What Writers Can Learn from Robin Williams
Robin Williams' character Mr. Keating was my inspiration as an English teacher, a reader, and a writer. Much as we were taught to analyze literature in college, I've also avoided being too cerebral in my approach to anything I read. Just because people say it's great and have good justifications doesn't mean there's something wrong with you if you don't like a piece of lit. And other times, you just have to trust your intuition. You may not be able to explain in detail why something is good, but that doesn't mean you are wrong to be moved by it.
Of course, these sentiments were voiced by the actual man the character was based on. But the actor Robin Williams himself, and other actors, in fact, have a lot to teach writers.
The first protagonists we write about are nearly always ourselves. And most writers are successful at this. Who do we know better than our own selves, after all?
Yet all too often writers get stuck in a rut and find they cannot write about other people's views and feelings. Take Betty Smith. Much as I love her only remaining books in print, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Joy in the Morning, it's easy to see that the two female protagonists are portraits of herself at different stages of maturity. Both are from poor Brooklyn families, self-taught bookworms who started working early to help their families. Most of all, both have a highly-motivated, better-educated significant other that they look up to as a mentor.
As much as I love Judy Blume, I noticed even as a young girl that so many of her protagonists were the same: quiet, skinny, underdeveloped girls with short, unmanageable brown hair that they wanted to grow out. Perhaps she was aware of this, since there's more of a range of characters in her later works. It's no surprise, by the way, to read biographical details of Blume and find out that she was herself a skinny, underdeveloped girl with unmanageable brown hair. But though she might write more comfortably about this, she was also able to successfully enter into other types of characters' dilemmas--chubby Stephanie, over-achieving Rachel, among others.
Actors who do too much of the same kind of role tend to be considered limited, constantly type-cast. Although this pretty much happened to Robin Williams, he was able to show enough range of emotion in his quirky roles of Mr. Keating and Patch Adams, among others, to avoid being limited to comic characters.
We writers, like actors, also have to enter the skins of other people, imagine ourselves as them, and often it's even more challenging. Actors usually play people of a body type, age and gender the same as their own. Using our imaginations, we can go much further, but it also demands more of us in terms of empathy and observation. We would feel safest, of course, writing about ourselves, but that will be severely limiting. And so we need to constantly widen our range by observing, interacting, and reading more.
Of course, these sentiments were voiced by the actual man the character was based on. But the actor Robin Williams himself, and other actors, in fact, have a lot to teach writers.
The first protagonists we write about are nearly always ourselves. And most writers are successful at this. Who do we know better than our own selves, after all?
Yet all too often writers get stuck in a rut and find they cannot write about other people's views and feelings. Take Betty Smith. Much as I love her only remaining books in print, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Joy in the Morning, it's easy to see that the two female protagonists are portraits of herself at different stages of maturity. Both are from poor Brooklyn families, self-taught bookworms who started working early to help their families. Most of all, both have a highly-motivated, better-educated significant other that they look up to as a mentor.
As much as I love Judy Blume, I noticed even as a young girl that so many of her protagonists were the same: quiet, skinny, underdeveloped girls with short, unmanageable brown hair that they wanted to grow out. Perhaps she was aware of this, since there's more of a range of characters in her later works. It's no surprise, by the way, to read biographical details of Blume and find out that she was herself a skinny, underdeveloped girl with unmanageable brown hair. But though she might write more comfortably about this, she was also able to successfully enter into other types of characters' dilemmas--chubby Stephanie, over-achieving Rachel, among others.
Actors who do too much of the same kind of role tend to be considered limited, constantly type-cast. Although this pretty much happened to Robin Williams, he was able to show enough range of emotion in his quirky roles of Mr. Keating and Patch Adams, among others, to avoid being limited to comic characters.
We writers, like actors, also have to enter the skins of other people, imagine ourselves as them, and often it's even more challenging. Actors usually play people of a body type, age and gender the same as their own. Using our imaginations, we can go much further, but it also demands more of us in terms of empathy and observation. We would feel safest, of course, writing about ourselves, but that will be severely limiting. And so we need to constantly widen our range by observing, interacting, and reading more.
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