WIL WHEATON dot NET

50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong

the play’s the thing

  • WWdN in Exile

I spent most of the morning and afternoon rehearsing my speech, listening to how it sounds, and making sure it times out right. The old improviser in me even played New Choice a few times with some ad-libs that amused me so much, I ended up writing them into the text.

Writing this speech and preparing it have been the singular focus of my life for so long now (in linear time, it's only been 6 or 8 weeks, but in hyperfocused mental writing time it's been much, much longer than that) that I feel sort of adrift, now that it's finished, like I don't know what to do with myself.

This reminds me of something an acting teacher once told us near the end of a 10-week acting class.

He stood on the small stage where we did our scenes and leaned against a tall chair. "You guys are all here because you love performing," he said, "and you hope to beat the odds and make a living as actors."

He absently scratched at his beard. "If anyone told you that this would be easy, they lied to you. It isn't."

I knew this, because I took this class in my early twenties, when I felt like I was never going to be a successful actor (or anything) again.

He continued, "This class is almost over, and whether you choose to come back here and do more workshops or not, you should keep performing, whether it's in a 99-seat theater, or in a scene study workshop that meets once a week." He leaned forward, folded his arms across his chest, and lifted up one hand, extending his index finger. Over the course of the class I'd come to think of it as his I'm about to tell you something very important pose.

"Some of you will be lucky enough to have several auditions a week, and when you do, you'll start to feel overwhelmed by the preparation … if you're doing it right, you should feel overwhelmed, because if you don't, you're not working hard enough. But sooner or later, you're going to consider dropping out of plays or stopping your workshops, and just focusing on the auditions. That makes sense, because you're getting to perform at auditions all the time, and we all know that nobody really goes to see live theater in Los Angles, right?" He pointed around the room as he said this, and let his palm fall open, like Hamlet contemplating Yorick, when he asked the question.

Some of the students murmured in agreement. Every last one of us would have been delighted to discover that we were so overwhelmed with auditionsNot enough time to perform because we're so overwhelmed with auditions?! This was a problem that all of us would have loved to have. 

The instructor shook his head, and folded his arms back around himself. He took a few small but dramatic steps – this was an acting class, after all – and faced us again from the other side of the stage.

"That's the worst thing you can do."

We all waited for him to elaborate, and after a very long few seconds, he did. "When you're performing in a theater or doing workshops, you're working with other actors, and you're doing it because you love the performance. You love the character, you love the story … you love something about it enough to do the work for the sake of the work.

"When you're auditioning, though, you're not in a performance environment. You're never on a stage, and you're rarely in front of people who are fully engaged in what you're doing."

Many of the frustrating auditions I'd had around that time, where I felt like the people in the room were interested in everything but what I was doing, flashed though my mind.

"So if you make auditions the only place you get to perform, it will slowly but surely unravel you. Because you're not really performing, you're auditioning. Do you all follow me?"

All of us nodded in agreement. He spoke as deliberately as I'd ever heard him speak, punctuating almost each word by pointing his finger or waving his hand.

"You have to give yourself a place where you can perform for the sake of performing, and you have to go there every week. Think of athletes: they practice between games, and so should you."

He started to walk back to his desk at the foot of the stage, and then abruptly stopped. He whirled around and said, "You know you're actors because if you don't act, you feel like something is missing. Don't give an industry that doesn't care about that the same way you do control over when you do it."

It could easily have been a sales pitch to get us all back for more workshops, but it wasn't. It was a life pitch, from the same teacher who told us all that, if we hadn't already, we had to find something we loved, something that truly mattered to us, that wasn't acting. "You can't let acting consume your life," he said, "you can't let it be your life, because life experience is part of what makes great actors great. You have to live a full life, so you have something to bring to a character when you create it."

I don't know how many of you who read my blog are actors or creative types, but I hope you'll heed the advice that acting coach gave me, thirteen or so years ago, because I have, and it's made all the difference to me, both personally and professionately.

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23 March, 2010 Wil

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games are important. games matter. #PAX is where we come together to celebrate that. → ← In which I finally finish writing my PAX East keynote

57 thoughts on “the play’s the thing”

  1. Christopher Feyrer says:
    25 March, 2010 at 3:13 pm

    Wil,
    I’ve paid attention to you, and Felicia, and a lot of industry folk for years. A fault of mine is that I always compare. So when I’d create, it’d always be, well, I wrote this, and it’s not going to get picked up and published by O’Reilley. Or, I made music, but it’s not Jed Whedon. Or, I love new media and social networking, but I’ll never have 1.5 million followers like Felicia.
    But the blog post above tells me the way it really is — and how hard everyone works creatively with successes few and far in between. So I’ve resurrected the Naked Dancing Llama via twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ndl . Yahoo site of the week in 1996, to nothing but obscurity now. I’m writing music for a web series, Empty Throne: Apotheosis, at http://www.emptythroneworld.com.
    While I would hope that I’m creating some quality music for Apotheosis and some laughable one liners for NDL — in the end I’m happiest that I’m producing content again, and music, and getting back into gear.
    My goals have become twofold:
    * Upping my game and producing the best quality I can.
    * Keeping my commitments and finishing what I start.
    That way, no matter what happens — I can feel like a success, and concentrate on enjoying creating.

  2. Jack Myers says:
    25 March, 2010 at 8:41 pm

    Daily practice is central to mastery, in life, in everything. Anything else is just half measures and mediocrity. Excellent post, Wil.

  3. Celia A. Escalante says:
    25 March, 2010 at 9:04 pm

    +HR+ Yes; I can. I’m very creative. I’m happiest when teaching Chemistry. It would not be fair to me to just study for the professional exams. Research, practice and penetrating empathy is how we master our crafts.
    Wil, you are a heartful man and you live in a free country; if performing gives you the strongest satisfaction make it your discipline to live the scenes. That one moment, when your expression moves the spectator, is so real that you can taste it.
    Take Kevin Spacey’s notability: first we “saw” him in See No Evil and it was then that he grew into our memory. It probably was not the first time he was in a movie. His hard-work touched us. Wil, you touch our hearts.

  4. adichappo says:
    26 March, 2010 at 5:01 am

    Wil,
    I know you’re at Pax East (cold enough on this side for ya?) but I just wanted to let you know that I got an e-mail from Subterrianian Press saying that they shipped out my copy of Happiest Days!!! I.Can.Not.Wait to read this book, esp with the extras in this edition. Thank you so much for puttin gso much time and effort and basically yourself into a book like this, I’m sure it will be worth the wait.

  5. Alex Pope says:
    26 March, 2010 at 11:19 am

    Though I am an English teacher and have no training in Drama (aside from my grade 8 and 9 Drama classes), I do ache for the applause. I also ache for “nailing it” even if I don’t get the applause, because I get satisfaction from that too.
    Oddly, perhaps, I often get both as a teacher. We do a lot of oral reading in my classes – and I model as often as I think I should. Reading Of Mice and Men is a joy, Shakespeare is a rush, and Poe is exhilarating.
    Additionally, I occasionally do what might be best described as a 5 minute monologue at the beginning of class to allow for late comers to get in before the “real work” begins. Of course, it’s alternate purpose is to get some of the aforementioned applause or satisfaction.
    I may not have found theater, but I found a stage, and it seems to work for all involved.

  6. Dirk says:
    26 March, 2010 at 8:13 pm

    Hi Wil, just want to thank you for the great keynote today. It made me laugh, it made me cry. We’re essentially the same age and your story was also essentially mine. Your goodness of spirit is lovely and appreciated. You make an exceptional ambassador for us all.

  7. ZombieCafe says:
    27 March, 2010 at 8:30 am

    Definitely quoting you in my game design podcast!

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