you're not in your body, honey

i've been watching a lot of actors' training lately, sitting in on a class taught by jean shelton. she's an amazing teacher, with a finely tuned b.s. detector and a fantastic sense of how to debug performance issues her students are having.

one issue that comes up over and over is the problem of being "in your head" when you're trying to act, which results in, well, trying to act (which usually reads as false and strange to an audience).

the trick, it would seem, is to get out of your head and "in your body," and just act. sort of like throwing yourself at the ground and missing. or, to quote yoda:

do! or do not. there is no try.

now i've been resisting the idea of "method" writing for a solid 10 years, maybe 15. i really don't like the idea that i should have to experience or feel something to write about it (um, ouch). plus, there's the problem of glossing over the left-brain work--without being able to work "in your head," you're going to churn out pages of mush, emotive but incoherent, and probably self-indulgent to boot. but there are obvious parallels between what works for me as a writer and strasberg's method.

it's more in what doesn't work. the head space that's death to an actor (i remember it all too well the few times i've been pushed onto a stage) is the worst possible place to be if you're trying to write even a decent sentence.

so what do you do when you're stuck in the wrong part of your head and you've got to get to work? actors have all sorts of exercises to get back into their bodies, but apart from a few "writing coaches" out there who aren't giving away any secrets, there doesn't seem to be many people trying to use stanislavsky to write. why?