blame it on the bad actress

seej is sitting next to me and helping edit this post by usurping the delete key, so this may take longer than usual...

i'm perservering with my acting classes, altho i did miss a couple of them due to the whole getting married thing. Acting is fun (discovery of the week, i know). I'm not sure i'll ever get good at it--in fact, i'm pretty certain i never will. Like most things in life, i reckon that if i really put forth the effort and tried my very hardest, i could manage a solid C average.

something i've picked up over the last few weeks is that writing isn't actually intended for actors--Instructor Carl has told us that most stage direction (and pretty much everything else in the script that isn't dialogue) can and in fact SHOULD be ignored when you're acting. It's a distraction, the writer telling the actor how they should be feeling when the emotion should be coming from inside the actor.

and i'm not quite sure how i feel about that. I mean, speaking as a writer, how dare those flipping actors ignore all those hard-written words? who do they think they are? But equally, when you're reading the scripts as part of the class, you start to notice how superfluous a lot of stuff is. Like, if the sleasy male character says "there's something you need to know about your husband", is it necessary to tag the woman's reply as "(worried)"?

you also realise how annoying it is when people put commas in the wrong place in dialogue. I may have to start bringing a red pen along to make corrections.