Week 6: Traumatic ways to develop characters

Working From the Outside In and Learning to access my Genius Zone.

My loyal followers! I have been on a bit of a detour in my journey to becoming a screenwriter. I have been reading and writing and doing a lot of thinking, but not much worth sharing with you guys. So, I have been pretty schtum on substack lately.

Since I gave up the Screenwriting MA I have felt a bit lost and have been taking some advice from my mentors like the wonderful Richard Walter - also a substack writer. I read somewhere that Quentin Tarantino said that he never took any screenwriting classes; he only took acting classes. So, taking that advice I have been doing an acting class at City Lit in London and it’s the best.

Except this week it was a bit odd, to be honest with you. I was a bit odd, to tell the truth. On my way to class I had in mind a podcast I had just heard on the subject of the ‘genius zone’ by Guy Hendrick. He’s not someone I would usually come across, and I really don’t believe in geniuses, but he was being interviewed by one of my gurus, Nicholas Wilton whose ‘Art to Life’ program helped me through the pandemic. I have a lot of time for Nick — check him out. Anyway, this Guy guy was telling Nick all about how we can all achieve our best by getting into the ‘genius zone’ mentally when we are doing our work. It is a place above the merely excellent and you have to allow yourself to get there largely by letting go of the blocks — that’s probably a very crude paraphrase. Anyway, as I got to class on Monday I was thinking:

I am going to work in my genius zone. I am not going to allow barriers of fear of criticism from others, or imposter syndrome, or not being good enough or any of those other little mind tricks to get in my way. I am going to dwell in that genius zone for acting class and see what happens. Just play it out.

And with this mantra in my head I go to class. Do you see the dangers? Well, really I didn’t.

You know from my previous post that I am having to concentrate hard on developing interesting, dynamic characters for my writing, this is a bit of a weakness for me. So, when the teacher announces we are working on creating characters ‘from the outside in’ I am pretty psyched about this. We all like a new gismo in the toolbox, right? So our wonderful teacher takes us through a series of exercises where we had to embody certain characteristics: walk in a certain way; develop particular postures and sets of mannerisms to work towards developing a character. All’s good. I’m pretty into it. I don’t know if I am in the genius zone but I am not really giving a shit what other people think. Well, I am like that a lot of the time anyway and acting class is no exception; I pretty well go for it. Because, why else bother?

Anyway, this is all by way of building to doing some impromptu ‘hot seating’ of characters we make up on the spot. For those of you unfamiliar with this cruel acting class exercise, the idea is that one person sits in the ‘hot seat’ in front of their classmates and they have to answer questions, in character. You get to develop the character as you go along and it is a kind of improvisational story telling. The rest of the class are both ‘audience’ and ‘interrogators’ as they ask you questions to find out who you really are. They might ask your age, relationship status, work experiences and so on; you get the idea. The teacher asks me to go first. I am happy to oblige. I am a genius, after all.

And then this character comes — Jennifer-Joan. She is wild; She is scared and scary; She is a terrible flirt. At the time I don’t know where she comes from but afterwards I realize she is partly based on someone I met in LA who took an instant dislike to me simply because I had had an affair with a married man. Go figure. Judgey or what? Anyway, suffice to say I don’t care for her much. So the character of Jennifer-Joan is one third her; one third Blanche DuBois and one third the London pub bar flirt who lives inside me. These three facets work to create this terrific character. And I went for it. I was fully playing her up and flirting with everyone before I even sat down and they began to ask questions in the normal way.

Then the weird started. One of the guys got up out of his seat and walked up to me. A big no no. He started to berate me and tell me off. Really going for me and wagging his finger in my face telling me (or Jennifer-Joan) that I couldn’t do that. That I was out of order and he was ready to take me down a peg or two. I actually was so frightened that I blanked on what he actually said. The tone was aggressive, scolding and very frightening. I felt a bit lost, like I wasn’t in the safe space of the acting room any more. The ‘me’ was struggling with the me who was being Jennifer-Joan.

I thought: “What would Jennifer-Joan do?”

Answer: Probably cry.

I asked myself: “What would I do?”

Answer: Probably cry.

I didn’t cry. Then another classmate got up from her chair and she, too, began joining in. But she took it somewhere else completely. She was making out I was a child and she was talking down to me, infantalizing me. She was talking to me about a pet or something and trying to get me to stroke it. That really freaked me out: I was trying to do sexy and she’s going child. I had two people right in my face trying to pull me in two different directions neither of which I wanted to go to. And all I was doing was getting in my genius zone and creating what I thought was an interesting character. I felt like they were assaulting Jennifer-Joan and me. I froze.

The teacher stopped it and gave us a little chat about what to do if feel uncomfortable. We abandoned the hot seating as a whole class and carried on in small groups. But I was feeling a bit wounded by it. Was it because I was in my genius zone or was that just a coincidence? Was it about me or was it about Jennifer-Joan? Do people have a right to be so aggressive to you in class?

I had an art teacher once who told me that you don’t want other people in the class looking at your work and admiring it — you want people looking away and being afraid to look at it because it’s so far beyond their reach. Your work needs to be so good the rest of the class won’t even look at it. Had I got to that place?

At one level, though, I feel like I let my genius out of the box and I got seriously schooled. Thinking about it rationally it was probably just that they weren’t aware of the rules of the game and overstepped the mark in their enthusiasm to join in. There were a dozen other people in the class who didn’t do that.

I feel very sorry for Jennifer-Joan now. She has certainly earned a place in one of my scripts. And there is no way she is going to put up with that kind of shit. Maybe I have learned more from Quentin Tarantino than I know. Because Jennifer-Joan is going to be one bad-ass chick. Watch this space…..

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Thanks for reading

Jane