Are You The Writer Or The Actor?

One of the big lessons one learns as a musician is to move your awareness from your hands to your ears, to stop thinking about your technique and the notes and to start simply listening to what you sound like. It takes years to learn to be your own audience member.

In 1997 I was working for Jonathan Wolff. We were scoring upwards of ten sitcoms in any given week and producers were coming in and out of his studio all the time. One afternoon I had a single interaction with a writer named Jim Vallely, who was a consulting producer on one of our shows called The Naked Truth. There is no chance he remembers our conversation, but I have thought about Jim and the story he told me about his switch from actor to writer a lot over the years.

He said that he moved to Hollywood with a dream to become a comedian and be on a sitcom. At first, he was just like every other struggling actor living in an apartment with five other people, trying everything he could, audition after audition, booking nothing. And then, bang, he books a sitcom called Double Trouble, and overnight he's on TV, making money and people are recognizing him everywhere. He went, in an instant, from struggling nobody to a sitcom star. The dream was becoming real.

He told me that he actually enjoyed the acting. It was what happened to the rest of his life that started to get to him.

There's a job on set called production assistant. PAs are basically the worker bees. They empty the trash and restock the fridge. They move all the things that need to be moved. They are the grease that keeps the cogs of a well run production moving along. The first day on the set, a PA walked up to Jim and asked, “Can I get you a drink?”

Jim could see the table full of drinks just a few steps away and said, “I'm good, I can get my own drink, I can see them right over there.”

“It’s my job,” the PA answered, “It’s no trouble at all.”

“OK sure, I'll take a Coke. Thanks a lot!” Being served and treated like royalty was awesome! Jim was sure he was going to love being an actor, dreams do come true!

The next day when the PA walked up to Jim and asked, “Hey, can I get you a drink?” Jim didn’t fight back, “Yeah, sure, thank you, I'd love a Coke.”

Soon he was stopping that PA as he passed by, “Hey man, could you grab me a Coke?” And it wasn’t long before it became “Where is that PA and my fucking Coke!”

The change in his interaction with the PA was so gradual that it didn't seem like much of anything from his perspective and most of us would have probably not even noticed the shift unless someone else pointed it out.

But Jim was destined to become one of Hollywood’s premier comedy writers. Even though it happened when he was young, before his writing career, he had the instincts of a screenwriter and he could feel the shift in his dialogue.

He not only noticed a distinct change in the way he was reacting to people, but also in the way people were reacting to him. At parties he would intentionally tell jokes that he knew weren't funny, but everyone would laugh anyway. He's the big sitcom star. So, of course, everyone laughs at his jokes. He took that old scene where the audience knows the laughter is fake and literally wrote it into his own life as an experiment.

Jim got about as serious as a comedian can when he told me he didn't like who he was becoming. He didn’t like the words that were coming out of his mouth, and he didn't like the way people were reacting to him anymore. So he quit acting to become a comedy writer.

At the time it seemed like such a crazy decision to me. Who gives up fame? Who walks away from achieving their impossible dream only to chase another impossible dream?

But Jim decided he was better suited in the writers room, where he went on to incredible success. He wrote for The Golden Girls, co-created Brotherly Love, and won an Emmy writing for Arrested Development.

It’s an old cliché that we live our lives like we're the star of our own movie. We always imagine ourselves as the lead actor of every scene. But I watched Jim play a different role in his life. He didn't just look at his life with the eye of an actor. He looked at HIMSELF with the eye of a writer.

For most people, talking is an act of self expression. We say the words that feel good to us. But it doesn't matter what the words feel like coming out of your mouth. It matters what they feel like going into the other person's ears. A writer chooses the words of his character very carefully, to send information not just to the other people in the scene, but to the audience as well. The writer is not just trying to give us the information contained in the words, but also showing the audience the character of the person speaking them.

It's because he had the mind of a writer that he had the insight to see how he was changing. He instinctively had an ability that the rest of us have to learn, and that's to see your own behavior from the viewpoint of the audience. Jim had mastered that skill musicians all chase. To listen to his own performance.

When you are speaking to someone, especially in tense moments or moments of conflict, ask yourself, “If I were writing this scene, and I put that dialogue in the mouth of a character, what am I trying to tell the audience about that character?” Because that's what you are telling the world about your own character.

For years I carried that story with me without really understanding what Jim was saying. It was just another cool Hollywood anecdote. It took me a long time, maybe too long, to see myself not just as the actor in my life, but as the lead author.

The audience doesn't get to see the writers room, and as long as you live your life only in the story you're in, neither will you. You have to make space for the writers room in your own mind. You have to take time to sit back and have writing sessions with yourself. What does your tone say about you? What does your word choice tell the audience, the people in your life, about what kind of character you are?

Jim’s successes are not an accident. It’s what can happen when you start to author your own story, not just act in it.