Think like an actor

Andrea Chalupa, a writer, journalist and TV producer, believes that acting can help a writer.

Writers can spend days, weeks holed up in a room, churning out words, not knowing if their work is any good—engaging, or just shallow “busy work.” Actors, on the other hand, have the benefit of the mirror, studying recordings of themselves, or the reaction of any sized audience to immediately know whether they’re being honest. In this regard, it’s better to be an actor than a writer. The instant feedback—communicating with the energy your spoken words, movements, and choices are creating—improve a craft faster than being confined to a desk and chair. On the rare occasion someone asks me for writing advice, I always say to take an acting class.

Shakespeare was an actor. 

And Charles Dickens too studied the craft and wrote his stories to be performed on stage. From an 1883 article published in the New York Times over a decade after his death, it is written of Dickens: “Nor could he ever relinquish his old fondness for the actor's art; for he scarcely did himself justice when he spoke of the stage as being to him but a means of getting money. 

He obtained great applause as an amateur actor, and he became famous as a public reader of his own books; his readings, in truth, closely resembling actings, or suggesting rather the readings of an actor than of an author." The stories he read on stage, the article says, had as many stage directions written on the pages as one would expect to find on the script of a play.

Something I learned at Reader's Digest, where dramas in real life were so important: In the construction of stories, even true stories, it helps to imagine the characters as actors on a stage. This will help you keep point of view and everything else straight. For example, characters not on stage  can't say anything. We don't know how they're reacting to the action or what they're thinking. You're writing what's on stage and only that.