Graduate Essay: “Acting Techniques for Writing Subtext” by Barbara A. Barnett

Barbara A. Barnett is a writer, musician, occasional orchestra librarian, coffee addict, wine lover, and all-around geek. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, GigaNotoSaurus, Weird Horror Magazine, and Flash Fiction Online.

A 2007 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, Barbara is currently managing editor of the workshop’s blog and a critiquer for the Odyssey Critique Service. She has also spent several years as Resident Supervisor for TNEO (aka The Never-Ending Odyssey), an invitation-only workshop exclusively for Odyssey graduates. The following essay was adapted from a lecture she did for the 2023 TNEO masterclass on “Emotion through Subtext”.

You can find Barbara online at babarnett.com or roaming the wilds of southern New Jersey, where she lives with her husband, a herd of surly unicorns, and a pantsless stuffed monkey named Super Great.

Acting techniques? On a writing workshop blog?

Yup.

When talking about subtext in fiction, our current understanding of the word—the underlying meaning of a scene, conversation, or work of literature—actually comes out of the theater. More specifically, it comes from the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938), a Russian theater artist whose work is at the core of most modern acting techniques.

Stanislavski believed that, without subtext, a performance would be emotionally flat. He famously said:

Spectators come to the theatre to hear the subtext. They can read the text at home.

Of course, if you’re a short story or novel writer, you want people reading the text at home. Or anywhere, really. One way to keep people turning the pages is to provide an emotional experience that’s just as engaging and satisfying as the one an actor provides on stage or film. We’re therefore going to look at how actors approach subtext, and then how we can adapt that approach as writers.

ACTION OBJECTIVES

In Stanislavski’s system, before an actor can dig into the subtext, they need to know three things:

• What the character wants (the objective)
• Why they want it (the justification)
• How they plan to get it (the action)

Together, these form what Stanislavski calls an Action Objective—more than simply a goal, it’s a goal plus justification for taking action to pursue it.

The Action Objective is a scene-specific goal, so you’ll generally have several of them within a story building to what’s called a Super Objective, an overarching goal the character pursues through the entire story. Every individual Action Objective serves the Super Objective.

In Stanislavski’s method, Action Objectives must be:

1. Possible to fail at. If failure doesn’t matter, there are no stakes for the audience to care about.

2. True to character. To remain invested in the story, the audience needs needs to believe the character would pursue this particular objective in this way.

3. Specific. To borrow an example from Getting into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn from Actors by Brandilyn Collins:

• “I want to rebuild trust in my marriage.” It’s an objective, but it’s too vague because it doesn’t tell us how the character plans to achieve the objective.

• “I want to never again lie to my husband so that I can rebuild trust in my marriage.” Not only is this more specific and actionable, but it allows for more character nuance when compared to this next version . . .

• “I want to never again be caught in a lie so that I can rebuild trust in my marriage.” Specificity makes a big honking world of difference there.

4. Stated as an action verb. Actors are often advised to play an action, not an emotion. This can seem confusing at first. Isn’t it the actor’s job to convey the character’s emotions? Yes, but…

Acting teacher Jeanne Johnston has a great post about this on her website: “Why Playing Verbs Is (Ultimately) Easier Than Acting Emotions.” In the post, she takes a monologue from the play Equus and assigns an action to each emotional beat. Johnston says of this approach:

Why is this more helpful than playing emotions? Certainly there is some anger in this piece, but if you choose to play the anger, you’ll be inclined to be angry throughout the monologue. Once you look at the individual beats and their verbs, however, you can see why anger doesn’t work well throughout. Just think of these beats in terms of aggressive/defensive, and you’ll find they seesaw between these two positions.

The problem is that emotions are messy. They’re constantly in flux. They’re driven by our subconscious, and we can feel two (or more) contradicting emotions at once. “Try to make the switch with your conscious brain,” Johnston says, “and the audience will see the wheels turning in your head. That’s all it takes for them to stop believing in you.”

But if you try to accomplish a verb instead, and if you’ve done your homework on the character, ideally the right emotion will come along with the action. It’s basically the acting equivalent of showing instead of telling: I’m going to show emotion through an action instead of telling myself what it is I’m feeling.

SUBTEXT

Once an actor has established their character’s Action Objectives, they can take a closer look at the scene’s subtext. That subtext is going to result from one of two things: either the character doesn’t want to state what they’re thinking, or the character doesn’t need to state what they’re thinking.

So how does an actor reveal that subtext seeing as they aren’t, well, saying it? To answer that, let’s take a look at a great example of subtext in film: the coin toss scene from the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. In case you’re not familiar with the story, in this scene, Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem) shows up at a gas station shortly after having ruthlessly murdered some people.

On the purely textual level, the conversation is about fairly mundane matters, but from the moment the gas station proprietor innocently asks, “Y’all getting any rain up your way?”, Chigurh is on alert. The proprietor knows which direction he’s come from, and Chigurh doesn’t want any loose ends seeing as he’s just killed people. So all of those questions about closing time and bed time and where the proprietor lives translate to, “I could kill you in your sleep.” As one MovieWeb article puts it, “The threat of death is bubbling just beneath the surface, but never spoken aloud.”

While the setting detail and the camera work (like the way it focuses on the crumpled wrapper) play a significant role, the subtext is largely revealed through the acting, specifically through a combination of verbal (intonation, volume, rhythm, pauses) and non-verbal (gestures, facial expressions, posture, physiology) expressions. These expressions all grow out of the character’s Action Objective.

One possible way to describe Chigurh’s Action Objective in this scene is: “I want to goad this guy into giving me a reason that would justify me killing him.” As for the subtext underlying that objective, Javier Bardem said of Chigurh in a January 2022 interview with GQ:

In the gas station scene, I was always thinking that there was a superior voice, an order that was making the decision through me. So this is not something personal against that person or that person. It’s like, there are things that must be done in terms of creating a better world—what he thinks is a better world. And in this case, it’s a world where people don’t marry into businesses. They own or they earn their own businesses.

Every analysis I’ve read of this scene agrees that this subtext comes out in Bardem’s performance: Chigurh is being purposefully intimidating, he’s drawing this out until he gets his justification, and when he does (the proprietor married into the business), we see it in the way he sort of chokes on the cashew. And when he flips the coin and says, “Call it,” he does so with this small sigh that seems to say, I don’t want to do this but I have to.

TRANSLATING ACTING TO PROSE

In order to convey subtext, to externalize the internal, actors have to be very sensitive to their own bodies. Stanislavski said, “In theater, in contrast to what happens in life, the expression of the subtext through nonverbal means must be sharpened.” This is particularly true with film acting. As an article from StageMilk puts it:

The camera is like a lie detector, picking up every tiny nuance in your expression. Because the camera allows us into your inner world, your subtext here can be even more subtle. On screen, simply having the thought will read.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way for writers of prose fiction. In fact, our familiarity with film can work against us, often leading to the overuse of “looking” words, where characters look at each other without context. For example:

He looked at her. “How are you?”

She stared at him. “Fine.”

Their son entered. They glanced at him, then turned back toward each other.

There’s a lot of motion in that short snippet, but it falls flat because the reader has no idea what kind of emotion to assign to those various looks. Is he asking how she is because he’s worried about her? Or is he asking out of habit even though he doesn’t actually care about the answer? Is her stare one of resentment? Gratitude for checking on her? What kind of glance do they cast toward their son? One of worry, indifference, annoyance at the interruption?

Often as writers, we’re seeing the movie playing in our heads, and in that movie those looks are filled with nuance. But the reader can’t see what’s in your head. They don’t know how these characters are looking at each other unless you tell them. So what an actor would do with their body, writers need to translate into narrative.

In her book Method Acting for Writers, Lisa Hall-Wilson says:

Subtext will fall flat if the reader doesn’t understand there’s another level of meaning happening, so make sure your POVC [point of view character] gives enough evidence to communicate how they’re feeling, or let the reader know the POVC is guessing at what the deeper level of meaning is.

So how do we do that? For that we’re going to turn to a book I used an example from earlier, Getting into Character by Brandilyn Collins. In her chapter on subtext, Collins says:

In Subtexting the real communication is artfully woven through description into the context of the conversation.

Basically, description puts authors in control of both the actors and the film camera—where it focuses and how close it gets. Even better, we can zoom into characters’ heads in a way that film and stage can’t.

In order to create subtext through description, Collins uses the acronym TIME:

• Thought: What the character is thinking
• Inflection: How they are saying it (tone, volume)
• Movement: Body language, what the character is physically doing
• Expression: Facial expressions

Here’s an example of dialogue without subtext:

Carol: “Want to grab some coffee?”
Sarah: “I can’t right now, sorry.”
Carol: “Another time?”
Sarah: “Sure.”

Here’s that same dialogue, but with the TIME approach used to add subtext:

Carol bounds toward Sarah’s desk like an overeager puppy. “Want to grab some coffee?” she asks, her voice pitched far too high.

Sarah checks the time and does her best I-can’t-believe-it’s-that-late face. The last thing Carol needs is more caffeine. “I can’t right now, sorry.”

Carol frowns. “Another time?”

How about never? Is never good for you? Sarah stands and grabs her bag like she has someplace urgent to be. “Sure.”

Now the dialogue is surrounded by thought (both Sarah’s direct thoughts in italics and her observation about Carol not needing more caffeine), inflection (the pitch of Carol’s voice), movement (Carol bounding over, Sarah checking the time and getting up to leave), and expression (the face Sarah makes when she checks the time, Carol’s frown).

To decide which specific details to include, I turned to the actor’s toolkit. I determined Carol and Sarah’s respective Action Objectives (Carol’s is “I want to invite Sarah to hang out so we can become friends” while Sarah’s is “I want to avoid Carol without hurting her feelings”), and those objectives in turn informed the characters’ actions and expressions.

Maybe not the world’s greatest writing, but with TIME applied, that tiny bit of dialogue has subtext—there’s more going on than is what is being said. And that subtext would change if one or both of the Action Objectives changed. For example, Carol’s body language wouldn’t be so puppy-like if her objective was, “I want Sarah’s help on this project so I’m going to invite her out for coffee even though I don’t like her.”

In Method Acting for Writers, Lisa Hall-Wilson makes some additional points about writing subtext:

1. The amount of description will depend on how well readers know the characters and how well the characters know each other. The more two characters share (history, experiences, social status, culture), the subtler the subtext can become. But, you have to show the reader that familiarity early on.

2. Subtext doesn’t have to be subtle. Because it’s unspoken, we sometimes get it in our heads that subtext is this sneaky thing you have to dig deep to find. But if a character slams his fist on the table while saying, “It’s fine,” the subtext there is loud and clear and you can trust your readers to figure it out.

3. Setting and objects can provide subtext. Think back to the cashew wrapper in that No Country for Old Men scene and the way it conveys Chigurh’s disregard and aggression, as well as the scene’s underlying tension. We can do that in prose too. Hall-Wilson uses this excerpt from one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, The Midnight Line:

He bought a ticket for the first bus out, no matter where it was going. Which turned out to be an end-of-the-line place way north and west, on the shore of Lake Superior. Fundamentally the wrong direction. Colder, not warmer. But rules were rules, so he climbed aboard. He sat and watched out the window. Wisconsin flashed by, its hayfields baled and stubbly, its pastures worn, its trees dark and heavy. It was the end of summer.

Colder, stubbly, worn, dark, heavy—the way Reacher views the setting here helps us infer his mood, feelings, and outlook. Another example Hall-Wilson uses is from the opening paragraphs of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins:

Sitting at Prim’s knees, guarding her, is the world’s ugliest cat. Mashed-in nose, half of one ear missing, eyes the color of rotting squash. Prim named him Buttercup, insisting his muddy yellow coat matched the bright flower.

The way Katniss describes the cat tells us exactly how little she cares for it. We can also see Prim’s more positive feelings toward it. Via the cat, we learn how each sister sees the world without the text spelling it out for us.

PROSE VS FILM

The full excerpt is too long to post here, but I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy of the novel No Country for Old Men and reading the coin toss scene so you can compare McCarthy’s prose to the film clip.

One of the first things I noticed was that, if you apply Collins’ TIME method, McCarthy doesn’t use thought or inflection at all in the scene. I think he gets away without inflection because the dialogue is just that damn good. But I think the lack of internal thought is intentional since he does use thought elsewhere in the novel (though sparingly).

While thought and inflection are absent, McCarthy very effectively uses a lot of other descriptive tools to convey the scene’s subtext. To highlight a few examples:

Setting: The scene’s opening paragraph describes “a long red twilight with doves crossing the highway.” Given the common symbolic associations of red with blood and doves with peace, that description tells us there’s a man living in peace (the proprietor) when along comes death incarnate (Chigurh).

Movement: “Chigurh opened the plastic package of cashews with his teeth and doled a third part of them into his palm and stood eating.” Chigurh’s actions here reveal his predatory, intimidating nature.

Posture: “He stood oddly erect, chewing.” Another description that shows Chigurh being intentionally intimidating and off-putting.

Expression: “The man looked at Chigurh’s eyes for the first time. Blue as lapis. At once glistening and totally opaque. Like wet stones.” Chigurh’s expression, as filtered through the proprietor’s perspective, conveys just how soulless he is.

Physiology: “The man’s face was beaded thinly with sweat.” We see the proprietor’s fear of Chigurh.

CONCLUSION

We’re at the end of this post, but hopefully this will inspire you to further explore how acting techniques can inform your approach to writing subtext in your fiction.

REFERENCES

Child, Lee. The Midnight Line: A Jack Reacher Novel. Delacorte Press, 2017.

Coen, Joel and Ethan, directors. “The Coin Toss: No Country for Old Men.” YouTube, uploaded by Max, March 20, 2022, https://youtu.be/ZY0DG8rUnCA

Collins, Brandilyn. Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn from Actors. 2nd edition, Challow Press, 2015.

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. Scholastic Press, 2008.

Hall-Wilson, Lisa. Method Acting for Writers: Learn Deep Point of View Using Emotional Layers. 2018.

“Javier Bardem Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters.” YouTube, uploaded by GQ, January 11, 2022, https://youtu.be/gOO4LR73MOs?si=etlzXNJQKnEXikcJ

Johnston, Jeanne. “Why Playing Verbs Is (Ultimately) Easier Than Acting Emotions.” Spacious Acting, December 11, 2013, https://spaciousacting.com/2013/12/11/why-playing-verbs-easier-than-acting-emotions/

Lee-Rekers, Alexander. “What Is Subtext in Acting?” StageMilk, January 12, 2023, https://www.stagemilk.com/what-is-subtext-in-acting/

McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. Vintage, 2005.

Moore, Sonia. The Stanislavski System: The Professional Training of an Actor. 2nd revised edition, Penguin Books, 1984.

Myers, Scott. “Script to Screen: No Country for Old Men.” Go Into the Story, July 20, 2011, https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/script-to-screen-no-country-for-old-men-163bc6656999

Prajapati, Rajiv. “No Country for Old Men: Why the Gas Station Coin Flip Scene Was So Scary.” MovieWeb, September 19, 2022, https://movieweb.com/no-country-for-old-men-gas-station-coin-flip-scary-why/

Stanislavski, Konstantin. An Actor’s Work. Translated by Jean Benedetti, Routledge, 2008.

Stanislavski, Konstantin. Creating a Role. Translated by Elizabeth R. Hapgood, Routledge, 1989.

Starkey, Arun. “Anatomy of a Scene: The Coin Toss in No Country for Old Men.” Far Out Magazine, November 4, 2022, https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/anatomy-of-a-scene-no-country-for-old-men/