![]() The astute reader will notice that in some of these examples, the sentence actually works better when you move the action out of the subject-verb nexus. A subordinate clause pulls action out of the main through-line of a sentence and makes it a modifier: I went upstairs and sulked becomes I went upstairs, where I sulked.A participle also turns a verb into a modifier: I went upstairs and sulkedbecomes Having gone upstairs, I sulked.The completeness of my failure became obvious to all. Once you have turned the verb into a noun, you can make it the object of a preposition, so turning it into a modifier: My love of swimming keeps me in the water constantly (In this example, note that both actions I swim and I love get turned into nouns ).A gerund also converts a verb into a noun: I swim constantly because I love it becomes Constant swimming is my passion or I love swimming.Nominalization turns the verb into a noun: I failed completely becomes My failure was complete.The passive voice places somebody besides the actor in the subject slot: I took the bull by the horns becomes The bull was taken by the horns by me.The following list is just the tip of the iceberg: Language is exceedingly flexible, and it provides a multitude of ways to express action in ways other than a good old-fashioned Subject-Verb-Object main clause. If this idea of expressing actions as verbs and actors as subjects seems self-evident, it’s not. Your reader burns to know the answer to the question “Who did what?” and her eyes and her brain are wired to seek first the subject position ( who) and the verb position ( did what) in every sentence she reads. I am forever trying to get writers to stay in the habit of expressing action in the form of a verb, with the actor as the subject of that verb. Tactics use verbs that encourage action, these are very different from adjectives that are descriptive and are impossible to put into action.My wife informs me that last week’s grammarama was a little much, and she’s usually right about these (and many other) things, so I shall try to rein in my exuberance even as I return to a grammatical topic this week.Ī recurring theme in my teaching is the importance of aligning the grammar of a sentence with the action that the sentence depicts. If you truly work off the other actor, then you need to constantly be cycling through tactics and that really really keeps you on your toes. Both work very well, my only problem with the first is that it tends to lock you into a pattern and you end up acting in a certain way regardless of what the other actor is doing. The other way is for the actor to come up with a bunch of tactics to use in a scene, that work within the context of the scene and that they can use based on what the other actor is doing in the moment. There are two ways of using tactics, the traditional one is to write them in, to score them into your script, as you work out what the character is doing to the other character to get what they want. Tactics are usually expressed as transitive verbs, this is a horrid term, but it’s essentially a verb that can be done to someone else (like coax, bully, nudge, massage, goad, bribe or pester). ![]() Tactics are concrete things that can be done by the actor, within the context of the scene that bring the scene to life – literally. Tactics turn the words of the playwright into the actions of the actor. Tactics make concrete that translation from page to stage. They need to translate that into something that the actor can do and the way that this is achieved (we call this “the how”), and how we go about getting the goal. When actors work on a scene, they need to identify the character’s goal, their desire, their want. When the character attempts to get what they want, they employ certain tactics (or actions) to do this. It can be simple like a hamburger or complex like unconditional love. That’s what’s happening in each scene of the play, the character is striving to achieve something: to obtain a desire or meet a need, and this is what compels them throughout the scene. So that’s what tactics are, they are the things that we use to get what we want. Some people call them actions, that’s probably the more traditional name for them (you get that term associated with the work of Stanislavski) but then some people call them tactics, which is probably a more useful term for the things that we use – the things we do to get what we want. One of the most important aspects of acting are the use of actions or tactics. It’s vital and the more you employ tactics, the more engaged you will be with the scene, the scene partner and, if you must, the character. I’ve written about this topic before, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t do it again.
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