Alas, Poor College Degree

I used to say that my college degree was as useless as burnt plastic. While I was working at a major software company that shall remain nameless, it might have been true in the most literal sense. In the less than literal sense, however, I was using the skills I'd learned all the time. Still do. Especially in writing. My degree is a BFA in Acting from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.

What the heck, you might be asking yourself, does an actor do with an acting degree while writing novels (or working in software)?

Fair question. Think of the acting degree as the most expensive three years of intense therapy you can imagine. It's so intense that of the 20 people who started the acting conservatory the same time I did, only 8 made it to graduation. (Our graduating class was 10 people - we'd picked up a pair of students who'd taken a break and were coming back to finish up their degree work.) Yes, Cornish taught us craft and technique, but above everything, Cornish dumped us face first into the sea called "Acting requires enormous emotional effort." The conservatory's job was to crack each of us like nuts and open us up so we could finally see inside. It wasn't easy and it was often unpleasant. But it was necessary. We had to be able to name every nuance of emotion whether we felt it or believed we saw it in someone else in class.  To do that, we had to rummage around inside our own emotional lives and examine every shadowy don't-want-to-admit-we-feel-that feeling we had. Ask me sometime about the incidence of raging nightmares in students during this work. I'm not trying to make it sound like a torture chamber because if you come to the work with a sense of curiosity, it's a lot of fun finding out what makes you tick and learning to parse yourself into useful bits of a toolkit. 

In regard to using the degree off stage, it turns out that once you've learned what you've learned at Cornish, it doesn't go away. The ability to name emotion or to reach for a part of yourself as if it were a wrench becomes inextricably bound up in the fabric of who you are. That means that in working for corporate America, it's easier to approach public speaking, to convey confidence, and to identify the surface emotions of the people around you. 

It's no stretch of imagination to think of using an acting degree for writing novels. They are both (for me) character-driven work. I suspect if we polled all the writers in the world who were or are also actors, we'd find they're all character-driven. (I'm willing to be proven wrong.) For me, though, it's more than that. Yes. I'm entirely character-driven. The emotional work means better depth and breadth of emotion in my writing. When I'm doing it right. The technique work means I dedicate time to working on each character's unique voice and physicality - how they perceive their world and how they move through it. For me, a scene is a stage. It means I'm responsible for clear, crisp stage directions in my work. I will always mess this up a little - this is why editors are so important - having that objective audience who can say 'whoa what just happened there?' I came away from Cornish with a stage combat certification that I put to work for every single fight scene in a book.

If pressed to pick the one thing that has had the single biggest impact on me, I'd say the emotional work. Hands down. It's also the work that has had the biggest impact on the people around me. Certainly I wrote before and during school, but I do feel like being published would have been far less likely without the work.

Stupid Human Trick Glory Days

 My stupid human trick is a thing of the past. It was the product of a 20-something body and excessive physical conditioning. It was also performed for an audience during a cabaret night at Cornish College of the Arts. I hadn't volunteered, I assure you. I still don't know who put my name in the box, but two of my classmates, Scottie and Brendan, were MCing. Yeah. I absolutely suspect one of them. 

At any rate, throughout the evening, between different acts, Scottie and Brendan would pull a name from the box. The stupid human trick was also listed. So each of us called upon performed. There was no demurring. We were students in an acting conservatory. Pretending we weren't egocentric showoffs just wasn't going to fly.

My stupid human trick was crossing and interlocking my legs, fitting my forearms through that interlocked cross, and walking on my hands. Up stairs and back down. I think it's on video somewhere. A video I hope never surfaces. 

I was doing 12.5 hours of hard physical conditioning per week between stage combat classes and dance classes. I was 15lbs lighter, and, as mentioned, I was much younger. At this point in my life, I won't be 15 lbs lighter until six months after I die. So the ship of that stupid human trick has sailed.

I'll just have to come up with another one that won't land me in a local emergency department. . . 

Edit: I'm back. I'm back because when the DH asked what this week's topic was, he reminded me that I have a few other stupid human tricks up my sleeve. I take them for granted because they weren't learned tricks like the one above was. So here they are:

1. I can stand on point without toe shoes and without blowing out my feet or my ankles. 

2. From standing, I can squat all the way to the floor without ever lifting my heels from the ground. 

These, I suspect are genetic relics bequeathed to me from a long line of stolid Scottish farmer stock. Who else would need cast iron ankles?

Something to Be Proud Of

In May of 1987, I put on a stupidly expensive evening gown that I'd bought (while still in high school) without any hope of ever getting to wear the thing. If you're friends with me on Facebook, you know I have a thing about wildly impractical gowns. Even though my day to day uniform consists of cut-offs, flip flops and a tee shirt, I'm all about every woman buying at least one such gown in her life. I wish I could tell you I'd limited it to one. What I can tell you is that in May of 1987 I finally had a legit reason to wear my silly evening gown out in public. (Yeah, sorry, I have a photo of it, but only that - it's not digitized. I wish. Frankly, it was over the top and slightly garish, but hey. It was the 80s. I was an artiste. O_o)

I got to wear it for a graduation ceremony that almost didn't get to take place.

It was the graduating class from Cornish College of the Arts. My class from the acting department was graduating ten people. Three years before, we'd started with twenty. Of those twenty, only eight remained (we'd gained a few along the way, too.) Attrition was a THING. An acting conservatory sounds like something that ought to be a walk in the park, doesn't it? It was three years of mentally, emotionally, and physically hard, hard work. Long hours. And lots and lots of digging around in your own emotional guts. For a lot of people, it got too hard and they turned away from it.

Yet even for those of us who dug into each challenge, our paths were not necessarily assured. Each year, we had to be invited back to the conservatory in order to continue studying there. We faced three hurdles, GPA, a professionalism score solicited from teachers and peers, and our final hurdle, a frank assessment by the teaching staff as to whether, in their opinion, we had a future in the craft. That last one came down to a yes/no vote. Clear all three and you got to enroll. Fail any one of them and you'd get a form letter explaining that your time at Cornish had come to an end. Don't call us, kid.

Between my junior and senior year at the conservatory, my stats were solid. Yet when my teachers voted on my potential, I split the staff. Half of them wanted me gone. The other half just as adamantly wanted me to stay. The director of the program declined to break the tie and none of the teachers could talk any of the other teachers into changing his or her vote. So, by the skin of my teeth, I got to stay and I got to graduate. I only knew about it because one of the teachers took me aside and told me about it, after. He also told me that the teachers who'd voted to keep me in the conservatory all cited the same reason. Sheer determination and stick-to-itiveness. He said that if success came down to never giving in, I had it in my teeth.

I'd had no idea that I'd made that impression on anyone - that I was determined (I was). I was disconcerted, and maybe a little defensive about nearly being kicked out, but I was also proud. It was another challenge that made me work all the harder that final year. And I was prouder still to get to graduate despite the doubts of half of my teachers.

This story plays directly into what I'm proudest of in my writing. I won't give up. I've stuck to it and will continue to. Slings, arrows, and outrageous fortune notwithstanding. I keep on keeping on. I have story gripped in my teeth, and I am that bull dog that will not let go. There's no graduating this time. And no one voting over my fate. Just me and the stories. Which in some ways is too bad. Because it means not getting to wear another silly evening gown in public.

I vote we create a writers tea somewhere fancy. White tie. Impractical evening gowns encouraged. We gather once a year to celebrate everyone who stuck with writing, no matter what. Determination. Stick-to-itiveness. That's something to be proud of.