Using Michael Shurtleff's Book 'Audition' to Help You Write Ficton

There is one book in my arsenal of reference weapons which I often find myself turning to when in need of inspiration. That book is Audition by Michael Shurtleff, in which he outlines twelve guideposts that actors should delve into while in preparation for a scene—including finding the humor in even the most tragic of circumstances as well as the importance of establishing where a scene is taking place and ascertaining the exact relationships between the characters. The chapters that I find most useful are those dealing with Opposites and Importance. Characterizations in novels and movies are often dependent upon being drawn too tightly because they have a part in the plot to fulfill. They are a certain “type” of person through and through with no room for shading. Real people, however, can love someone one minute and want to kill them the next. If your happiness depends on another person, you are doubtless going to have moments of resentment at that person’s power over your fate. If your character desperately wants to win the Miss Fried Bacon Pageant more than anything in the world, she should also be equally frightened of winning it whether it be because she’s afraid of the responsibilities or because once she lives out her dream, what will be left in her life to motivate her. This dualism is the strength of the concept of opposites. Whatever scene you are writing, it should be considered one of the most important scenes in the lives of at least one of those characters. Even if the details and the events of the episode don’t seem particularly earth-shattering, your reader should come away feeling as though it changed the life of at least one character in some small way. If a jerk cutting you off in traffic can make you mad enough to want to commit vehicular homicide then surely the events that are taking 300 pages to relate or two hours of screen time to watch should be important enough for them to get as worked up as you were when you didn’t make that green light. In other words don’t underplay your drama, enliven it. The key to Shurtleff’s method lies, I think, in the chapter titled “What are you fighting for?” The subtitle of this chapter is named after the single most important ingredient in all fiction: Conflict. If we can identify exactly what our characters are fighting for and know exactly what they will do to get what it is they are fighting for, I think most plot problems would probably take care of themselves. The term fighting may be misleading. As Shurtleff says, characters should do whatever it takes to get what they want, whether that be actual hand to hand combat, seduction, trickery, friendship or whatever. Most people reading this would probably do just about whatever was asked of them—short of murder, I hope—to get their book published or script produced. Your characters should probably even be willing to consider murder to get what they want. Most writers have a handful of books that they turn to for inspiration. The next time you go to the bookstore, I highly recommend that after you spend the requisite amount of time in the writer’s section that you saunter over to the acting section and see if they have a copy of this excellent reference book for writers