*Insert Literary Blog Name Here* (noun): a small corner of the blagosphere dedicated to books, writing, and kidlit. Come for the book lists. Stay for the coffee.
Yesterday, we talked about authenticity in a nebulous sense - what it is, and why it’s important. Today’s post is about co-authorship, or building a relationship with your audience. [As Crouch is an actor and playwright, he speaks specifically about theater, though the same ideas carry into other aspects of fiction, too.]
A large part of Crouch’s theater philosophy revolves around the idea of acting and not acting. “I’m bored to the back teeth of watching actors act,” he says. “There’s a truth about actors – they have to do everything…and there’s no room for the audience left. Art is about making connections, the act of suggestion. If I suggest something is so, then it is so.”
So what exactly does the audience do?
“It’s an act of co-authorship,” says Crouch. In a play, “the idea is present but is given manifestation by a contract between the audience and the performance.” In Crouch’s one man play, “My Arm”, the driving idea is that the character (also named Tim Crouch) can’t lower his arm – said arm has been held above his head since he was a child. Despite the obvious idea that Crouch would sit on stage speaking with his arm above his head, he does not. Instead, his arm is down, by his side, the entire performance.
At one point in the story, Tim Crouch the character talks about a scar on his back. He turns around to show the audience the scar – the audience who know that Crouch has two normal arms – and most everyone leans forward to see it. “That’s a writer’s gold dust,” says Crouch. “The know, empirically, that it’s not my story…[but they] will things to happen. We will make things appear…between out eyes and our ears some miracle happens. Our eyes see a physical presence but our mind sees something else.”
Other examples of this co-authorship include metaphors and similes. “[ When I was done] I removed the adjectives from the manuscript. I didn’t want to do the work for you [the audience].” How can a narrative get by without adjectives? According to Crouch, it’s all about personal experience and visualization. At one point in “My Arm”, the character describes a low point in his life. Instead of saying “I really cried, and I never cry” or “I was really depressed, so I cried for the first time in ages” he says:
…not having cried for as long as I can remember I have now taken to crying like a newborn lamb in the rain.
This is an incredibly powerful image. Why? Because almost everyone can envision a newborn lamb, and the lamb’s lament. It immediately pulls the audience back to a place when they felt like a newborn lamb in the rain, creating a much more powerful emotional connection than “and then I really cried, and I never cry, like, ever”.
“If you forget the audience are going to do 90% of your work for you,” says Crouch, “then you’re in trouble. I think.”
So how do we create this sort of sincerity and suspension of disbelief in writing? A good first step is to consider the first person autobiography. We already know the story, and all the details, but “it’s very authentically an image,” says Crouch.
“[An image] created not by me, by by us.” The character I see as me, a writer with husband, small child, and a novel on the way – is tall, dark-haired, brown-eyed. The character you see might be red-haired, pale, and green-eyed, because that’s what writer suggests to you, or perhaps because you once knew a red-haired woman with a similar one-line bio. Of course, it’s hard to resist the temptation to tell the reader what a protagonist looks like in detail – it’s human nature to want to share our vision. But, when reading, “a reader brings the pages to life, otherwise they’re just papers”.
Building a relationship with readers, co-authoring, requires letting go. Like any venture involving two people, there’s an element of trust involved. Writers have to trust their reader to fill in the blanks, to get what’s going on – because that’s the most effective path to creating a suspension of disbelief. Why? Readers want to suspend disbelief. Readers want to get into the story, and see what you have to say. Banging them over the head with every little detail, leaving too few gaps, actually pulls a reader out of the story. And nobody wants that. (There’s a good example of this over at Livia’s blog, here.)
Today’s takeaway: Trust your readers, and trust your instincts and personal experience. Don’t tell your readers how your character feels (I felt depressed, so I cried). Hook into their personal experience, and let them do the work for you. It’s much more satisfying on both sides.
Getting Authentic with Tim Crouch, part I – authenticity.
Getting Authentic with Tim Crouch, part III – writing outside the box.
Getting Authentic with Tim Crouch, part IV – writing inside the box.
Do you have trouble trusting your readers? Why? How do you hook into a personal experience?
Part II of my Tim Crouch series – the co-authorship and between a playwright/writer and the audience. http://bit.ly/7Iqekv #writing #theaterReply – Quote
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Getting Authentic with Tim Crouch, part II ::
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[...] my last Tim Crouch post, I talked about co-authorship and the role of the audience and/or reader. Today, I’m getting a little deeper in again, with some of Crouch’s thoughts on actors, [...]