CRAFT & SPIRIT

CRAFT AND SPIRIT

Ideas Grow in Visits

You wake up in the middle of the night. You get a glass of water and use the restroom, but when you get to your bed you can’t fall asleep again. Something has captured your mind’s eye. Your eyes are open, but whatever you see has lost all focus as you drift off on a winding tale. An idea has surfaced. Grabbing you by the hand it now leads you further and further down a rabbit hole of the idea. Characters enter and exit, time leaps in different directions, someone says, “Well done, what a great idea” and you can’t help but smile a little seeing the “you” experiencing this. This tunnel of imagery with no context of time or space is the personality, the life, the soul of the idea that initially sparked you on this path.

Every idea is a soul, a living being. Yet, its language extends beyond the language you speak, it utilizes images, sounds, tastes, and smells to translocate you somewhere entirely different. Placing you in that space is only the beginning. It’s all a setup to communicate the next portion of the idea. But to get to that phase, you must visit.

This is all a personification of an idea. Creatives everywhere have tried to grasp an understanding of how ideas work, being an important asset to their craft. Ideas seem very much like visitors in the least expected moments. An unknown force. People, singular or plural, vying to be heard.

When the stars align to where an idea introduces itself to you, there’s only as much room in the conversation as you’ve allowed yourself to have for that idea. The idea will end when you’ve reached your capacity for it. In contrast, the idea could be one image, or it could be an entire conversation in your head between two or many people. The idea ends when it has completed what it wished to say in that time. Yet we keep leaving so much on the table. Just because the conversation ended on the first visit doesn’t mean there’s not more to be said.

Ideas are a chance for a connection between a soul and a human being. Yet, like all relationships and connections, you’ll never find out if a match or connection exists without showing up, without visiting.

When an idea comes, be present. Then write it down. Like catching dreams in a bedside notebook, the more you practice the more you catch. It’s catch and release, but you must keep showing up to the water. David Lynch, writer and director of Mulholland Drive, says, “I love the idea of catching ideas. And they’re out there, millions and millions of ideas, and we don’t know them until they enter the conscious mind.”

The more initiative on your end to learn the language of ideas, the more the ideas will speak to you, and the more you will be able to communicate and collaborate with these ideas.

In the chapter “Imagination and Incorporation of Image” of To the Actor, Chekhov elaborates on the training of the imagination and in equal parts, concentration. A goal is to confidently get to a place where when seeing the images in your mind’s eye, you also receive the sensations of the the psychology of the images and circumstances. “The more developed your imagination through systematic exercises, the more flexible and fleeting it becomes. Images will follow images with increasing rapidity; they will form and vanish too hastily. This may result in your losing them before they can kindle your feelings. You must possess enough willpower […] what is this additional willpower? It is the power of concentration.”

Concentration in tandem with your imagination also takes systematic and disciplined exercise, an exercise that’s easier when in active collaboration. When an idea appears to you “To complete themselves, to reach the degree of expressiveness that would satisfy you, they will require your active collaboration.” To actively collaborate is to show up and to have a conversation.

I’ll utilize my script for example, it’s on my mind as I visit it almost every day. But that’s exactly the point. Through these visits, we speak and we communicate and we are in true collaboration with the idea. There’s all sorts of strange conversations the idea and I will have. At times I’ll speak to myself as different characters in my script, or conversing with the idea itself, the idea taking on a posh British accent. Other times I may simply draw something in my notebook to clarify a shot, or I’ll spend the visit crossing out grammatical errors in my script.

Every time I’m playing a character I pay my visits as best I can every single day. I say hello, I speak to them, and I listen to them. The more I do so, the more I’m rewarded with a greater understanding of the character. It’s a form of trust that is created through communication.

Sometimes I don’t find anything that day. Sometimes I get to the root of my character's desire and/or I find something I never expected which changes how I play that character. I discovered a remarkable amount of shame for the Beast in Beauty and the Beast. For Zach in A Chorus Line, I discovered an insatiable desire for perfection but not just for himself, for someone else. For the character I’m developing now, I am getting a sense that he seeks a range of control that appears as comfort or safety.

All of these were discovered in visits, in conversations and in collaborations with the initial idea. Because I wouldn’t move anywhere unless I got up and moved. Every morning I must cast my line, and wait patiently. While I wait, there are many things I can think about in the meantime.