Norwich actor and playwright, Marie Cooper, on Acting and Writing

Acting and Writing

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Combining Passions into Purpose

Today I am writing a short piece for a character I will be playing tomorrow. I don’t need to. It’s not necessary, but I thought I would combine day four of #My500Words challenge with my research and preparation for the role.

I have been provided with a brief which contains a bit about the history and personality of the character I need to play,  and what her motivations are. I am going to take the main facts and creatively write prose from my character’s point of view, as she goes through the experience that has been created in the text for her.

I will be creating her character tomorrow as an actor anyway. This is what I do, taking clues that the writer has put into the text or playwright has created in the dialogue. Investigating the words to determine where my character came from, what it is she wants, what action she is going to initiate to get it and what is standing in her way and how she is likely to react. I would use all the clues to dig deeper into the truth of who she is so that I can bring genuine emotions from my own experiences to make her real, aiming for verisimilitude.

But today, I am going to start with the facts and attempt to invent her internal reality, in words not actions, mind not body, enveloping the emotions into the text, as opposed to digging into the text for her emotions.

I am very much enjoying experimenting with words on the page. I think that the way that I  build my characters and explore emotion is going to be advantageous to my writing, and that getting back in touch with the writer in me is also going to contribute beneficially to the richness of my creativity and make me a better actor.


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