Hey hey hey writers!!! Especially y'alls who are struggling to develop character or have white room/still character syndrome!!!
Look into Uta Hagen's acting techniques, specifically her 9 questions. I'm not kidding. She built off Stanislavski's techniques to help actors develop their characters and roles & bring that to the stage- specifically, and this is why I'm pushing Hagen specifically and not anyone else, their relationship with the set, props, other characters, setting (yes that's different from set), history and the play's plot, and how that changes how they act and speak. I have my textbook open I'll take some pictures.
If you need a transcript/image description I'll put it under the cut, they're a little blurry cause I'm bad at holding my phone... I know alt text is a thing but I don't want y'alls to have to scroll through a tiny box lmao.
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The lower part of a textbook page. The text reads:
Uta Hagen's acting exercises
[Out-of-transcript note: Most of these, with the exception of Three Entrances, are less useful in terms of writers, but you could make it work, especially for roleplay.]
Basic Object Exercise: Sometimes called "two minutes of daily life," this exercise requires the actor to replicate activities from their own daily routine in specific detail (think making breakfast or getting ready to go out). The goal of this exercise is to increase the actor's awareness of their un-observed behaviour.
Three Entrances: Starting offstage, the actor enters the environment of the scene. The actor's performance should answer three questions: What did I just do? What am I going to do? What is the first thing I want?
Immediacy: Hagen asked actors to search for a small object that they need. You can perform the exercise on a set or in your home. As you search, you should observe the behaviour and thoughts that arise as you authentically try to find something. The objective is to identify the thoughts, behaviours, and sensations you experience when you genuinely don't know the outcome, so you can use them on stage.
Fourth Side: This exercise starts with a phone call to a person you know. You should call them with a specific objective in mind. During the convention, Hagen wants you to focus on your surroundings and the specific objects that your eyes rest on. The purpose is to help actors observe how they interact with all dimensions of an enclosed physical space so they can recreate privacy on stage.
Endowment: this exercise is designed to help actors apply their observed behaviours to endow props with qualities that they cannot safely have on stage. Hot irons and sharp knives are typical examples. The Endowment excercise asks actors to believably treat objects on stage as though they have the qualities the actor needs in a scene.
Uta Hagen's exercises are her greatest gift to actors working today. She developed them between Broadway jobs to solve some acting problems she had never seen anyone tackle to her satisfaction. The result is that Hagen's exercises give actors a way to observe human behaviours and catalogue it so they can recall it onstage when useful in a role.
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Most of a textbook page. The image cuts off about 3 quarters of the way down the page. The text reads:
Uta Hagen's 9 Questions
Who am I? This question's answer includes all relevant details from name and age to physical traits, education, and beliefs.
What time is it? Depending on the scene, the most relevant measure of time can be the era, the season, the day, or even the specific minute.
Where am I? This answer covers the country, town, neighbourhood, room, or even the specific part of the room.
What surrounds me? Characters can be surrounded by anything from weather to furnishings, landscape or people.
What are the given circumstances? Given circumstances include what has happened, what is happening and what will happen to a character.
What are my relationships? Relationships can be with the other characters in the play, inanimate objects, or even recent events.
What do I want? Wants can be what the character desires in the moment, or in the overall course of the play. [Out-of-transcript note: I recommend figuring out both for writing, the former multiple times for whenever it changes! Outside of Hagen's technique, we call it objective and superobjective.]
What is in my way? This is the actor's chance to understand the obstacles the character must react to and overcome.
What do I do to get what I want? In Hagen's teaching, "do" means physical action.
Uta Hagen's nine questions help actors develop the granular details of their character's backstory. The questions come from Hagen's first book, "Respect for Acting," though in her later book, "A Challenge for the Actor," she condensed her original nine questions into six steps.
Uta Hagen's revised six steps to building a character are:
Who am I?
What are the circumstances?
What are my relationships?
What do I want?
What is my obstacle?
What do I do to get what I want?
Later in her life, Hagen distances herself from her first book and encouraged her students to rely on her second book, which she felt was clearer about her concepts. Both books are popular with acting teachers and students today, however. Hagen's questions and steps are the foundation for all of her acting exercises. Whether you rely on the nine questions or the six steps depends on personal preference.
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Personally I like the 9 questions more, but like the book says, personal preference! So yeah, if you're a writer, try some of these out for your characters. :]
your twenties are Also about discovering that you’re not a bad person in all the ways you believed you were but you’re a bad person in completely new and exciting ways
the way lord huron sings about immortality and reviving the dead is so enamouring to me,,,, the speaker of the man who lives forever refusing to believe he'll ever die when he has so much love and life in him,,, la belle fleur sauvage content to spend the ages enjoying the wind and sun and rain,,, the ecstasy of "i came back from the edge!" i mean, have you HEARD the TRIUMPH of dead man's hand? this entire verse??
this shit makes me want to woop and holler with joy. like YES!!! LOOK DEATH IN THE EYE AND SAY NO! LIVE FOREVER! our lives ARE too short and i would LOVE to step out of my grave and walk into an endless night.
Chat I regressed right back to being a moody teenager now that I am home for Christmas. All I do is read fanfiction and leave my room to gather some snacks in a hurry to bring back to my lair.
brooding men who cannot communicate their feelings if their life depended on it are only hot when they're fictional. if i have to deal with one in real life i will curse him and pray for his downfall every night before i go to bed
It's because the writer communicates their feelings for them. If people wanna pull that off in real life they need to hire a guy to walk around behind them narrating.
"save me, substance abuse!" i cry. before you can moralize to me about the dangers of addiction, a noble and powerful steed gallops into the room - my horse whom i have named "substance abuse". you learn an important lesson about making assumptions. i snort a line off its back
Bro I fucking love the DB Cooper case nothing about this whole situation sounds real. None of the passengers on the plane realized they were being hijacked until the plane landed two hours after it was supposed to and the fbi showed up with suitcases full of money. The note about the bomb almost went unnoticed because the flight attendant thought she was being sexually harassed so she didn't read it. One of the main suspects was the first trans woman in Washington to have a sex change operation. A reporter who was so dead set on his suspect that he brought him to court was so upset about being wrong that he went catatonic and was treated with electroshock therapy and it WORKED. There's been multiple "I'm DB Cooper" death confessions. He never even SAID his name was DB Cooper. Either he got away with a million bucks in today's money and the most iconic and harmless crime American history or he impaled himself on a pine tree while falling a zillion miles an hour in the dark while clutching duffel bags full of cash and either option is equally hilarious. He wore a clip on tie. He committed an act of sky piracy. What in the fucking looney toons
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