There's this song in
The Sound of Music. "I Have Confidence."
Maria, the sweet, life-loving, virgin nun-to-be sings it as she's heading off on her own to start a new life as a nanny to a crapload of motherless kids. She's terrified, and trying to build up her courage, so she's singing about her fears and about what she has confidence in.
Like: sunshine, rain, and that spring will come again. But the build up throughout the song leads to this line: "I have confidence in confidence alone."
When I was a senior in high school, I played Maria for the fall musical, so I spent a lot of time thinking about what was going on in hear head. I have to say, that line always baffled me. Confidence in confidence? How does that make sense? How can you have confidence in something that you clearly are trying to convince yourself to have confidence in? It isn't like spring, which always comes, or weather.
I didn't really get it, but I belted it out anyway. See?*
A few weeks ago,
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
apocalypticbob asked me at the BookCrossing convention if/how my writing has been affected by my experiences with theater.
I couldn't answer her (other than to say that it made it possible for me to easily stand in front of 30 strangers and entertain them for half-an-hour by making fun of myself). But I wrote the question down in My Brain (also known as my notebook), and have been mulling on it ever since.
The answer, I think, goes back to that line in
The Sound of Music.
In theater, you have to perform. I mean, duh, right? You have a script, and you have a director, you have costumes and sets and a built in audience. All these things you don't have when you write a novel. But when the moment comes to step out on that stage and the bright lights are shining and the whole scene rests on you - on your ability to remember cues, lines, hit high notes, project to the back, not trip on the guitar, and most of all to convince an auditorium of people to forget your name and only see this invented character - the only thing you can do it focus on the moment and pour all of yourself into it.
And,
damn, that's a lot like writing.
I think of writing as a performance. Because I never write something that isn't intended to be shared somehow. Either I'm publishing it straight to my blog, where I hope there will be a back-and-forth discussion, or I'm publishing it on Merry Fates as a professional author, or I'm going to give it to my crit partners and eventually to my agent and editor in the hopes of selling it and turning it into a Real Book.
Although I don't write for my audience, because that way lies the path to derivative works and paralyzation of creativity, I do always keep my audience in mind. Not only the audience I know (regular blog readers, crit partners, etc), but the audience I want to create. The audience I want to draw to me.
Writing is communication, and communication MUST be a two-way street.
If I'm just putting down words because I like them, that's merely self-reflective. If I'm thinking of all the different ways to communicate the thought/idea/emotion to my audience, my writing takes on a whole new dimension. It's not just words, not only a monologue on an empty, black stage. It becomes costumes, backdrop, lighting, curtains, and me there in the center using not only my voice, but
my entire body to communicate.
What it comes down to is that you're pretending to be someone else, and the audience is agreeing to the pretense. But you have to keep them convinced. They give you one iota of a free pass, and from that moment on it's all on you.
When a reader picks up your book, it's because they heard you were funny, the cover is nice, the plot sounds intriguing, or it was recommended to them. That right there is the tiny little moment where they agree to give you a chance to convince them.
Every word is an opportunity for you to mess it up.
It's scary, but the thing that makes us (ok, me) go out onto that stage, or push post on a new short story, is the bliss when you reach that moment of catharsis with your audience (and with yourself). But you know at every moment that it could all go wrong. Anything could happen. You could botch a line. You could trip on your skirt. There could be a fire on the lighting board (this actually happened once at my high school).
The only thing you have to trust in at that one final moment before stepping into the spotlight is yourself. And if you don't know if you can do it, you have to take the leap of faith and
pretend that you do.
That's what Maria meant. She has confidence in confidence. Because if she pretends she's confident for long enough and hard enough, she will be. We're so good at lying to ourselves. The thing to do is to turn that to your advantage.
Lie to yourself. Pretend you're talented and brilliant and can act/write everybody's socks off. Believe it. Make yourself a mask in your imagination that you can put on when you sit down to write. It won't be long before it's true enough that you don't have to pretend to believe it.
So that, more than anything, is what I think the theater gave to my writing. It gave me this sense of writing as performance, of writing as a dynamic creation of story. And it gave me Maria, and the lesson it took me years to figure out. By the time I could put it into words, it had already permeated my writing philosophy.
I can't believe it's almost time for the December 22nd release of my critique buddy's debut middlegrade novel, SCONES AND SENSIBILITY! 
excited
, the sixth and last volume of the epic Codex Alera series.
-- now in paperback.
enthralled
