Our brains are wired to remember stories. We seek heroes and villains and resolutions. We seek the framework of a story to make sense of our own day to day journey. All of us do this as part of the wonderful complexity of the human mind.
The nature of every story is to move forward through action for the purpose of building character. The same is true for a meaningful experience in relationship with others, otherwise known as your life.
As an actor and storyteller, I try to follow three simple guideposts: What does the character want? What’s in the character’s way of getting what they want? What does the character do to get what they want? Put more succinctly, by the great acting teachers who’ve come before us: Objective, Obstacle, Tactic. Each requires action.
We must take action in our lives. This means we actively engage our lives (as opposed to passively let life happen to us). We make choices and own our responsibility for them. We create, we destroy, we feel, we rest, we err, we solve, we complicate. We live.
We take action to start a career as a creative professional. We get headshots, build a website, reach out to customers or buyers, hang out a shingle. The beginning of a story. Then we connect, find partners, vendors, writers, marketers, directors, producers. The middle of a story. Finally, we execute our plans, open for business, go to the audition, share our work, value it for what it truly is: an essential service to every human being on earth. The end of a story — to be continued in the next one.
