Lately I’ve been revising an old novel, and I decided to break the whole plot apart and rebuild it with the logic of stage acts—tightening each dramatic beat and reordering everything from the ground up. In the process, I ran into something uncomfortable: the original story was full of cracks I hadn’t fully seen before. Too many characters had exits available to them, too many moments where they could simply choose otherwise. And once that possibility exists too clearly, the conflict weakens.
What gives a story dramatic force is not that the characters make outrageous choices for the sake of shock. It is that the reader comes to understand that, if they were trapped inside the same circumstances, they too would be forced into that seemingly absurd choice—even if it meant personally destroying the perfect ending.
When I was in college, I wrote quite a few stage scripts for other people. Theater and fiction demand different things. A play needs stronger, more visible dramatic tension, but the actor must still inhabit the role for themselves. A script can’t completely police how a performer understands a character. Because of that, when I used to write character notes, I often tried to build an extremely complete and detailed portrait for the cast.
In hindsight, that was a bad habit as a writer. If you over-specify every action and every inner movement, a character can become sealed shut. There is no room left for the audience to enter, no shared imaginative resonance. But for theater, that kind of detail could still be useful. It gave actors a direct line into the role, helped them grasp the character deeply, even become that person for a while, and then improvise from within that understanding.
After years of thinking about it, I’ve come to feel that the biggest difference between a fictional novel and a stage script is this: fiction should return imaginative space to the reader. It should not expose every fine-grained detail of a character through something like a dossier. Readers ought to dismantle a person bit by bit on their own. They should be able to think, He was obviously a bastard from the beginning—how did I end up crying for him?
This line of thought didn’t come only from revising the novel. It also brought back an old regret. I once thought I would have the chance to go to Taiwan and see Ping-Fong Acting Troupe perform—to watch, in person, how the great Li Guoxiu could use comedy to tell a tragedy that made people cry while laughing, and use tragedy to tell a comedy that made people laugh through tears. But Li Guoxiu passed away from illness in 2013, and the troupe chose Shamlet as its final production. It officially closed in 2014, on my birthday.
Back in college, I never joined any campus clubs, but I often dropped by the drama society. I even filled in for a few days as a substitute instructor, talking to younger students about how to bring performer and character together from the perspective of a playwright. At the time I borrowed one exercise from one of Li Guoxiu’s training classes:
Perform a tragedy while reading from a cookbook.
That exercise gets at one of the hardest things in theater: how to carry a character’s emotion all the way to the audience member in the last row. Film has close-ups. If a character cries, the camera can move in on a tear and everyone instantly understands the emotional state. Theater has no such luxury. However exaggerated the actor’s facial expression may be, the farther away the audience sits, the less they can register those subtleties. So dialogue becomes the best vehicle for emotional transmission.
And voice is an extraordinarily delicate vehicle. Genuine joy and forced cheerfulness do not sound the same. One rises naturally; the other betrays itself through minute differences in tone. A listener can hear the falseness, or detect the trace of sorrow hidden inside the smile. The same goes for crying. No matter how hard someone tries to suppress it, that involuntary inhale, that small wet catch in the nose—those sounds cannot really be faked away.
Once voice becomes the main carrier of feeling, the lines themselves become the true protagonist. The same phrase—“I love you,” for example—can contain entirely different emotional worlds depending on how it is spoken. If, on top of that, a play added narration to explain the obvious—Look at her, she’s crying, she still loves him, but she also hates him—the audience would only get irritated. It would feel like someone had turned on a stream of intrusive on-screen commentary and refused to switch it off.
So the point of that training session was to learn how emotion can be expressed through voice alone. The students would hold a cookbook and read from it in different emotional states: with joy, with grief, laughing all the way through, crying all the way through, as a villain, as a hero, and so on. At first, most of them couldn’t imagine how a cookbook could possibly be read with distinct emotions, so I gave them a dramatic situation.
- Act One: Three days from now, a husband returning from war will finally come home. His wife decides to learn his favorite dish today. She opens the cookbook and begins reading with excitement and anticipation.
- Act Two: Two days before the promised reunion, word arrives that the husband’s army accidentally entered an enemy minefield during retreat and was wiped out. The wife cannot believe it. She goes home, looks at the cookbook, and decides to make the dish one more time, lying to herself that he will be back tomorrow. She reads the cookbook while sobbing uncontrollably.
- Act Three: On the very day he was meant to return, she stands in a dim kitchen and finally begins to cook the dish. As she reads, her voice moves from joy to pain, from pain back toward joy, until she can no longer continue.
Once the scene was in place, about half the students were able to complete the exercise with convincing emotion. Not just the women—many of the men also entered the situation fully and let the words carry feeling into the room.
What interested me most was asking them afterward how they had managed to cry.
Some said the scene itself was tragic enough that tears came naturally. Others treated the lines as a task: in order to cry, they had to construct a more personally relevant version of the scene in their own mind, perhaps imagining a boyfriend as the dead husband. And some performed in a way that felt even truer to theater’s heightened style. They could enter the emotion quickly and leave it just as quickly. When I asked how, they admitted they had simply borrowed an entirely unrelated sad memory—something that could make them cry on cue in that moment.
That, to me, maps neatly onto three kinds of emotional archive in performance:
- Text archive: the script or text itself moves the performer.
- Hypothetical archive: the performer places someone close to them into the script’s circumstances.
- Experiential archive: the performer draws directly from their own life, retrieving a feeling they already know—private amusement, open laughter, quiet tears, full-throated sobbing.
Over time I developed a further thought of my own: these three emotional archives tend to shift in priority with age.
When people are young, they are more easily moved directly by the text. Character notes and detailed backstory help them understand and enter a role. As they grow older, they begin to form their own understanding of a character. That person is no longer a figure tightly bounded by instructions for every smile and every glance. They may even split themselves across multiple roles inside the same story, imagining what emotional reactions would arise if one part of themselves had to confront another.
Only later does experience become dominant. The more someone has lived through, especially the more dramatic or contradictory those experiences have been, the faster they can reach for a corresponding emotional form from memory. This is where a distinction appears between two kinds of performer: the one who can become whatever they play, and the one who, no matter what role they play, still radiates mostly their own personal charisma.
I had meant this daily writing session to be a reflection on writing, and halfway through it turned into an acting class. But that feels appropriate, because writing too is a form of emotional transmission, and it seems to have its own shifting archives.
At this point in my life, I’ve mostly abandoned the text archive in fiction. I no longer feel the need to insist on every tiny detail of a character. The hypothetical archive is fading too; I rarely model a character so directly on my own inner life and feelings anymore. What I rely on now is closer to the experiential archive: taking some emotional truth from lived experience and letting a stranger in fiction go through it in my place—then allowing that stranger to make choices completely different from mine.
And while breaking down my novel with the logic of theater, I arrived at one final conclusion:
The core of fiction is necessity.
Everyone may believe the protagonist is going to choose A. The circumstances, the logic, the plot, reality itself—everything appears arranged to push the protagonist toward A and deliver the ending everyone wants. And then, at the final moment, the protagonist chooses B: the opposite decision, the one that seems to derail everything.
The reader’s first reaction might be: Was that deliberate? Is this story forcing it?
But if the writing has done its job, the next reaction comes immediately after:
Damn it—he could only choose B.
And if I were in his place, I would have chosen B too, and then all I could do would be watch the whole story spin out of control.