All The World’s A Stage, And Each Must Write Her Part

Ex-actress and current best-selling author Tana French (right) gets the kind of mild grilling you might expect in a Q&A session over at Penguin, but there’s some fascinating insights on offer nonetheless, not least of which is her assertion that she’s as much an actress when writing as when on stage, to wit:

Q: In addition to becoming an author, you have acquired a strong reputation as an actor. Why do you think IN THE WOODS came out of you in the shape of a novel, instead of a script or a screenplay?
TF: “This may sound strange, but writing IN THE WOODS as a novel was actually a lot closer to acting than writing a script or a screenplay would have been. The book is first person — everything is seen through Rob Ryan’s eyes, filtered through his perceptions and described in his voice. That was my job as an actor for years: to create a character and spend hours a day operating completely from her perspective. Writing IN THE WOODS was just an extension of that process. I played Rob Ryan for almost two years — on paper, rather than on stage, but the mental process was the same. To write the story as a script or a screenplay, I would have needed to work from a much more detached point of view, coming at it as an all-seeing outsider rather than as a character experiencing the story from inside, and I don’t have a clue how to do that. Working from inside is all I know.”

Method in her madness, eh? Stanislavski would surely have been proud …