A4C Blogs

Words, words, words

April 11, 2012

5 min read

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Something dawned on me recently and it has kept me away from blogging for while. (ha – you probably didn’t even notice.) 😀

The overabundance of words (and content generally) on the internet is more than astonishing. I’m sure someone could eloquently and poetically dissect my fascination with the brain’s inability to fully comprehend the magnitude of it, but not me. Clearly.

Words are a Variety Pack of a thousand at the ’99c Only’ store. A single word will inspire someone and offend another. As Declan Donnellan says (and I paraphrase) “Words are always woefully inadequate at expressing how we truly feel”. This is the wonderful thing in drama because it’s about what’s not being said and as actors, writers and directors, we should thank the universe that communication is so difficult, else we wouldn’t have this occupation.

However, words are not enough…

There have been a hundred thousand words I could have written since my last blog and search engines thrive on words. Keywords, content-specific words, ‘copy’ to offset the pics and help the spiders, bots and crawlers boost us up in search engine rankings. Because what’s the point writing if no-one’s reading. But what’s the point reading if the words are trumped up, steroid-fed trivialities, genetically modified to satisfy a Googlebot or Yahoo Slurp’s tastebuds?

Then ideas. What of ideas? Ideas are a dime a dozen. Good ideas? A buck a dozen. Great ideas…perhaps a grand a dozen. I wouldn’t lose them though, because without them, the words are simply random noise from mindless chattering robots.

“How is’t with me, when every noise appalls me?“

– Macbeth

But even ideas are commonplace. Ask a random sampling of friends (in our industry or not) if they have thought about making a Tropfest film and you’d be surprised. Everyone has an idea! Tropfest repeatedly reminds us “it’s about the idea!”. Perhaps that’s why so many fail to create careers for their directors. As Goethe said of the stage:

“I wish the stage were as narrow as a tight rope so that no incompetent would dare walk on it.”

The same might be said of what appears on the screen. An idea is only one tiny part of a much larger picture…

Stories. Stories are light particles. Abundant but difficult to catch. Everywhere you look, every day, there are stories taking place. Yes, Mr Hitchcock, drama IS life with the boring bits taken out, but still….Stories are there. If you know where to look. A story simply has a beginning, a middle and an end. Plotting the journey of that story is where a skilled writer is required, but the raw product is there in front of you. Like fresh produce on the kitchen counter, waiting to be turned into the meal you have in your mind. Or create along the way…

I have found a story. A wonderful story. A story of heroics, danger, love, adventure, intrigue, suspense and action. A story with a fully-formed protagonist, a powerful antagonist, a universally recognisable (yet unique) setting and a journey far greater than most stories I have heard in my life. A story filled to the brim with ideas, brought alive by words incapable of fully expressing the emotion underlying them. Most remarkable of all is that the protagonist is still alive and mentally alert today, so as to share the intricate and intimate details of her entire experience with us.

The hi jinx of terrible teachers and exploitative organisations within our industry still damage me. They still knock me around as each new wave hits. Another one recently sent me scrambling for Google to prove again that the ‘experts’ were in fact frauds with only ‘extras casting’ credits – but who cares? Who heeds warning anyway? I feel like I’m waving frantically to warn people driving past about the danger ahead and they’re waving back in blissful ignorance, with the windows up and Tony Robbins CD playing full boar….

I have a great fear that when my first child arrives, I will wrap them in cotton wool. Not letting them fall. Stopping them from making the mistakes I made. Mistakes I know (or think?) will hurt them. Do them some kind of physical or psychological damage. But I can’t. Everyone needs to make mistakes so they can learn for themselves. That’s the cliché, of course, but I’ve always been a slow learner.

So the practice starts now. I’m letting them go. And I’m hunting stories instead. Like hunting the quark only much much bigger. 😛

“He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other”

-Francis Bacon

This story will not only keep me occupied for quite some time, it takes me out of needing to care about any of the rest of it. Who’s famous, who’s working, which director are they working with and what was the box office return of the latest blockbuster. I’ll still put in my two cents whenever I feel the need (my child will still be told to keep their hand off the stove) – I audited another acting ‘guru’s class yesterday, in fact. The need to share is burning within me. But that could be that I’m just leaning on the stove myself…:P

=pb—

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