Method Writing: What Novelists Can Learn From Actors About Self-expression

I wrote What It’s Like in Words in my dressing room in the St Martin’s theatre in the West End whilst playing Miss Casewell in The Mousetrap, and over nine months and approximately 300 shows it occurred to me how similar the processes of writing and acting are. They may appear binary forms of storytelling, one extraverted, the other introverted, but they are both concerned with the limits to which you push your mind in order to inhabit someone else’s.

I have always struggled with long form; jobs without deadlines remain on to-do lists, and I don’t make plans for the future. Therefore, placing a full stop on the first draft of my first novel felt like breaking a habit. It was a mess, of course, as all first drafts are—it was the literary equivalent of the first week of rehearsals when you’re still holding the script, and trying to remember the blocking. You can read as many writing books as you like (and you should) but the first battle you have is with yourself.

I studied Method Acting at The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York. I don’t claim to be a “Method Actor” (and by all accounts it takes more than one summer to become one) but I believe that Strasberg’s Method can be a powerful tool for unlocking authenticity across art forms. Popular thinking regarding method acting is that a character has to inhabit the role in order to play it (insert Daniel Day-Lewis story here). I don’t know what that method is, but Strasberg’s Method is arguably the opposite. He isn’t suggesting that to play a murderer you have to murder someone; he is asking instead: have you ever killed a fly? It isn’t about living as the character to understand them; it’s about understanding yourself in order to relate to the character. It’s almost like you are giving them permission to enter your life rather than the other way around.

A stage actor has to create reality multiple times over multiple months, and so Strasberg’s Method offers a toolbox for actors needing help to create an authentic performance every night—even on that sleepy Tuesday no one showed up to. One of these tools is Sense Memory, which, through a series of exercises, trains our minds to recall specific items or sensations in order to trigger emotional responses. Examples are the feel of sunlight, physical pain, or a personal item. But we start small by trying to remember a breakfast drink, say, coffee.

Ensuring that our bodies are stripped of tension, we sit on a chair, close our eyes, and focus. We feel the cup. We smell the liquid. We ask how our bodies feel. Sleepy? Content? Excited about the day ahead? This should be an emotionally easy one, but what if this morning, as you were drinking your coffee, your partner of ten years walked into the room and confessed that they were cheating on you with your best friend? The memory of that coffee will likely elicit a stronger response than ‘groggy.’ And this is the aim of Sense Memory; it’s not about remembering an emotion—this is too abstract—it’s about combing through our memories to find something that will trigger the emotion.

If you were playing Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, you are unlikely to understand how it feels to wake up after faking your own death in order to be with the boy you love, only to find that he has killed himself. But have you been thirteen and had your heart broken? And if so, what tangible thing can you recall in order to recapture that feeling? The smell of the grass on the playing field? The feel of your new shoes digging into your heels? The spearmint gum losing flavor in your mouth? Once you can connect to your role then you can perform it.

When it comes to the human experience you are always going to be your best resource. Things don’t always look the way we think they will. If you watch someone tell a sad story, they often do it with a smile, a calmness. And when we achieve a dream, we don’t always jump for joy. We are fed stories on social media about what our emotional lives should look like—what a happy relationship looks like, what anxiety looks like, what wellness looks like. I recently saw a woman slide down a wall crying accompanied by an emotive soundtrack. The caption said that she had just been abandoned by her husband. But this reaction was completely contrived, mimicked from what she presumably saw in films, and if you think I’m being cynical, please consider that she had to first set up the tripod. Audience and readers know when they are being fed sloppy seconds. Strasberg’s Method helps us connect to what something is or would actually be like, helping us to create original and yet entirely relatable stories.

The Method can also help to bring your writing to life, a reminder to show not tell. Adding in sensory details can help a reader connect to your work in the same way that recalling them as a writer can help you connect to it. There is an excellent episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when Buffy’s mother dies, and rather than us seeing Buffy fall apart, the camera focuses on the sensory details. A fly. Vomit on the carpet. Piercing sunlight. This is assisted by the directorial choice to use no music; to strip down the scene to what is happening in Buffy’s head in order to demonstrate that she isn’t processing her reality. Our senses are powerful triggers; smells conjure forgotten memories. People suffering with dementia can forget their own names but remember a melody. So, write down the details. It’s not revolutionary; method acting is about working with our minds, not against them. Don’t explain to the reader that your character is heartbroken, make the reader feel heartbroken for them. Maya Angelou said: people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

One of the most important things to remember with the Method is to be present in the past. Our minds naturally change our memories over time, and so we have to fight against retrospect. When we recall that cup of coffee, we have to forget about everything that happened between the moment we were drinking it, and the current one. We have to forget about the stressful journey we had traveling to work, or how upset we felt reading the news at lunch, otherwise we risk altering the memory of our coffee. We also can’t judge our past selves because they didn’t have the information that we have now. We have to time travel. And remember the first rule of time travel? Don’t change a thing.

In What It’s Like in Words, there is a chapter where Enola is cooking risotto for her boyfriend. He enters the kitchen and immediately begins criticizing everything she is doing, eventually taking over the meal. This scene wasn’t a stretch for me because I once dated a director who did exactly this. The same risotto. The same criticisms. But what was a stretch was writing the chapter authentically. In earlier drafts of the novel, I had Enola feeling slighted by her boyfriend’s behavior. But if she had felt slighted, even in her head, even for a moment, then the story would have unfolded differently (and I would have broken up with that director on the spot).

So, I took myself back to that evening, smelt the celery sizzling, felt the blunt knife chopping the onion, and discovered that I had (regretfully) found his rudeness charming. And in turn, Enola blissfully watches as he cooks dinner, and she daydreams about their future together. Had I written the scene in the third person it might have been different, but as it is in first, the only mind in that room could be Enola’s. Because if my present self was in the kitchen with her, she would have grabbed the risotto pan and hit him over the head with it.

I am not Enola any more than I was Miss Casewell in The Mousetrap, and even though I did the work to understand her, our lived experiences are different and so our actions would be too. As an actor, the action is in the script and/or given to you by the director. But as a writer, it’s up to you. Now you know how the character feels; what action would they take and what words would they use? During one performance of The Mousetrap, a younger actor went off script and swore. Off stage, he said: well at least the ad lib was in character. But it’s Agatha Christie. The play is set in the fifties. His character would not (and did not) use the “F” word.

Lee Strasberg said that “Work for the actor lies essentially in two areas: the ability to consistently create reality and the ability to express that reality.” Once you’ve found and translated the truth, you need the craft. It’s not enough to connect, we have to communicate. Often a tear-stained actor will come off stage into the wings (we’ve all done it) and say something like man, I really felt that one. It doesn’t really matter if you feel it, if the audience doesn’t. I once watched from the wings as an actor played an emotional moment. I could see their tears—their emotion was clearly genuine—but their head was down, and so not a single audience member could see their face.

The writing equivalent is perhaps overwriting a sentence. We’ve all waxed lyrical over our purple prose, but more often than not, that darling, much like Strasberg’s fly, must be killed. And perhaps this is where acting and writing part ways—acting is designed for an audience—but we can, of course, just write for ourselves. But if you do want to reach someone else with your words then it has to be about telling the story you want, and feel qualified, to tell as clearly and honestly as you can. You can’t control who your story will resonate with. It won’t resonate with everyone. But you will reach someone, they will reach you, you will both be understood, you will both be seen.

Leonard Cohen said about art-making: “For me, art is the evidence of a life, and not the life itself. It’s the ashes of something that has burned very well…and sometimes we confuse ourselves, and we try to create the ashes, instead of the fire.” Life and art are intrinsically linked, there is no avoiding it. Irrespective of whether you are writing fantasy or memoir, you are still dealing with the human condition. It’s about creating life from the ash of the fires, and asking yourself what something is really like—or in the case of writing—what it’s like in words.

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What It’s Like in Words by Eliza Moss is available from Henry Holt and Co., an imprint of Macmillan, Inc.