How I Learned to Externalize the Internal in My Writing

…by borrowing some techniques and thinking from theater.

Next week at Narratively Academy, Chris Tebbetts is leading our first-ever Theater Camp for Memoir Writers. Today, Chris tells us about how a lifetime in theater has shaped his approach to storytelling—and how those same techniques can strengthen your memoir.

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I’m fascinated by the way we writers can use something as abstract as prose to capture something as concrete and tangible as lived human experience.

It’s an interesting process. When I’m writing fiction, first, I imagine a character doing and/or feeling something, or in memoir, I remember an experience of my own. Then I put words on the page to recreate that experience for my readers, who ultimately feel their own tangible emotional response to that description of that character’s lived experience. There’s a kind of triangulation that happens between author, character, and reader, where each plays their own part in bringing the story to life.

This fascination cross-germinates for me in my theater and film background. Before I was a writer, my primary creative outlet from age ten to thirty was theater, including work as a stage manager, director, choreographer, and producer. I love to mine the ways in which these performance-driven disciplines can inform my writing process.

Which is not to say that the two are thoroughly analogous. Performing arts have a visual component—a way of showing, versus telling—that prose doesn’t have. Prose, in turn, can take us inside a character’s head in a way that theater and film performances can’t.

But anywhere I can borrow from one discipline to inform the other, I want to know about it. For instance, I’d say that developing scenes, whether for the page or the stage, often revolves around the same questions:

What does my character want, and how can I best show that to the audience?

Or, put another way: How do I externalize the character’s internal experience?

All of this brings to mind a conversation I once had with a writer. She was struggling with plot, and specifically, the sense that it had lagged in the middle of her story and that nothing was happening. It’s a common issue for writers. I started my response with that most basic question:

Me: What does your character want?

Writer: She wants to be at peace.

Me: Yes, and…that’s fairly abstract. What, more specifically, does she want?

Writer: She wants to stop hurting.

Me: Yes, and…that’s what she doesn’t want. What is something that she does want?

Writer: She wants to ride at liberty. [This refers to a kind of saddle-free horseback riding, which figured into the plot of this writer’s story.]

Me: There it is.

Without refuting any of what this writer knew about her character — everything she said was true — I was prompting her toward something external that she could write toward; a desire for her character to act on as she was also pursuing those other, more abstract wants: to stop hurting, to be at peace.

From the perspective of plot, the “on camera” story here was the character’s pursuit of riding at liberty. That’s not to dismiss the importance (and necessity) of the character’s internal life, but it’s that externally focused desire, and plot, and action, through which the intangibles of character arc and theme are often communicated.

For me, the most frequent aha moments about how to externalize the internal in my writing have come from hearing my work read out loud by others and talking through those desires and actions.

That’s exactly what we do during my Theater Camp for Writers workshops. The bulk of our time is spent on scene work. Writers submit excerpts from their work in progress, and other workshop participants play the parts of the characters and narrators from those pages. It can offer a unique lens on the revision process, putting everyone directly inside the story and gaining insights from the readers who are living out those scenes in our workshop. It’s also informative for many writers to work on others’ submissions in this way as much as on their own.

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Ready to Try it Out? Join us for Theater Camp for Memoir Writers on Saturday, June 27. Only 10 seats available. No theater experience required!