Reading time: Less than 1 minute
This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a blog post by Dan Bevacqua…..
Writer Dan Bevacqua (pictured above), had me at the headline: “What Happens When You Treat Writing Like Acting?”
In a post appearing on the site LitHub, Bevacqua intrigued me with his apparently contradictory premise (I have had a number of friends in the acting business). And then he delivered with a charming introduction, featuring a story about the actress Lucy Liu. I read on.
It turns out that Dan Bevacqua has recently published his first novel (Molly Bit) and to learn more about his characters he took an acting class. What did he discover? In Bevacqua’s own words:
What I witnessed in that theater was an immensity of kindness. In fact, the class was a refuge, a place for actors to be real in a town that doesn’t treat them as such. The pre-class conversations were about character research, child care, love, choices, money, failure. When I watched the students go on stage and perform, the results were startling. Nothing was ever quite good enough for them. There was always another layer to go down into, a truer moment to find. The actors were revising their sentences up on stage. They were encouraged to speak of the personal, emotional work that fiction writers tend to avoid speaking of.
And his conclusion knocked it out of the park:
For me, beyond the celebrity, that’s who these actors are, or who, at their very best, they try to be. They are like the fiction writers. They are the liars who tell our stories.
Based on Bevacqua’s strong writing style and the thoughtful conclusions expressed in his post, I’m going to make sure to read Molly Bit later this year.
