(This post starts an occasional series on the connections I see between writing and teaching or performing drama. As always, your thoughts are appreciated.)

Before I get into how working with drama has helped my writing, I’d like to recount how I ended up getting involved in drama.  I was a writer that hadn’t written much of anything in twenty years.  With the drama teacher at my school leaving, I threw out an idea that I could write a play with a group of high school students, and then we could produce it for the stage in the following semester. The powers that be said ‘yes’ so I began to realize that now was the time to try out writing once again.

Trust me, it was an exercise in experimentation, not expertise. We muddled through some ideas, put together a rough plot-line and ended up writing “What I Wouldn’t Give … for a Monkey Love Potion.”  As the title might suggest, it was long on silly jokes and physical gags, but short on plot and substance. The performance went over well enough that I decided to do another play the following year.  We produced a musical called “A Tad of Trouble”, set in 1903, where a mute boy is given the gift of song by his guardian angel if he promises to right the wrongs in his life. I’m actually quite proud of this one. It was both moving and funny when produced for the stage, and it proved to have a lasting message. This one remains unpublished. I definitely want to re-stage it in the future, and I want to publish it. It’s worthy.

By this point, I had gotten the writing bug.  So over the next couple of years I continued producing new dramatic works including “Take Two” (another musical), “Spy Blue” (the tragic and moving spy thriller), and “Life with Stewart” (the poignant and funny drama about   stardom and hidden family secrets).

I threw myself headlong into drama, not understanding the terminology and not being formally trained in drama, but I learned that I have a knack for slowly working through the threads of a dramatic performance and eventually weaving it together in a cohesive and meaning work.

Then this past year,  I asked if we could bring the Theater Arts into the regular classroom, and I was fortunate to be assigned to teach “Intro to Theater Arts” for the first time.

This is when I began to panic.  Working through a script and putting together a performance is one thing, but teaching the ins and outs of method acting and theatrical production is certainly something completely different.

So I hit the books, trying to understand what acting really was and how to approach it in an effective manner. I quickly learned there were all different types of schools of thoughts concerning acting, but the one thing I remembered in my education classes is not to get too hung up on any one method or ideology concerning the teaching of anything. The advice was this: USE EVERYTHING. So I tried to find a resource that approached acting and theater in a level-headed manner.

I came across a book by acting teacher Larry Moss which really struck a cord with me.  Larry broke down acting into very concrete parts which can and must be analyzed in order to understand the character and what they are trying to achieve.  This is where I began to see a useful connection between teaching drama and writing. For as I began to understand how to take apart a scene and understand the characters, I began to also see how the writer of the play purposefully constructed that character.

How do you take apart a scene?  Every character has an objective. It’s what they want or hope to accomplish in the scene.  You have the obstacle. What is preventing the character from achieving that objective. You have the stakes. How important is it for that character to achieve the objective?

I’ve enjoyed taking these simple steps and applying it to my characters in my own writing. It is a useful exercise. If the stakes are high, do the words and actions of the character prove it? Do they match the stakes or do they let the scene fizzle and let down the readers?

I’ll give an example from my own writing in another post.  But keep in mind: objective, obstacles, stakes. Every literary character has them.

Next up in the drama & writing series: Superobjective