The Stanislavski System and Method Acting

And finally, there are also proto-words. I don't always have to resort to actual words, I can just imagine the idea of walking down a corridor or across a field. It's at the conceptual level, pure thought. It comes before you can form words to describe something. First you just get the raw idea of walking somewhere, in a certain kind of environment, then you come up with the words for it. For every part of the imagination, including the words, there's such a proto-version that comes before it and remains after it.

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This needs to be posted in here, even though I wish it could have been a couple of pages back, with the rest of the similar stuff. Hey, it just showed up for me now.

Just a quick run-down on this idea—I don't have it in me to do another massive write-up right now. And this one is from memory, so I hope I don't screw it up. In class, Stan told Main Dude to work out a scenario where he's in his own room at home, and to begin with he just wanted him to walk around and look at the furniture and everything else, and see if anything jumped out at him. He was able to conjure a pretty good idea of his room (by which he seemed to mean his living room, though I'm not sure). He noticed some mail lying on a table that he hadn't responded to yet, which made the class laugh. Stan asked him what he was going to do here, and he said he wanted to play a part. Stan asked if he would again play Othello (which he had played earlier, and in his room) and he said no, because in that same space he would just remember all the mistakes he had made the first time. Stan approved of this. So Stan asked what part will he play, or what will he do. Main Dude replied he would now hang himself (in the scenario) because he couldn't think of anything to do, so he went into his imaginary closet and got a belt and hung it on a hook on the wall, but discovered that it was too low to do the job. He had everyone laughing, but at this point his imagination seemed to break up and stop functioning.

Stan told him it was because he was trying to do something he would never really do in life. His solution—trying to kill himself because he couldn't think of a scenario, was too extreme, and his imagination refused to honor it. The imagination (as opposed to the fancy) likes to work with realistic scenarios, at least in certain regards. I think especially concerning emotions. He had tried to get too extreme of an emotional reaction from a mundane event, and it refused to play along.

So it lets you know when you're stretching the bounds of reality too far. If you're trying to create some scenario and the imagination refuses to play along, chances are the scenario is too outlandish or extreme or something. Especially in the realm of emotional realism, it wants to keep things realistic. Maybe this is what causes bad melodrama—people try to write or act an extreme emotional reaction to something that wouldn't cause such a powerful one, and the result is weak and unbelievable. If you want a powerful reaction, you must set up a powerful enough situation for it.

I can't help but be reminded of something I've talked about on the board before—that my imagination lets me know if I'm trying to make a character do something they wouldn't do. It's good to find some confirmation on that. The imagination is a powerful ally, but it refuses to let you force things that aren't right. Fantasy will allow you to do anything—it's fully under your conscious control, and it doesn't have access to the powerful resources of the deep unconscious that imagination has.

I'm going to back up here. This is from a little earlier in the book, but it's important. At one point Stan had them on a stage with some elements of a set in place. There were a couple of walls, a door, some chairs, maybe a table or two with pitchers and glasses on them. He told them to just sit or stand somewhere, and make use of the props and furniture. This was because they had said it's too hard to work with just the imagination, they thought if they had some things to work with it would be much easier. They all found a place and just started sort of aimlessly milling around or fiddling idly with part of a chair or something on a table, or opening the door and looking at parts of it. Then he stopped them and said "Ok, now what if I tell you that you've just heard a dangerous lunatic has escaped the nearby asylum and is known to be in the area, and now you hear someone trying to get in the room, turning the knob back and forth forcibly and banging hard against the panel?"

Suddenly they all were able to react much better, finding places to hide or improvising weapons from props. I guess this was showing them that you need more than just a place and some things (and that even having real furniture and props doesn't help), there must be some sort of dramatic setup, and danger is a powerful goad to the imagination. Once danger presents itself, people will very quickly find dramatic and sensible things to do (or sometimes hysterical, but hey, that's dramatic too).

Fragmentary is all you need, and it mimics the way we experience reality
One thing I want to explain a little better—when I say I see fragmentary images, or just get fragmentary sounds or sensations, it doesn't mean the imagination is incomplete or lacking really. The fragments are enough—they suggest an entirety, and because there are several different senses all providing fragmentary information, it feels like a very rich and full scene, with sound and smells and visuals and sensations. Even taste, if I imagine eating or licking something. A rapid succession of fragments—slices of a complete image, will build what seems like the whole thing. The same way when you watch a movie you might get a series of close-ups, but you don't feel that you're missing anything as a result. The faces were what was important in these scenes, so that's what you were shown.

Dreams work this way as well. I've noticed frequently in dreams I'll be shown sudden close-ups of whatever is most important. In one dream there was a long narrow puddle alongside a railroad track. I was walking along the tracks speaking with a very short woman with long straight brown hair. We were moving toward the puddle, and as I looked at it for just a brief moment I saw a close-up, with the water removed. It made me clearly see the depth and shape of it, and I realized it was exactly the right size and shape to hold a human body. Then I hit the woman over the head with a large rock I suddenly had in my hand and she fell right into the puddle and disappeared into the water. Things like this happen a lot in dreams. People are often confused by what seems to be the random nature of such shifts, but usually when I examine the dream and try to understand it, it turns out there are good reasons for these close-up views and shifts (like the puddle suddenly being dry for a moment). It's your attention being directed to what's the most important thing in the scene. Same way a movie director decides to cut to a close-up. Or to move the camera slowly toward some object that will soon be very important. These movie techniques work so well because they mimic the way the dreaming mind operates.

If I try to visualize a dog and I see only a tail, and the tail is wagging, it's probably because that's the important aspect of the dog right now. Or if I only see its muzzle and it's growling and baring it's teeth, then that's the important thing about the dog. The rest of it—its back, its legs, its ears—don't matter in this moment.

A few posts back when I imagined stepping into a bakery and suddenly my imagination put The Rock there in a baker's hat and apron, I really only saw his face and the hat and the upper part of an apron. I also saw a rapid succession of partial images of the inside of a bakery—part of a glass counter with rolls and cupcakes and croissants on the shelves, parts of the wall behind him, similarly loaded with baked goods. And I got an aroma of the mixed odors of a bakery. Then just for a moment my hands felt the surface of the glass counter, as if I had laid them on it. And I could hear the bustle and clatter of workers in the back doing their jobs. Just now, in thinking about it, I heard the tinkle of the bell over the door as it swung closed behind me, the squeal of its hinges, the clunk as it closed. All of these little fragments of image, sound, sensation, smell, etc combine to form a very rich and seemingly complete idea of being in a bakery. It isn't necessary to see a panoramic view that remains constant and contains all of these things at the same time, it's probably a lot more efficient for the imagination to supply just the relevant and important parts. It certainly saves on bandwidth! And you don't need any more than this. In fact it's the way your attention works in reality too. Yes, you can see everything in front of you, but your vision concentrates on whatever seems important. Same for the sounds you hear, and the rest of it. Your attention selects the most important things and the rest seem to fade into the background.

A piece of advice I've heard for developing the imagination, and this definitely didn't come from Stanislavski, is to imagine a sexual fantasy. This is engrossing enough that it should draw you in and the unconscious should kick in and start to provide details without your needing to force them. Maybe this works best for males. For females—I don't know, imagine there's a shoe sale on at your favorite store maybe? Can you smell the leather and the new shoe smells? Imagine walking in front of the low tilted mirror in a pair of shoes, something outrageous that you wouldn't orinarily dare to wear in public, and stroll this way and that admiring them. Sit down on the little stool and take them off, put them back in the box. There's the rustle of the paper in the box. Can you smell that cardboard smell, maybe the smell of the ink the box is printed with? Put the lid back on the box and set it aside, now slide the next box over close and open it. What did it slide on? Tiles, carpet? What color was it, and how thick? What kind of stool was it? One you've seen before? What kind of shoes are in the box? Combat boots maybe? Sandals? Clown shoes? What do they smell like, how do they feel in your hands? Maybe you struggle to get into something a little too tight, and a salesman crouches next to you and uses a cold steel shoe-horn to help ease your foot in. Maybe it's Brad Pitt, or Tom Cruise. Or you name him or her. What happens next?

Guys—maybe try it the same way, ask yourself the same kind of questions, but make it a sporting goods store or a hardware store. Anyplace that would really stir your passion. Video game store maybe? Head shop, but the biggest one you've ever seen? Your favorite restaurant? Or some exotic one in a distant country?

The point is—if you can think up a scenario that really engages your attention, that you really want to imagine, then it will happen a lot easier, and the session will be a lot more vivid and immersive.

I just realized—thinking back on the Fragmentary Imagination post—this is the basis of showing. In certain instances anyway. I'm thinking of certain kinds of action or horror scenes. If you use telling, put it into narrative summary, then the reader is told everything in no particular order and with no powerful emphasis. But if you break things apart into the important fragments and display them one after the other, with the important details included, you build up exactly the same kind of totality from the slices of sight and sound and texture or whatever. It mimics the way you would experience such a moment—in reality, in a dream, and in your imagination. Interesting.

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I'm going to post these videos here, even though there are a lot of little mistakes in wording, both in the written part and the spoken part. She stumbles a lot trying to make sense of her notes where she put the wrong word, and often makes it worse rather than better, as if she doesn't really understand it well enough to correct her mistakes on the fly. But it's very thorough and serves as a good overall reminder of the whole system. Since I've watched a lot of videos and read a lot of articles/PDFs, and am reading Stan's books now, I can correct the mistakes in my own head. I think most people can understand what she meant to say in most instances. Sigh—if she just would have taken the time to correct her mistakes in the writing stage before she tried to read it, this would be an excellent presentation. But it's very servicable even as is, especially as just a reminder of material you've already studied.

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In this one she's talking mostly about beats. "Finding the action" means finding the beats—either the large story beats or the smaller scene beats. It helps keep things on track and helps you make sure important things are happening in every scene. When you break a scene (or the whole story) down into beats you'll see where nothing really important is happening, or maybe the action doesn't fit well into the character's overarching desires and goals, and you can fix it.

The super-objective is the major goal of the character—the big thing they want to accomplish. All the things they do throughout the story must relate in some way to this overall goal. So you break it down into scenes—what sub-goal is the character pursuing in this scene? And then you break it down farther—what individual actions does he or she take in the scene to work toward that large goal, moment-to-moment (these are the scene beats)? What kind of opposition does he or she face from other characters, and how does he or she react to them? All of it is organized by their super-objective or overarching goal (the spine of their story).


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This does translate to some extent to writing. A writer's expression is done through the writing, but the characters move and perform and have facial expressions etc, plus they might have a certain way of walking, maybe different at times to show an inner change. We're still performing each character, there's just the extra imposition of the written word in between, so we don't do it physically through our bodies. But our written characters do express things that way. You want to be subtle most of the time with it— don't turn it into a story of twitching eyebrows and spasming hands or anything. Use it judiciously and sparingly, maybe mainly for those moments when they say one thing but really feel something else. You can also use a catch in the voice or a strange false tone at times to show they aren't speaking truth.

And it occurs to me that we might find ways to express certain things through the writing itself that might parallel what an actor would do physically. Speed up the tempo or slow it down, use some alliteration or assonance or some other literary/poetic device. Suddenly somebody is searching for words a lot or making a lot of weird mistakes when they're nervous. A certain cadence and tone for the way a character speaks, and suddenly that changes.​

One problem I keep running up against is how to show emotions. I've been improving at it little by little. I recently did a deep dive into Deep/Close POV specifically for their techniques of expressing emotion, but there was still something I didn't like about it. I might be remembering it wrong now, and quite likely it was my own misunderstanding of what I was reading, but I seem to recall there was a lot of thudding hearts, terror rising up in people, etc. Ok, actually a thudding heart isn't bad, but the part I object to is directly naming the emotion. "Terror rose up" is pure telling. So I started thinking about ways to show the emotions. And I don't mean through facial expression or body language—those aren't the emotion itself, they're after-effects of it. They're effective in the right place and used sparingly, but I know there's something far better. So just now I did a search for "Sneaky ways to show emotion in writing." I passed right by most of the results just from seeing the little snippet you can read on the Search Results page. All the same standard stuff I've already seen. This is the 1st really different one I ran across:

• How Fiction Writers Can Show Emotions in Their Characters in Effective Ways

Actually it was the second, but it is the first one to go into some detail. Here's the actual first one that caught my eye:

• How to Show Emotion in Writing and Make Readers Feel It

This one gives some tantalizing hints, but nothing solid.

"It takes thousands of hours of study, practice, and honing to become a master of emotion. And often that means we have to mine our own emotions.

"We have to dig deep to reflect on how we react, respond, and feel emotionally to events, people, and situations so that we can try to capture those feelings and transfer them onto the page."
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This is really good right here. In fact it lines up perfectly with all the Stanislavski stuff. Mining our own emotions, digging deep to reflect on how we react, respond, and feel emotionally—this is very much in line with remembering events from our own lives (emotion memory stuff). I did it myself briefly before doing this search. I thought back to one of my earliest memories—when I was a little boy and my grandma was in the hospital dying. My mom had told me she was, but I had never experienced a death before, except for maybe a pet. Some mice and some lizards I used to have, doubtless some goldfish. We did have a dog named George who died, but they hid that from me.

I remember pulling into the driveway and suddenly my parents were acting strange. My dad pulled the car way over to the side of the driveway (something he had never done before) and they asked me if I had seen George. He was on his chain, on the breezeway between the house and the garage, so almost directly in front of us, but my view was blocked at the moment by the edge of the garage. I hadn't seen him. They said they didn't see him either, wonder what could have happened to him? My mom stayed with me in the car while dad walked over to the breezeway. A couple of minutes later he came back and said "I don't know, he's just gone. Must've got off his chain and ran off." I was distraught for the next few days or so (I don't remember how long), kept walking around the neighborhood looking for him and calling has name. Then they told me they thought maybe someone had taken him—he was a beagle, those make good hunting dogs. Probably some hunters took him and are taking care of him and teaching him to hunt. And they seemed pretty convinced this was what had happened. That made me feel somewhat better—at least I thought he had a home and a good life somewhere else. It wasn't until many decades later my mom told me what actually happened. They had seen him lying unmoving on the breezeway. Probably obviously dead (or I suppose he would have been straining at his chain and wagging his tail at our arrival). My dad unhooked him from the chain and dragged him behind the garage so I wouldn't see him. They didn't think I was old enough or emotionally tough enough to deal with his death yet (they were undoubtedly right).

So I had never dealt with a major death yet (mice and lizards are pretty easy to get over, especially when you replace them). I just have this isolated memory of a moment when my mom, my aunt, my sister and I had stepped into Grandma's hospital room. I was already a little freaked out because of the way they had been talking and acting. They had probably already told me she was dying and very sick. But then, as we stood in a little huddled group just inside the door, some ways away from her bed, my aunt said "My god, she looks like a skeleton." That did me in. I was totally freaked out by it, and I wanted to just leave the room and never go back. I didn't want to see her looking like a skeleton, and I don't remember seeing her at all. Maybe I refused to look? I don't know.

Now see—writing that story out like that (but better-worded) is so much better than "Horror gripped me as I looked at her in the bed." The sequencing is much better. The fact that one of the adults said that—not really a great thing to say right in front of the kids—and the way I reacted to it. The emotion comes across clearly I think, without needing to name it or use any cliched phrases. As I recall Stephen King is really good at this kind of thing. I should definitely read a few of his with an eye out for how he expresses emotion. I still remember in Pet Sematary, the story about the sick sister in the back room with scoliosis or whatever she had, that made her look like a skeleton (ironic, or maybe that's why it made such an impression on me?).

The first link I posted about writing emotions (two posts back now) is one I'm pretty sure I ran across before when I was looking into this. The example stories were very familiar. But I'm glad I ran across it again. It's the first article I remember seeing that handles emotions this way, without all the standard telling and cliches. I started to figure this out, some aspects of it anyway, after Louanne made that comment to me on my progress journal—that I need to go more into the MC's emotions. It struck a nerve. I knew she was right. Sometimes you just get that one bit of critique or advice that goes straight to the heart and you know this is one to work on for some time.

I mostly had Cody mention how he felt after-the-fact, like 'Ronnie picked on me like this because he knew it upset me.' I don't remember if I actually wrote upset. But in this context, in inner monologue rather than directly, it's a lot more acceptable. I mean, this is how I started inserting emotion after her comment. I think it was working pretty well, and especially in a story written many years later by the older, wiser Cody who had plenty of detachment from the directness of the emotions and experiences. Since he was acting as the narrator, it's up to him to decide how to show emotions and everything else. That makes it possible to do things very differently from a story with a standard narrator, or one that's first person told in the moment (or immediately after the event), when the emotions would still be raw and fully in effect. He can be very circumspect about them.

But I can't do all of it that way. It would start to feel like the same trick over and over. Sometimes you need to get right in there and deliver the gut punch, not just tell 'em about it afterwards. I think that article (from two posts back) is a great approach to it. It's exactly what's been teasing around the edges of my mind as I think about this. Sequencing is vital—it needs to be in the order the character experiences them in. First something happens, it gives rise to some inexpressible deep emotion, then he has a thought about it (he accepts it or rejects it), and then the secondary emotion wells up, either instantly (in the case of rage maybe) or slowly. That first primary emotion is something you hardly feel. Oh, you feel it, but it's mysterious and complex, and hard to explain. You start to react to it I think. At least sometimes, and you have a little inner monologue about it. The way that goes determines if you're going to shunt the emotion off to the side or let it take over. So there's a sort of little inner drama going on. That drama is what the writer of the article did so well. She really did slow things down, to moment-by-moment or even second-by-second. It's one to study, to read several times, and to analyze. And then you try something similar yourself, based on some experience you remember when you were overwhelmed by an emotion. Try to remember as much as you can, especially the things that get the feeling across powerfully without needing to rely on cliches and tricks. Like that moment when my aunt said "God, she looks like a skeleton." The little pause as we all stood there before we stepped forward, and then that phrase. The way she whispered it, and how inappropriate it was with my little sister and I standing there. And yet it was real, it was totally honest. She couldn't help it. I'd probably say something similar before I remember—oh shit, the kids are right here! Oops!

I went back and read both links again. And suddenly I realized, somewhere, at least once in that revised example from the first link, Stephen King would have done something like this:

Oh god no. nogodgodno. I can't Icanteventhinkit but I did think it. How could I even let the idea cross my mind? What kind of father does that make me? But it did. And I—

I let it.

I let it.

And I liked it. Just for a moment, a bleeding stinking hellish moment, I did. I liked it. How can I live with myself now?
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Lol—maybe I overdid it. Maybe it's more like a caricature. I need to crack open Carrie and see how he really does it. Or 'Salem's Lot. This is the stuff he does best—get deep inside the heads and hearts of the characters and show the flaws and the humanity and everything else that's in there, including the darkness hiding in the deep parts. The darkness that just keeps going down, that seems to have no lower limit.

Actually I think he would have used a lot less (maybe no?) punctuation. Maybe no capitols. He had probably seen him some Cormac McCarthy.

Or that thing he does where the other voice breaks into his inner monologue in small caps. The dark, nasty voice from deep inside, where he might be totally evil but he's afraid to look too closely at it. Like this:

No, surely he's alright. I would nev YES YES YOU WOULD YOU KNOW YOU WOULD​

I'm not sure how it would go after that, if it would cut back and forth between the two voices. I think it would to an extent, but not like a dialogue. The second voice, the dark one, would give frightening responses to his own thoughts, revealing that they're on a shallow surface level and the real truth lies somewhere below, deep inside. And his surface voice would continue to try to ignore it as if too frightened to acknowledge it, and yet obviously it directs the way his thoughts are running now. As if he can hear it but he's pretending he can't. It's like the ultimate subtextual device.

I want to say something real quick about proto-words, which I wrote about at the top of the page. The other day I did a bunch of scenarios and I noticed each time, a moment before I formed an actual word in my mind (like Dog, Cat, Barn, Rocket, etc) the image was appearing in my mind's eye. So indeed the proto-words or pre-words are important, more so than the words themselves. It's the thought that must be there before you can say or think a word, the conceptual version of the word itself. Once I knew this, I didn't need to use words anymore, just the thought that gives birth to the word. It feels kinda crazy, like you're going to lose control, because there are no words running now in your head, but the thought-stream is there, just in pre-verbal form, and rather than words being birthed form it, there are images and the entire assortment of sound, sensation, smell, and, when appropriate, taste.

My hope is that as I keep experimenting with this and using it to develop stories and characters, I'll get better at it and unlock new levels of connection to the unconscious source of creativity.