Secrets of Writing: Acting

No motion should be wasted in a story. Nothing a character does should be without a purpose. How people move, talk, breathe, gesture, tells us a lot about them. Body language is important. So is posture. So is the way people hold or manipulate objects.

How people act and dress is a very strong visual indicator for the audience when they assess a character. Our goal should be to minimize the amount of dialog we need to use in a story. So you want to use the appearance and actions of the characters to do some of the work for you.

Comics have an extremely limited amount of space to tell a story in. You have to keep the amount of copy in a story brief. You have to squeeze the maximum impact out of each panel. That doesn’t leave you much room for excess.

Acting can help you save words and show us what kind of character we’re dealing with.

Acting in Comics

Comics is a static visual medium. You don’t have movement. You don’t have sound. We can’t deal with the subtleties of human voices very effectively, or inflection. So we have to rely on tricks like gestures, posture, dress, and certain semiotics which we will discuss later.

When writing a scene with a character, you are writing a series of still pictures of actions, either talking, punching, smoking, thinking, flying, drinking, crying, sleeping, whatever. Each snapshot has the power to tell the audience something about that character.

If they’re sleeping, we can find out if they snore. If they’re thinking, what kind of expression is on their face? If they’re talking, what kind of mannerisms do they use? If someone is talking to them, do they look distracted? Do they show rapt attention? Do they look worried? Everything single shot should reveal something to us, advance the story in some way. Otherwise, it’s just filler.

A comic story is a distillation of the most critical moments that happened to those characters. You have to cut out all the boring stuff. Every panel has to serve a purpose. Every line of dialog needs to crackle with meaning, humor, wit, character, etc. Every gesture, expression, action, needs to have weight.

You do this by creating meaning through acting. It doesn’t hurt to take a few acting classes if they are available in your area. Learn how actors express their inner thoughts through gesture. Read books on body language. Find ways to use props as a form of expression.

You can get a lot of mileage out of ordinary objects.

Freudian Slips

This term is usually reserved for verbal gaffes, but you can also reveal a lot about someone through their body language. Especially if their body language is different than what they’re saying. You can tell the audience a whole lot of things without dialog, through subtext.

For example, a man idly doodles while talking on the phone about some boring business. But their doodles are full of words and images that suggest death and pain. Or maybe a woman is playing hard to get, but she sits with her legs uncrossed and her hands resting suggestively on her thighs.

(Insert Art examples: A man says to a friend: “Hey, I loved what you did the other day!” but he has his arms crossed when he says it.)

The verbal gaffe is one where someone says the wrong word in a sentence, and this suggests what is really on the character’s mind. For example, a man says to his girlfriend: “No, I don’t want to sleep with him...I mean, her.” It could have been shown earlier that a gay friend of his has made a pass at him and he’s not sure how he feels about it.

(Art insert: A woman at a Starbucks coffee joint says to the man behind the counter: “I’d like a decaf cocaine, please.” The man replies: “We only serve caffine here.” Panel 2: The woman looks embarrassed: “I mean a decaf coffee. Sorry!” Panel 3: Close up: She looks embarrassed and thoughtful. thought balloon: “This is getting out of control. I need to watch what I say!”

There are all sorts of methods to inform the audience subtly about what’s going on in your character’s heads without resorting to turgid thought balloons or captions. Keep that in mind when you write a scene. It adds realism and depth.

REMEMBER: Acting can save you from writing dialog.

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