It’s Friday and time for another episode in the That’s Not Me! saga.
This week’s author, Angela Wren, is also an actor. How does that affect her skills when creating characters and making decisions about their behaviour? Let’s have a peep behind the curtain.
That’s Not Me!
As a writer and as an actor, I can say quite definitely that none of the characters I’ve created on stage or on the page are me. I can be so specific because of the process I go through to create characters. It doesn’t matter which media I’m using.
I’ve been working on stage since I was child, and I’ve played a myriad of characters from a chicken in a play about Old MacDonald, to a Rat in the Pied Piper right up to Raksha, the wolf mother of Moglie in Jungle Book. I’ve played many human roles, too, in any number of productions from Roald Dahl’s The Twits (I was Mr Twit – and yes, I do mean Mr) to Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I played a seven-year old at the age of 42 and an eighty year-old at the age of 25. So, I’m only too well aware of how important it is to make the characters I play on stage appear real to the audience. In that situation I need only enough of myself – 10% – to keep me breathing, moving and speaking so that I can convey the scritpwriter’s words in the right way. Everything else, the costume, the make-up, the gait of the character, the mannerisms and the vocal quality are all the characters. When I’m waiting for my cue in the wings, I think myself into my character. That way I can be sure that at my first appearance in front of the audience, I’m my best version of the character I’m playing and, hopefully they will believe me to be the person in the script.
When I’m writing, I can see all my characters in my mind’s eye. I’m with them for every moment in the story. In a sense, then I’m both audience and actor. The great benefit of writing is that I can stop the action at any point and make my characters go back and do something again but in a different way. When I’m acting in front of a real live audience, that’s not possible! Working with my characters when I’m writing is so much easier than when I’m on stage. And there are no lines to learn – I just make them up as I go along!
But I do have to confess a couple of things. There are times when I’ve overheard a conversation on a bus or a train or in a café and I’ve committed it to memory. Those few words and phrases are then recycled and given to one of my characters. Similarly with my newest creactions, Alice Tomlinson and her dad. There are bits and pieces of conversation that took place between me and my dad that have remained in my mind and, finally, I’m finding opportunities to use a sentence here or a phrase there. But Alice is nothing like me, either physically or in her inner self. Just as Peter bears no resemblance to my real dad. But it is fascinating exploring the dynamics between them as I move through my current story – a full-length murder mystery that is set in central France.
You can meet Alice and her dad, already. They both appear in The Bookseller’s Secret Octavo, a short story that was published in an anthology called Autumn Paths. The third book in that series, Spring Paths, is due to be published quite soon and Alice and Peter make it onto the page in that collection, too. But there will be more about that in the coming weeks on my blog and my website. In the meantime, I’m going to get back to my desk with my fictional world and its people and get my story finished.
Author Bio
Angela Wren is an actor and director at a small theatre a few miles from where she lives in the county of Yorkshire in the UK. She worked as a project and business change manager – very pressured and very demanding – but managed to escape, and now she writes books and stories.
Her first published story was in an anthology created by ‘Ireland’s Own’ magazine in 2011. She also works with eight other northern writers to create the series of Miss Moonshine anthologies. Most recently, Angela has collaborated with eight Canadian/American writers to create the ‘Paths’ anthologies.
Her full-length novels are all set in France, where she likes to spend as much time as possible each year.
Blurb for Autumn Paths
Nine writers – Seasonal Collective – from both sides of the Atlantic, including best-selling and award-winning authors, have created this miscellany of stories.
These tales of family, mystery, intrigue, adventure, and suspense will take you across continents, through time and space in this world and others. With a linking theme of autumn, discover new landscapes, encounter new and intriguing characters, uncover secrets and lies, and witness the resolution of old enmities.
Take the first step on this roller-coaster of an emotional journey, and you won’t be disappointed.
Miriam Drori, Author 