I once heard the famous actor Henry Fonda tell an interviewer (Johnny Carson) that he loved acting, referring to stage acting mostly and not movies—because it allowed him for a time to step outside his real self.
While he was on stage portraying someone else he could be at least for a few hours a more interesting, colorful person than the real him.
Writing is like that.
Writing is among the world’s loneliest professions. You will spend long uninterrupted hours of time facing the screen of a computer or a blank page. A few writers still write a first draft longhand with paper and pen while even fewer writers today use a typewriter.
You have no co-workers to joke with at an office or to share stories with about your experiences.
In writing like in acting you exist in another world—of imagination— it allows you to be one of the characters in your book. You can for a time escape from yourself and if you’re like most of us—the real you can sometimes be a little bit short of the person you would like to be.
That’s just being human.
I made the transition from acting to writing 30 years ago.
I had once been an actor in Los Angeles.
I like to joke today that I appeared in some of the worst films of all time. These included Deathsport, a biker sci-fi space movie in 1978 starring David Carradine, and It Lives Again, also 1978, about a demon baby with big teeth who goes around eating people.
I was also in a successful play The Chicago Conspiracy Trial at the Odyssey Theater in Santa Monica in 1979. The play ran for a year to sold-out crowds.
Numerous celebrities saw the play including Dom DeLuise, Andrew Prine and Allen Garfield. One of those in the audience was Jane Fonda, Henry’s daughter, and her then-husband the activist Tom Hayden. He had been one of the actual seven trial defendants in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial in 1969-70, accused of fomenting a riot at the Democratic National Presidential Convention held in Chicago in 1968.
Hayden was sentenced to five years in prison for crossing state lines to incite a riot but served no time. The conviction was overturned on appeal in 1972.
I was mostly a bit player, the guy with maybe a spoken line or two, usually dressed as a policeman or as a bad guy, a thug, like my appearance on the television show General Hospital.
Acting could be fun but there wasn’t enough steady work.
Like some other actors that I personally know have, I abandoned the acting profession because it didn’t give me enough limelight and turned instead to writing. I could get my name on the cover of a book. I could become (at least in my mind) the star of the piece.
It allowed me to invent characters more admirable than I was, although almost all of them have quirks and weaknesses as I do. Other characters I could make deliciously wicked.
I could escape the boredom of myself, step out of my own shoes and become someone more interesting than I am in real life. I could portray deeper emotions than the average day-to-day, and invent dialog to show my character’s intentions.
I could live inside those characters.
The actor learns how to be convincing on stage before a live audience or in front of a movie camera. A writer learns how to portray interesting characters and situations. Both involve starting with something very private, learning how to make a portrayal convincing, and sharing this with an audience, in acting, spectators in a theater, with a book, its readers.
Both acting and writing have the ability to bring people to tears, fire them with emotion, joy or anger, frighten them, make them laugh and forget for a time their real troubles in life. Words spoken from a stage or those written on a page can uplift and inspire, provoke sympathy—and goodness knows there is not enough of that in today’s world.
I think the feeling I get with being a writer is that aside from a body of work that can be publicly displayed (internet), it gives me a feeling that even to just one person I have made a difference. In something they have learned from the work or something they enjoyed.
That’s plenty good enough for me.
John Sammon is a freelance writer and the author of 41 books, many of which can be foundhere on Amazon. He is a resident of El Dorado Hills. His commentary is the first in a series on the trip of self publishing.
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