Breathing Deeply
is the natural and simple
path to good health and
happiness ... and an
essential requirement in
every actor's skill set.
Breathing Deeply
promotes confidence,
self-esteem
and good health.

More Information ...

Letters to Michael
(A visionary novel)

Read the exciting
  and inspirational
novel about life,
love, family, passion
and death.

Mother and son are
both hit by lightning,
and die. Kate must
return to life and her
 grieving family, but
 she refuses to leave
 without her child.
What can heaven do?

More information ...

Stop your negative buttons being pushed.
When it's time
for a better life,
it's time for
The Second Trigger

More Information ...

Do you want  a
seriously happy
marriage?

More information ...

What is ??

Answer:
The Applause  button is your chance to send a positive comment to the many talents and creative works showcased throughout The Bright Light Café.

Do you want to be;

- a voice artist - 

- an actor/actress -

Do you want to showcase your talents to the world?

This could be your chance

More Information...

Screenwriting by Actors: What are the Benefits?

I started my career as an actor.  I studied hard for my profession and was consumed by its joys and frustrations.  I loved learning to comprehend unfamiliar perspectives, and gaining intimate knowledge of varied and unfamiliar human experiences.  I loved learning to understand other people and their motives.  I loved the way every character I portrayed increased my understanding of myself, and my world.

Acting demanded I recognise the uniqueness of every human, while also demanding I find each unique being inside myself.  It also insisted I learn the big lesson of unconditional love.  Actors must completely love the person they are portraying to bring truth and reality to their presence.  This is the payment insisted upon by our muse.  It is the foundation stone of great performances.  Fortunately for us, it is also the foundation stone of great screenwriting. 

Screenwriters are also required to unconditionally love the beings that they birth.  The Writers Guild of America (WGA)[i] teaches: “… you (the writer) must genuinely fall in love with this person, understand them, empathize - even if said character is, for instance, a serial killer.”  This is not an easy lesson to fully comprehend, but it must be learnt if the writer is to become an expert.  It is consequently beneficial for a screenwriter to have already gained this hard earned degree in compassion through a background in acting.

The ability to create and feel ever-increasing compassion is a driving factor for many actors to extend their skills and talents and experiences into the realm of scriptwriting.  Actors are driven by the need to create believable and memorable portrayals, and actors who have turned screenwriter are also driven by the need to create believable and memorable characters that they, and their acting fraternity, would love to bring to life.

For instance, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck began and continue their lives as actors.  Their scriptwriting emerged out of their frustration as actors.  They recognised that the best roles always went to the A list of actors, and they were not on the A list.  Although the odd juicy role slipped through, they were only asked to audition for the roles, and scripts, already turned down by the A list actors.  Ben and Matt became determined to create the perfect script for themselves, complete with their own starring parts.  So, in the same manner as C.S.Lewis created the Narnia series because it was the sort of story he wanted to read himself, Matt and Ben wrote the sort of script in which they themselves wanted to act.

Leni Riefenstahl[ii] is notorious for her megalomaniacal, and brilliant, approach to filmmaking, and for being the creator of Triumph of the Will[iii].  She started her film career, however, as an actor, and the first film[iv] she wrote, and produced and directed, also ensured that Leni had the starring role.

Albert Brooks[v] has written seven films[vi] and seven starring roles for himself.  As a scriptwriter, Albert creates stories about theories and thoughts that matter to him, while the actor in him creates relationships that he knows will be bonding for his fellow thespians, and for the audience.  Albert’s composite talent understands “Plot is more than a pattern of events:  it is the ordering of emotions”[vii], and writes scripts with plenty of emotion and humour for all the cast, while leaving the best part for himself.  Actors may be team players but they are not stupid.

Most professional actors have great respect for their peers.  We know each other by, and respect each other for, our hard work, dedication, passion and talent, and we delight in making magic together.  Actors rejoice in doing the very best job they possibly can, and are, almost, as equally thrilled when they witness another actor doing their very best.  Unlike society’s ridiculous, selfish-child caricatures, or projections, a true professional actor wants his or her peers to give extraordinary performances with wonderful scripts.  We give the ultimate in ourselves so that the ultimate can be returned to us.

It is this peer-respect and team spirit that can bring another benefit to the scriptwriting process.  The scriptwriter, who understands the acting fraternity’s mutual passion to create believable stories together, can foresee a team of actors creating great moments together out of total silence.  The scriptwriter who understands and shares the actor’s concern for truth, can write in expectation that the actor will find the truth of their own character, and all connecting relationships within the script.  The writer can assume the truth of the character will be found, and brought to life by the actor’s performance. 

In Good Will Hunting, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon took their love of acting and created a script[viii] that was both brilliant and unorthodox.  How-to books on screenwriting, as well as screenwriting websites, emphasise the need to limit dialogue and to stay well away from monologues[ix].  Matt and Ben, however, blessed with the actor’s typical desire to have a good lengthy speech to wrap their minds and talents around, wrote a plethora of monologues and let themselves, and Robin Williams[x], shine.

Actors are in the profession of creating human beings full of personal experiences and preferences and realities.  We not only give them breath, we give them emotions and opinions and needs and desires.  We also give them fully mapped out backgrounds.  We then reach deep into the caverns of our own energy until we find the human being that we are aligning ourselves to, and literally bring them to life.   Acting is a sacred profession.  Actors are nurturers and creators and transmitters of compassion and understanding.

Scriptwriting involves the creation of an entire cast of human beings.  Consequently, scriptwriting may be seen as an extension of the skills of acting.  Both actors and scriptwriters need to create three-dimensional humans.  Scriptwriters, however, need to create an entire story full of multi-dimensional characters.  This is a compelling concept for many actors.  After years of creating rounded characters out of superficial outlines, the idea of writing fully fleshed personalities for actors to continue to research and grow, is exciting and enticing.

Actors and scriptwriters also share understanding and experience of the disciplines of our crafts.  Actors are bred on the basic format and formulas of scripts, and can tell when a writer has written about a known subject matter.  We can feel the intimacy and strength and truth in the writer sharing their own experiences and knowledge.  Ben Affleck and Matt Damon wrote about subject matter that they understood and for which they felt deep compassion and love.

From a writer’s point of view this meant that the area where their script Good Will Hunting was set, was a character in itself.  The lead lads are Southie (South Boston) boys, as indeed are Matt Damon and Ben Affleck themselves.  They are able to reproduce the personality of the community through their intimate association with the subject matter.  They also manage to convey the texture of Harvard and MIT through their knowledge and association with both of these neighbouring institutes.

As actors both Ben and Matt realised that a character’s home base is part of the creation of their personality.  For Will Hunting, home is South Boston and the people of South Boston are his family.  Matt and Ben were able to take their appreciation of the background of their characters and show the audience how and why this ‘home-base’ is so important to their development.

As scriptwriters they would have created extensive and intimate biographies on their lead characters, and possibly on every character in the script.  The obvious benefit of an acting background is the actor’s extensive skills and experience in doing this backbone work of any scriptwriting venture.

In The Complete Book of Scriptwriting[xi], the author J. Michael Straczynski states: “If you get to know your characters well enough, the story dictates itself.”  He also tells us that story building is all about being able to “Determine what your character wants, how far he will go to achieve it and how far someone else will go to try to stop him”.

As actors, our training and our work require that we do a complete in-depth character analysis of one particular person.  Over time and consistent employment, we do many and varied character analysis.  We become experts in the area of human psychology.  We become more nurturing and increasingly humble.  We are the privileged few who live multiple, and very often fascinating, lives in one life.

Scriptwriting therefore seems a natural extension of the actors’ craft.  Instead of one character, there are multiple characters all at the same time.  Each of these characters is nurtured into three-dimensional being before they are placed together for dialogue and action.  They must be alive, before the script will live.

Actors are trained to search for the depth in any emotional being, and they are also trained in the discipline of switching from one characterisation to another in the wink of an eye.  An actor’s mind is well ordered and well disciplined.  We are trained and equipped to slip from the creation of one character to another.  We are also trained and skilled in the unconditional love needed to bring the truth of a character to the audience.  This seems to me to be an extraordinary bonus for any scriptwriter.

Writing the background story for each of the main characters of a script is a very similar job to writing the background story for one character.

The next step for the writer is to discover the conflict between the characters.   And all actors know where the best emotional conflicts lie - between the characters in the script who care about each other.  It’s the same place that they put Oscars and Grammies and other prestigious recognitions.  “Domestic conflict is the most universal of conflicts,” teaches Irwin R. Blacker in his book The Elements of Screen writing – A Guide for Film and Television Writing[xii].

Here lies another benefit of being an actor before becoming a screenwriter.  Actors consistently propel themselves into self-introspection and personal growth.  This often uncovers a hornet’s nest of unsettled family, and friend, and lover issues.  Yet actors feel compelled, for the sake of ‘their art’ to work their way through these issues and conflicts.  We are not always, or often, successful, but we do learn an amazing amount about conflict along the way.

Actors also watch conflict - our own and everybody else’s - from a different perspective to most other beings.  We have been trained, and we train ourselves to be observers of all situations and all people.  Including ourselves.  We therefore bear witness to many situations that might otherwise be consumed in an emotional abyss.

As the much missed, and very talented actor John Hargreaves is quoted [xiii] as saying, “I can find myself in a highly emotional situation where something terrible has happened to me and a part of my brain says … Remember that! That’s very good!  You could use that!”

As actors we understand that all emotional reactions, may be useful for our unborn characters.  We are therefore lifetime students of sensitivity and awareness.  We observe and sense how, and why, people create conflict.  We note obvious and minute reactions.

Actors are also propelled into regular conflict through the whims of scriptwriters.  And it is in the best interests of the actor, and the scriptwriter, for those conflicts to test their character’s limits, many times.  The actor gives life to the personality that sleeps in a script.  Actors are the Prince Charming with the magic kiss.

The script, and the spirit of its story, can be thought of as The Sleeping Beauty, waiting for the life that the actor will breathe into her.  Both The Sleeping Beauty and The Heroic Saviour need each other to create the enchantment of their existence.

It is therefore logical to assume that the joining of the actor and the scriptwriter into one being is an obvious culmination of talents and skills and passions.  It can only be beneficial for the scriptwriter to have already mastered the art of observing and reproducing emotional situations and reactions.

Another benefit of fusing an actor into a screenwriter is the actor’s ability to understand the flow and pace of dialogue.  Listening with an attentive ear is part of the actors’ stock in trade.  We purposely stay close to people whose voices fascinate us.  We tune in on accents and oddities.  We practise the nuances of other people’s speech, and even exercise our mouth and facial muscles to ensure our flexibility in this medium.

Scriptwriters are told to listen to the flow of speech around them.  Actors don’t just listen, we become experts in voice.  We are given a 30 second radio commercial and we achieve its time limit, without hesitation.  Actors develop a sixth sense that deals completely with the timing and placement of dialogue.  We sense the perfect time to deliver a line and we do it within any necessary time parameter.  With practise, our skills our honed to the extent where we look at a script and can tell exactly how it will time.

Working a script into a breathing entity often requires an actor’s ability to give life to the words.  Years of working with scripts that do, and don’t work is an excellent training program for all scriptwriters.  It is also the training and working ground of all actors.  Novice scriptwriters are advised to read as many scripts as possible.  Actors have not only been reading scripts for their entire careers, they have also been reading them out loud, giving the words life and passion. 

The actor’s ability to modulate and manipulate their speech patterns into exciting speeches, monologues and story telling, is also an enormous benefit to the scriptwriter.  It is invaluable within the creation of a script’s dialogue, and its value does not end with the creation of the script.  To sell a script, a writer must be able to pitch their script to the best point of sale.  The Writer’s Guild of America has over one hundred pages of mentoring advice on their website [xiv] which includes this advice on pitching a story to a producer:

• Do breathe. Very important. And somehow, very easy to forget to do your first few times out.

• Do have a good time. If you're having fun, they'll be having fun too.

• Do take charge of the room.

• Do be enthusiastic about your ideas.

• Do spin them a story; intrigue them, amuse them, thrill them, but never, ever bore them.

• Do read their body language and get them involved in the pitch.

• Do your homework and know what kind of stories they're looking for.

• Don't sink into the furniture. Stay off the comfy couch and opt for the chair.

• Don't explain your entire pitch in excruciating detail. You should leave them wanting more.

• Don't argue with them.

• Don't read word-for-word off a page if you can help it. Consider this a performance and memorize your story.
  

With a few word changes, this list could be given to an actor who is to meet the very same people that the scriptwriter has previously met.  From an actor’s point of view, a pitch is remarkably similar to an audition with an accompanying interview.  We may hate it, but we are remarkably good at it.  Actors sell their talent, and their comprehension of the character and script.  We give solid, charming presentations and pitches.

Therefore when an actor also becomes a screenwriter, we carry extensive presentation skills with us into every pitch meeting.  As “Public Speaking” is the consistent number one fear for most people, it is invaluable to have a scriptwriter pitching who has a talent in publicly speaking, and who is trained in, and experienced in, ‘selling’ a story.

Actors, who have become scriptwriters, also realise that a major part of a final ‘sell’ is the approval or better still enthusiasm of the actors being offered the lead roles.  Understanding the true drives and passions of acting can only benefit the writers’ creation of lead roles for actors.  A deep respect for the artists who will bring a scriptwriter’s material to life seems like a definite bonus for the scriptwriter.

For instance, Frances Marion[xv] was the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood for three decades.  She started her career as an actress, and as is typical of most talented actresses, she made deep, fulfilling and lasting friendships with other actresses.  She was Mary Pickford’s personal scriptwriter, as well as her best friend. Frances also married an actor, the western star Fred Thomson and wrote for him a series of highly successful scripts.  It seems logical to assume that Frances’s background as an actress, and her long-term, loving relationships with thespians led her to a greater understanding of, and respect for, the art of acting.  Certainly her comment: “Adaptations are interesting because you get to spend some time in some one else’s mind” sounds very similar to an actors need and desire to spend time in some one else’s mind, and heart.

It is also probable that David Lynch’s[xvi] professionalism as an actor, as well as a renowned scriptwriter and director, enables him draw an unusual depth from both scripts and actors.  He understands the creative process of the actor because he uses the process himself.  This gives David kinship with his characters and his cast, leading him to make such insightful remarks as:  “Actors ask a lot of questions. But they're strange, because they seem to understand things - abstract things - pretty easily. They can buy into an abstraction without too much trouble.”  And "Well, at first with an actor you start one place and you talk, you rehearse, you talk, you rehearse and little by little you're coming closer to that place where you're united with the original ideas, that same doorway, and then you're rolling".

These are the comments of a fellow conspirator, a kindred spirit who understands and respects the work involved in the creation of a ‘real’ human being.

Professional actors know that it is the job of everyone involved in the creation of a great production to appreciate each other, and to appreciate the extraordinary dedication that our various arts and trades demand of us.  This knowledge and vast information bank passes immediately into the scriptwriter who has been an actor.

An actor’s team spirit also flows onto the crew.  Working actors spend the majority of their time with each other, and with the crew of the shows they are working on.  The atmosphere between this close-knit, if short term, family can make or break the quality of a show.  Actors therefore quickly learn that the relationship between cast and crew is important, often having beneficial, or detrimental, influences on a performance.  This in-house knowledge can add another edge to the scriptwriting skills of the actor.

The actor-turned-scriptwriter already has first hand experience of their fellow tradespeople.  They have built shows together, and actors, with perpetual curiosity, are drawn to understanding everything that might enhance their performance.  This can, and often does, translate into a ‘need to know’ about the jobs of everyone working around them.  An actor easily understands the seriousness of every job within a crew.  Many actors take the time to learn a little of everything about those jobs.  This general, but experientially detailed, link and learning from the crew, naturally flows from the actor into their scriptwriter persona, allowing them to benefit from any knowledge such information brings.

Long-term, close association with a crew’s various talents and skills creates a symbiotic relationship between cast and crew, each drawing on each other’s talents and skills to enhance each other’s work.  Actors are therefore familiar with the frustrations and delays that can occur in various departments of the filming and production process.  As scriptwriters, we can translate this knowledge into a script that is aware of production limitations and budgetary controls.

In summation, my studies have shown me that I am very fortunate.  I have already paid many of the dues required of anyone serious about the business of entertainment.  There are so many benefits for a scriptwriter in having an acting background that it appears to be the perfect training for anyone wishing to become a wordsmith.  In many ways, the art of acting is the experiential key that opens the talents of the writer.  We each create believable fantasies.  Actors and writers are creative mirrors to one another.  It not only seems beneficial, but amazingly natural to merge them into one being.

Reviews (applause received)   

Impressed Reader   Australia
"This article is fascinating.  The author obviously really knows their stuff. I reckon it's an article that all actors would really appreciate and gain great value from the insights provided by such a multi-talented and experienced author."

Be the next to review this article - click here.