inner Rhythm, the Action Objectives, the passions of this character?

To discover how you can create any character, no matter how different he or she is from you, we look to our final Secret, Emotion Memory.

SECRET #7

Emotion Memory

ACTOR’S TECHNIQUE:

In bringing forth the emotions of a character, a Method actor relies on his own Emotion Memory to re-create within himself all the sensations and feelings appropriate to his role at the moment. Emotion Memory is rooted in the actor’s past experiences and can be evoked through such things as a smell, a picture, or a thought. Other times it is more slowly and purposefully recaptured through retelling of a certain past experience.

NOVELIST’S ADAPTATION:

An author carries within himself the seed for every emotion and desire he may create within a character, no matter how foreign that desire may seem to him on the surface. When an author learns how to tap into his Emotion Memory, he will release himself from every “I-can’t-write-that” fear.

Time to get personal.

To this point, we’ve focused on your character. By now you have a clear understanding of how important it is to know your character from the inside out. We’ve discovered who he is—his inner values, traits, and mannerisms. We’ve discussed his Action Objectives, his Inner Rhythm, his motivations for Subtexting, the widely varied colors of his passions. Now we’re going to talk about
you
.

Like it or not, the truth is this: your character’s emotions begin with you. You are the well from which every passion of your character—every tremble and smile and tear and jealousy—will be drawn.

Personal Experience And Character Emotion

As a novelist, you are much further removed from your audience than an actor. An actor displays his or her emotions directly in front of an audience, who can see the movements and facial expressions, hear the tones of voice. But you must create your characters’ emotions in your own mind, then effectively describe them on paper. From that point, your audience has to read words, and finally, they re-form the images of those emotions in their own minds. It’s so easy for those emotions to lose their depth of meaning in any one of these steps. One thing is certain. Considering how far removed your readers are, if you want them to feel the passions of your characters in all their glory, you—being at the starting point—will need to feel these passions as fully as possible yourself.

But how to do this? How to plumb the depths of the well of emotions within you, rather than merely skim the surface?

Once again we look to the art of Method Acting to guide us. How does the Method actor believably portray the unique emotions and desires of different characters, particularly when a character faces conflict that the actor has never faced? Answer: by tapping into his Emotion Memory.

Emotion Memory was first spoken of by the French psychologist Théodule Ribot, who called it “Affective Memory.” Stanislavsky explained this “Affective” or “Emotion Memory” as the kind of memory that makes a person relive all the sensations he or she felt when faced with a certain situation. Emotion Memory can fill a person anew with the feelings of that moment, even though these feelings may have long before sunk into the subconscious. These are memories in their most pure, distilled form. They are simmered by time just as a sauce simmers on the stove until excess liquid is gone and all that remains is potent, blended flavor.

A friend of mine once told me about the time she was baking a dessert on a hot summer day. She mixed all the ingredients, poured the mixture into a pan, and slid it into the oven. Then she went outside to work in the yard. When she reentered the house some time later, she was struck by a familiar smell wafting from the oven. The smell combined items she’d used in the baking—oranges and cloves and cinnamon. In an instant, that smell transported her to Christmas—the remembrance of oranges and apples stuck with cloves, bobbing in hot cider. That rich, sweet, heady scent filled her mind with scenes of celebrating the season with family: the joy of opening presents, the frustration of awaiting her turn in the bathroom, the biting cold of caroling house-to-house, the sadness of saying goodbye at the airport. All the emotions of the season in their vibrant colors, the deep meaning of the Christmas celebration—all these memories released themselves from my friend’s subconscious, sweeping her in one instant from a hot summer kitchen to Christmas. Merely because of a smell.

You have no doubt seen or experienced something similar. Think of a woman on a talk show, telling the story of how her son almost died in a car accident five years ago. The son is sitting beside her, whole and well. But as the woman relates the scene, her words choke and she starts to cry. Everything turned out fine, so what is she crying about? She’s reliving the scene, all the emotions that overwhelmed her at the time. That’s Emotion Memory.

Accessing Your Emotion Memory

Any one of our five senses, or any combination of them, can release vivid memories. The problem is, we can’t count on such serendipitous moments to trigger the emotions we need to feel while writing a certain scene. As we all know, emotions have minds of their own. They are often fleeting, teasing, no more than vague, ghostlike impressions.

“Our artistic emotions,” Stanislavsky told his students in
An Actor Prepares
, “are at first as shy as wild animals, and they hide in the depths of our souls. If they do not come to the surface spontaneously, you cannot go after them and find them. All you can do is concentrate your attention on the most effective kind of lure for them.”

Because we need these emotions, and they don’t always appear at will, we have to learn how to access them. Through conscious effort, we can tap into our Emotion Memory, causing subconscious feelings to rise to the surface, much as a well-digger taps into a hidden spring, and suddenly fresh water bubbles up.

When we learn to access our Emotion Memory, two wonderful results occur in our writing:

1.
We can far more splendidly color the passions of those characters whose experiences are similar to our own
.

Sometimes we create characters whose main hardships are based on those we’ve faced in our own lives. Still, your character will encounter some situations that are different—or perhaps worse—than your own, and she will have a Desire and inner values that do not exactly match yours. When her passions diverge from your own, tapping into your Emotion Memory will help you discover all the colors of her unique situation. This character can become far more than a mere carbon copy of your own experiences.