Original link: https://onojyun.com/2022/10/17/7538/
△ 290｜A tragicomedy performed against a cookbook
Recently, I started to revise the previous novels, and decided to break up all the plots of the novels, and re-deduct and reorder them according to the way of drama scenes. It turns out that there are actually many loopholes in the original novel that cannot be justified – the characters in the plot have many “can not choose” opportunities, so that the conflict of the drama cannot be achieved. The drama of the plot and the tension of the characters make readers realize that even if they are the character in the plot, they have to make the “choice” that seems outrageous and even destroys the perfect ending.
When I was in college, I helped people write a lot of stage plays. Different from novels, drama scripts need to be more dramatic, but after all, the actors have to feel the characters themselves. The script cannot frame their understanding of the characters. So sometimes, when I write a biography of a character, I try my best to describe a very complete and delicate character image for participating in the script – this is considered a bad writing. The closed nature of the film makes it impossible to form synesthesia with the audience – but it is an effective way to communicate with the actors, allowing them to deeply understand the character, and even turn themselves into that character, and then let it play freely.
After several years of reflection, I finally realized that the biggest difference between fictional novels and stage scripts is to return the imagination space to readers, instead of using the way of character biography to make the details of a character public, and let the readers themselves a little bit. To dismantle a character – “He was a jerk in the beginning, and I will cry for him in the end! “
The reason for the idea of the previous paragraph is not only because revising the novel gave me the opportunity to summarize my previous writing experience, but also reminded me of a regret in my life-I thought I would have the opportunity to go to Taiwan to read it in my life. In a performance of a screen performance class, see how Mr. Li Guoxiu, a real drama master, used comedy to tell a tragedy that made people cry and laugh, and how to use tragedy to finish a comedy that made people laugh and cry. It is a pity that after Mr. Li Guoxiu passed away in 2013, the screen performance team also decided to use “Shamlet” as the last performance and officially seal the box on my birthday in 2014.
When I was in college, I didn’t join any clubs, but I often went to the drama club to visit classes. I also worked as a substitute teacher for a few days to teach my younger brothers and sisters. From the perspective of writing drama scripts, I talked about how to combine performers and characters. At that time, I borrowed a lesson from one of Mr. Li Guoxiu’s performance classes – performing a tragedy in front of a cookbook.
The difficulty of a drama is how to convey the emotions of the characters to the audience in the last row outside the stage. It is not like a movie, where a character only needs to give a close-up of a tear when crying, which will instantly make people understand what the character is in. mood. Even if the actors use more exaggerated expressions, the farther away the audience is, the less able they are to feel these subtle changes, so the lines have become the best tool for conveying emotions.
Sound is a very delicate vehicle, and it cannot be modified by humans by any artificial means. The joy of a person’s heart, and the joy of a forced smile, sound quite different. That joyful voice is non-artificial and spontaneous, and if a person wants to imitate it deliberately, people will read more emotions because of the subtle differences in the voice line – he is too hypocritical for being happy, or It was I who read a trace of sadness from his happiness. For another example, when a person is sobbing, no matter how he suppresses the movement of crying, the sound of sniffling is completely uncontrollable.
Using the voice as the conveyance of emotion, the lines become the “protagonist”. Earlier I provided interpretations of “I love you” in different scenarios, and different tones can cover a very complex emotional scene. If the play is still at this time, add a narration to the audience: look at her, she cried, she still loves this man, but she hates her again. At this time, the audience will be annoyed: Can the fucking shut down the barrage!
That training session was all about learning how to express emotions with sound – take a cookbook and read it, using all kinds of emotions. Read with joy, with sadness, read with a smile, read with a cry, look like a villain, look like a hero, etc. Most people don’t understand how a cookbook can read different emotions at first, so I added scenes to them.
- Act 1: After three days, the husband who fought on the battlefield will come back, and the wife decides to learn one of her husband’s favorite dishes today. She began to read the recipe with excitement.
- Act 2: Two days before the appointed day, the husband’s army accidentally broke into the enemy’s minefield when withdrawing, and the entire army was destroyed. The news of her husband’s death came. The wife couldn’t believe it, she went home, looked at the recipe, and decided to make it again, she lied to her husband that she would be back tomorrow… She began to read the recipe, sobbing and crying.
- Act Three: On the day of the appointment, the wife stood in the dim kitchen and decided to officially cook the dish. She read the recipe, from joy to pain, and back to joy, until she couldn’t read it any more.
When I set the scene, half of the classmates can successfully complete the reading book with emotions, not only women, but also men can bring themselves into such a scene, and then let the lines have what they want to convey Give the surrounding a mood. Funny how I asked them how I brought myself to tears while reading the recipe. Some people think that the scenes I set are too tragic and make people want to cry; while some people regard the lines as “tasks” and need to force themselves to cry by constructing a scene that is closer to themselves in their brains, such as Think of your boyfriend as the husband who died in battle; there are some people who act more realistically and are more in line with the “exaggeration” of the play. They can quickly get out of the emotions they created for themselves. Ask why, yes Because they thought of a sad thing that was completely irrelevant, and made themselves cry immediately in the moment.
This happens to be the “three emotional files” of performance: the text file, the hypothesis file, and the experience file. Because the plot of the script and the text itself moved the performers; put the people close to him into the plot of the script; and relying on his own life experience, he quickly found a person who could make him smile, laugh, and cry silently. , the experience of howling.
On the basis of these three “emotional files”, I also concluded a theory of my own – the three emotional files will gradually show a sequence with the change of age. For example, young people are more likely to be directly moved by the text, and biography of characters will make it easier for them to understand and enter the role; and with the increase of age, people will begin to have their own understanding of the role, and they are no longer a subject Framed roles are prescribed with a frown and a smile. They will even split themselves into different roles, and then feel the emotional changes and interpretations that each other will make when they act as opponents; the last is experience, when a person’s experience is richer and more dramatic, The more quickly they will be able to recall some of their own emotional manifestations from these experiences. In this process, there will be a difference between “acting what looks like” and “acting everything has their own personal charm”.
Today’s daily writing was originally a summary of my own writing, but half of it turned into an acting class. But it doesn’t matter. With the growth of age, writing itself is also a kind of emotional transmission, and there will be different writing files. Now that I am “aged”, I have abandoned the “text file” and no longer emphasize the details of a character; the “hypothetical file” is almost over, and I rarely use my heart and emotions as a blueprint to sketch a character. Role; now it should be in the “experience file”, how to let another unfamiliar character experience and feel the feelings of some life experience, and let him make a completely different choice from me.
Recently, when I used drama logic to dismantle novels, I came to a conclusion:
The core of fiction is “must”. When everyone thinks that the protagonist will make the decision of A, all conditions, reality, and plot are designed to make the protagonist make the decision of A, and then get the ending that everyone wants. As a result, at the last moment, he will definitely choose B, a completely opposite decision. Readers will scold: Is this intentional?
But at that point, they would curse again: Fuck! He can only choose B! If it were me, I’d have to make a decision B and watch the whole plot spiral out of control.
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