THE DOCTOR IS IN

STAR (?) QUALITY

A number of my clients and friends are fine writers who have difficulty either getting published at all, or getting published at the level their writing deserves. They accept that they are working in a crowded and highly competitive field. What rankles is the knowledge that writers who are less talented and less serious often seem to have an easier time. It's not fair, they protest.

It isn't fair. And I would resent this phenomenon on my own behalf, as well as theirs, if I hadn't benefited from it in a different arena.

Here is the thing. I used to get a lot more attention for my acting than I deserved. It's not that I was a dabbler: I was talented and serious, and professional and conscientious. But I worked with people who were more gifted than I was--who immediately grasped concepts that I had to plod to--and who devoted their free time to seeing plays, reading books on technique, and talking and thinking about the theater, while I...didn't. I loved seeing plays but I also loved reading novels, hiking, writing stories, and going to parties with non-theatrical friends. I read the major texts, but often they bored me--there was no plot, no dramatic conflict. I thought about a lot of other things besides theater. And I'm sure this showed in my work. I was also physically clumsy, and though I took movement classes to try to correct the problem, I never threw myself into them, and I never achieved half the physical grace of many of my fellow actors. Yet people liked to watch me. Teachers praised and encouraged me, and forgave me transgressions my more talented peers couldn't get away with. And it drove my fellow students nuts. I heard about it, believe me. And I couldn't argue with it.

I sometimes thought it was because I was pretty. But it wasn't that. I was nice-looking, in a girl-next-door way, but the acting world was filled with fabulously beautiful people. And I didn't get cast in gorgeous parts--I was always the friend, the sister, the frazzled secretary, the comic relief, the foil to the beautiful ingenue--so clearly, I wasn't seen as a great beauty. Besides, something similar is happening now, in my voice class, and though my loved ones tell me I am irresistibly attractive, I turned 58 on Monday, and, well, you know. So, no, it's not that.

I was talking about this with a friend who occasionally casts plays, and he agreed: "We often don't use the most talented people who audition, even if they're physically right for the part. Someone can come in and drop lines, bump into furniture--but they have a quality, a reality. You feel for them, or with them. Those tend to be the ones we want."

I don't think I have this gift in regular life--or if I do, it translates differently. I don't walk into a room and make a big impression. But my favorite acting teacher used to say that I had a "transparent" quality, that all of my thoughts and feelings showed in my face and body language, and that made me interesting and exciting to watch. He once told me that I was the only person he had ever seen who actually blushed onstage. So it may be that the same attributes that "read" as thin-skinnedness and absence of coolness in ordinary life are transformed into "transparency," expressiveness, and spontaneity onstage. Or maybe it's something else.

Whatever it is, it is absolutely, definitely unfair. And I want to figure out how to get some of it into my writing.

Susan O'Doherty, Ph.D.,is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself,she specializes in issues affecting writers and other creative artists. She is the author of Getting Unstuck without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity(Seal, 2007). Her Career Coach column appears every Monday on Inside Higher Ed's Mama, Ph.D. blog, and she is a regular monthly panelist on Litopia After Dark. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.

 

Comments

[Susan Messer]

Interesting, Dr. Sue. Re: figuring out how to get "it" into your writing though, it sounds like something that is either there or it isn't. Something completely natural to the artist. A lot to think about.

[lisa peet]

Maybe it's not so much the quality of those "unfairly" distributed skills you want to invite into your writing as the FEELING of having them -- the sensation of being a little bit gifted, of having something come to you without a struggle. Not that that will make it so, but I always think of it as what they call in AA "acting as if."

I'm a writer and artist but have a similar situation with, of all things, specialty baking. I pastry cheffed just long enough to know that it's nothing I want to do professionally for the rest of my life, but in the meantime I swanned up through the ranks. I have no doubt I could have pursued it with a fair amount of success if I'd chosen to. But I didn't -- it turns out what I love is what I have to work at really really hard. Maybe that's why I love it, I don't know. But what I try and take from that discrepancy is the memory of doing something instinctively well. It's hard to put into words, but sometimes when I'm struggling with a particularly gnarly paragraph or image I'll stop and just imagine myself in the kitchen, knowing exactly where I'm going to turn, what I'm going to pick up next, what I want something to look like and having the gift to make it come out exactly so... It doesn't always work. In fact, it doesn't work a lot of the time. But as a flash meditation, something to calm my brain and remind me that yes, I DO know what success feels like, it's not a bad exercise.

[renaissance costume]

Sometimes, it's just like that. Life is not fair. (Really) But that's how things go around here.. We just have to make the most out of it.

[Katharine Weber]

This column made me think of my experience with eleventh grade French. I was a bad student in French class, and I never ever grasped all the tenses, never did all the homework, fell further and further behind -- but I had a better accent than a lot of my classmates who knew the material perfectly. I somehow sounded right no matter what. The French teacher always believed I was a better student than I was, always heard my French as if it was more fluent than it was, and gave me higher grades than I ever deserved.

[Susan O'Doherty]

Very interesting comments (well, 4 out of 5); thank you all. Susan, I think what I'm struggling with is exactly that--whether what people respond to is some innate quality that can't be learned, or whether it's the "transparency" my acting teacher talked about--whether my writing might be too effortful, not allowing that quality to come through? I really don't know.

Lisa, having seen & tasted your pastry efforts, I have to say your confidence in that area is not surprising! But I was not a supremely confident actor--I knew I had strengths, but I was very aware of my clumsiness and other deficits, and always surprised by the response I got. It's whatever I did to evoke that response that I'd like to get into my writing.

Renaissance Costume, yes, definitely. But doesn't "making the most out of it" also sometimes entail trying to figure out how to even the scales a bit?

And, Katharine--I had a professor in graduate school who was ruthless & sarcastic with other students, but exempted me, and was always protective and encouraging, & praised my brilliance to others. Once he confided that his first, intense love had been for an Irish girl with blue eyes. An "aha" moment.