A Quote by Dustin Lance Black
I think of the biopics I've written as exploring a more grown-up side of myself, through other characters' lives.
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I think that I write much more naturally about characters in solitude than characters interacting with others. My natural inclination - and one that I've learned to push against - is to give primacy to a character's interior world. Over the three books that I've written, I've had to teach myself that not every feeling needs to be described and that often the most impactful writing more elegantly evokes those unnamed feelings through the way characters speak and behave.
I love my job, I love being an actor and stepping into the shoes of different characters and exploring their lives. It's enriched my life extremely. I've learned more about myself and the ways of life through being an actor.
The more I have written, the less it has been about exploring myself, and the more it has been about exploring the world around me.
I don't think of my characters as people I create, I think of them more as people I have met and whom I'm exploring on the page. I don't actually think of myself as having 'created' any of these people.
I'm happy being myself, which I've never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn't have those things in mine.
I, on the other hand, still might not be considered a proper adult. I had been very grown-up in primary school. But as I continued through secondary school, I in fact became less grown-up. And then as the years passed, I turned into quite a childlike person. I suppose I just wasn't able to ally myself with time.
I find myself speaking through the other characters, putting ideas in their voices and heads. Writing almost becomes a splitting of myself into multiple personalities. But I don't write to make an argument on behalf of any of the characters, or to prove anything about a character. I think that's important that I be serving the story first and not my own point of view.
I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.
Exploring the dark side of my characters' personality is my forte.
Because when does anybody really grow up? I mean, I feel more grown up now, more in a place of solidity and peace. But I think a lot of people take on these roles as parents, or husband or wife, and immediately think 'That's it. I'm grown up now. Done.'
Growing up where I did, you met a lot of colorful characters whose business was on the other side of the law, or more likely you didn't know what they were up to, and you never would. So playing those kinds of characters now, I can draw on that. The rest of it, you can practice or learn from books. But mostly, I draw from my experiences. That's all I have, you know.
One of the main reasons I write fiction is to try to understand what life is like for people other than myself, to try to see the world through my characters' eyes. I often find that I'm able to understand certain emotional truths about my own life by exploring things from different vantages.
I have ventured out and written about real-life experiences that I haven't gone through myself, but I've known people to go through them. In the past, I've always written about my experiences and people related to that, but there's a lot of other things that I've never written about that people have gone through.
I think, most of us, when we look back over our lives, see perhaps moments when everything was dangerous and precarious. We're making all these mistakes, and yet somehow we make it through. It's the making it through that that interests me. To go through the valley of trouble and come out the other side. That's what we all have to do.
We had enough years in front of us to be serious and grown-up and respectable. Why rush it? But on the other hand we always complained when teachers and other adults treated us as kids. In fact there was nothing that annoyed me more. So it was a frustrating situation. What we needed was a two-sided badge that said 'Mature' on one side and 'Childish' on the other. Then at any moment we could turn it to whatever side we felt like being and the adults could treat us accordingly.
The great thing about acting is, because you're constantly playing other characters and exploring yourself because you have to find those other characters in yourself, you sort of broaden as a person over your life because you've been other people. So you can empathize with many different sorts of people. It's great in that way and I hope, therefore, as you get older as an actor, you not only get more interesting because you lived more, but you get a bit wiser as a person.
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