5 CHAPTER FIVE

Characterization and Method Writing

What is it I want?

What am I willing to do to get it?

These are the central questions an actor asks herself while doing scene work. It involves action, verbs, seeking your goals, and these tactics shift during a scene, adjustments are made to respond to and perhaps challenge what your scene partner is giving you.

Writers can adapt this technique to their prose to give scenes levels, to increase tensions between characters, to move more freely and dramatically between moments of connect and disconnect.

In almost every chapter of Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House, he encourages artists to avoid the over-determined. His chapter on narrative dysfunction seeks to give characters agency; his emphasis on defamiliarization is on finding the “moderately strange” within the ordinary; he dislikes the preponderance of epiphanic endings because they become too formulaic, an easy narrative solution for tired writers; and counterpointed characters should never represent ideas but exist as fully realized people, bumping up against each other and eliciting honest responses.

Actors live in subtexts. They want to make the “hot” choice, the unexpected within the expected. The best performances are never over-scripted but full of complex, shifting tonalities.

Sean Penn lives truthfully in imaginary circumstances. A proponent of the Method, Penn said on Inside the Actor’s Studio in 1999, that his acting approach seeks the “uncommon thought in the common matter.” Penn called up a poem by Charles Bukowski in which a young seven-year old boy is looking from a train window, watching the Pacific Ocean rush by. The boy utters to a traveling companion, “It’s not beautiful.” The man, taken aback, realizes for the first time that he too doesn’t find it beautiful. We’re conditioned to believe that oceans are beautiful. But actors break through our conditioning to transcend the all-too typical and find the new response, the unpredictable that is also somehow inevitable. That’s living truthfully, not following the all too familiar. Penn, indirectly, is reinforcing Baxter’s notions of defamiliarization.

So, how does a writer take an acting approach to his scene work and let his characters follow impulses and freely breathe? Ron Carlson has brilliantly argued that dialogue isn’t just exposition, a means of moving a story forward. Dialogue is the very stuff of individualism, allowing each character to have his/her moment free of the controlling voice of the narrator/author. Carlson believes that characters speak from their own place and this can take a story in unprecedented directions. Invest in that freedom.

I have written so many stories in which characters surprised me by saying something through dialogue that took the plot or the moment in a fresh, new direction. Be open to those surprises. Stay in uncertainties and listen to the choices your characters will help you make. Explore and enjoy the shifting tones that dynamic scene work inhabits.

The Art of Subtext and the Three S’s

Staging

This according to Charles Baxter involves “putting characters in specific strategic positions in the scene so that some unvoiced nuance is revealed.”

Imagine that you, the writer, are a director of a play, and you are using blocking for two reasons: to reveal the inner life of your characters and to keep your audience engaged. Does one character move toward the other on a given line or action? Does the other move away or cross to an object in the room? Does one character try to touch the other character, to help land a line? Or does that character touch the other while stating the opposite of what she means? Again, Baxter on staging: “It shows us how the characters are behaving, and it shows us what they cannot say through the manner in which they say what they can say.”

Stakes

Characters want things: respect, love, to be understood, happiness. Literary stories are often about desire. This is what creates urgency. Acting Coach Sanford Meisner defined acting as “living truthfully in imaginary circumstances.” Living truthfully involves being present and following authentic impulses. For the writer, give your characters the space to live and freely breathe.

Moreover, the space they inhabit is fraught with “life and death stakes,” either real or figuratively. Losing a job; getting a medical diagnosis; discovering your spouse loves someone else.

Sometimes characters want the wrong things. George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life wants to be a great man, to make his mark on the world, and fails, initially, to realize the more quiet gifts his hard work and generosity have bestowed upon the inhabitants of Bedford Falls.

Sounds

In Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night James Tyrone and his wife Mary seem to have long parallel monologues in which they aren’t really listening to one another; similarly Jamie and Edmund have moments where the younger brother listens but Jamie is off somewhere else, investing in wallowing regrets and self-hatred. Their dialogue is full of “unheard melodies.”

These disparate melodies can be a powerful tool for writers, what Baxter calls “non-listening, selective listening, and parallel monologues.” Self-absorption can also be present. Richard Belzer as Detective Munch on Homicide: Life on the Street was a character who enjoyed the sounds of his own words, as if everything is pithy and brilliant and deserving of our attention. When he speaks he wants strangers to eavesdrop and revel in his cleverness.

Beats, Objectives, Tactics and On the Waterfront (1954)

Beats is a Method acting term for breaking down the units of action in a scene. Beats can shift word to word. “Yeah, yeah” can have a beat change in the midst of the utterance if the first word’s intentions differ from the second (say surprise versus resignation). A single word, such as “fantastic” can contain a beat if the melody of the word changes in the midst of its utterance (say from celebration to irony between the syllables). Most often when an actor marks the beats on a script, she’s indicating shifts in emphasis, new tactics and objectives to be explored. She’s building emotional levels that continue to probe the key questions, “what is it I want and what am I willing to do to get it?”

Many stories fail because they lack genuine honesty or surprise. Instead of characters playing tactics and a writer discovering all of the shifting tonalities, beats in the dialogue, limpid stories are full of flat scenes where nothing new or surprising is emerging.

Great actors never flat-line, they find varied levels, moments of syncopation playing up against a standard 4/4 beat. Nobody followed an impulse better than Marlon Brando. He was brilliant at choosing the right expression, gesture, and response for the right moment. In a tender scene from On the Waterfront, Terry Malloy (Brando) walks with Edie (Eva Marie Saint) out front of a church on the mean streets of Hoboken, New Jersey. He’s somewhat shy and retreating, unsure of what to say. And then, in the midst of the conversation, Edie accidentally drops her glove and Brando picks it up, sits on a swing, removes bits of lint from the glove’s fingers, and places it on his hand.

A “rehearsed accident” (Saint dropping the glove) turns into a magical impulse (a man wearing a woman’s glove). Brando slides his hand inside her glove, leaving a personal trace within an object of clothing that isn’t his. It’s as if he’s holding hands without holding hands. This is an inspired choice that shows Terry’s tenderness, vulnerability, and repressed desire to hold her. And from there the dialogue becomes gentler between them, more poignant.

Let us slow down and look at the scene more closely now, at several beats, and how the actors’ choices and Budd Schulberg’s dialogue serve up dynamic complexities, shifts in objectives and emotional levels, that point a way for writers to write better scenes.

Terry and Edie’s scene in On the Waterfront

The given circumstances: Malloy has been asked by the mob to keep an eye on Father Barry’s protest movement with the waterfront workers. Malloy finds himself attracted to Edie (Eva Marie Saint), but feels tremendous guilt in being complicit in her brother’s death. His objective is to find out just what she and the Father are organizing and to keep her distracted, directed away from the truth. Edie, a sheltered woman, desires to avenge her brother’s death and to take her fight, with the help of the priest, to the streets. She wants answers from Terry and often has to press the issue, pushing away his various moments of subtle deflection (“Well, they play pretty rough around here,” he says). However, she too finds herself, almost against her will, attracted to the ex-prizefighter and his child-like innocence. And what we have is a love scene.

Edie pushes past Terry’s armor, his apparent mask of nonchalance, directly asking him, “which side are you with?” Terry smiles with an abashed joker grin and says, “Me, I’m with me.” He once again makes light of the violence that surrounds them, but this time his efforts fail because of the intrusion of a local “juice head” who mumbles on and hints about Terry’s involvement in Joey’s death. “You remember,” the rummy cryptically intones. Beat. This is the scene’s emotional lynchpin. Even the loose change Terry tosses the rummy’s way doesn’t stop him from withering Terry with the cutting, “You don’t buy me. You’re still a bum.”

Terry’s response to this comment creates a major beat change. His emotional levels shift from nonchalance to hurt and a need to seek Edie’s affirmation: “Who’s calling me a bum.” What’s emerging here is his desire to be respected and a fear that maybe the “juice head” speaks the truth. Terry wants Edie’s acceptance and love and that will be his objective throughout the remainder of the scene.

Edie slides her tactics back into interrogation mode with “What did that man mean just now,” and Terry deflects with his “Don’t pay no attention” repetitions, and then once again shifts tactics by telling her not to be afraid of him, “I won’t bite ya,” and expressing interest in her ambitions. It’s at this moment that he picks up her scattered glove and places it on his hand while finding out about her sheltered past; her training with the nuns; and her desire to be a teacher. He praises her ambitions trying to soothe and win her trust: “A teacher. That’s very good. Personally, I admire brains. My brother Charlie was a very brainy guy. Had a couple of years of college.”

His compliment, however, is turned back against him, as Edie issues a challenge, indirectly chastising his allegiances to the waterfront mob. “It isn’t just brains. It’s how you use them.”

In good scene work, onstage or on the page, the moments vary between connect and disconnect, moments of understanding, communion versus moments of challenge and hurt.

Terry acquiesces, giving in slightly to her challenge. “Yeah, I get your thought,” he replies, eyes somewhat faraway. Failing to win her trust through compliments about teachers, he changes tactics, creating different beats, returning to their shared past, and teases her, describing how her hair “looked like a hunk of rope” and how she had wires on her teeth and everything. “You were really a mess.” She responds to his gentle put-downs with action, removing the glove from his hand, re-indicating a desire to leave, and he issues a halting apology: “I just mean to tell you that you grew up very nice.”

After taking back the glove, Edie once again looks offscreen right, and exits the frame. Terry, uncertain, wonders if perhaps she too sees him as a bum.

This is the scene and the film’s super-objective: self-respect.

How will she respond? Will she connect with him or push him away with words or silent action?

Desperately, he calls her, trying to halt her movement, his voice climbing an emotional register as he pleads, “You don’t remember me do you?” Beat.

Finally, he’s broken through to her.

Admissions by actors are almost always powerful moments. They make us all vulnerable: performers, viewers, readers. They strip us actors of our armor and disarm our fellow actors too. Terry’s vulnerability here is on full display here. He drops his arm and reveals a fear of being invisible. This brings about an equally vulnerable admission from Edie: “I remember you the first moment I saw you.” The tension is broken, he jokes about his nose, and the two connect as he crosses over to her and she offers up her philosophy about the need for teachers to treat troubled youngsters with more “patience” and “kindness.” He needles her for her innocence and indirectly asks for a date. “What for?” she questions. With an inarticulate shrug he responds, “I don’t know.”

The beginning of their love is established in this “getting to know you” scene. Terry and Edie are vulnerable and open, letting genuine feelings in. For Terry the scene moves from denials; deflections; his need for approval (am I a bum?); his desire to win her by praising, teasing, holding onto the glove, and reminiscing about the past; an apology; his making himself vulnerable and partially known; and finally, rather clumsily, asking her on a date. For Edie the scene moves from a desire to leave; interrogate; chastise and challenge; accept his apology; leave; admit a certain fondness for him; and question the “date” while leaving the possibility still open. She doesn’t say no.