How Not to Go Spare

Have you ever..? Ever felt like this?

Jun 01, 2023

There is a railway station in my head.

It is a great vaulted ceiling affair with dozens of platforms, hundreds of people shuffling across the floor and wearing hats, and a big clock.

In an ideal world, the trains would come in one at a time at regular, scheduled intervals. They don't. It’s chaos. Great waves of nothing wash around the paving stones for days until, without warning, five trains charge in from different directions, all to the same platform. At least three of them plough through the station floor to get there. The air is thick with concrete and hats.

You can tell when I’ve got too many trains arriving because I’ll have to hold up the conversation with an embarrassed: ‘Umm… hold on…’

The problem with a railway station, particularly one that lives in your head, is that you can’t control the trains. If the only goal were to quietly manage a space for shuffly-hat folks who have nothing more to do than have emotional affairs in the tea room, everything would be great.

Instead, there are all these outside goals steaming in to collect the shufflehats and take them away and not checking with me first. At best, it’s rude. How can you run a railway station if you can’t control what happens to it? It’s enough to make you want to get out of the railway-inside-your-head management business altogether.

(Incidentally, I hate Sim City).

Better to focus on the acting then.

The Acting Then

As actors, we are freelancers and contractors. Our work is intended for consumption by an audience. We are A, they are B. A to B. Or, in business speak, we are B(usiness) and they are C(onsumer). B to C aka B2C.

However, getting in front of that audience is not evident. What exactly do we sell? We’re like musicians but without the ability to sell songs, painters who lack a way of selling paintings, bakers without a loaf. Our wares are entirely creative but without a larger framework with have no one obvious thing to trade. It’s not like there’s a Bandcamp for monologues.

In fact, we spend precious little time selling directly to the consumer. We have a B2C product (our time, talent, choices, presence…) but we mostly live in a B2B industry. Like Fintech, Consulting, Logistics…

That B2B industry is full of agents, managers, casting directors, casting departments, theatre programmers, studio execs… TV shows are cast on the basis of which actors will most likely retain audience long enough to watch the adverts so we find ourselves selling to studios’ advertising partners. When we do manage to find work, we keep half a brain on how to use that work to find the next job and so we are now promoters, graphic designers, video editors, social media managers… That’s a lot of trains.

And it drives me potty.

I think actors’ lives follow a familiar pattern. The first year to eighteen months of working professionally are a time of elation. The actor is still fresh talent, a new face, possibly someone who will appear with nine other hand-selected wunderkinds in a Times Magazine feature called The Faces of Tomorrow. And then, mostly, they don’t.

Coming into the second year, a new crop Faces of Tomorrow have appeared but the actor is still in the same place. This is a difficult period for the actor. The trains are starting to pile up on each other. It’s the first point at which some will drop out of the profession.

Years two to five are spent in the search of some kind of answers to the question of how to ‘make it’. A lot of this period is spent pondering ‘what does success look like?’ Motivational Instagram memes are suddenly very attractive and worthy of reposting. Trains judder in and out. Shufflehats begin lighting fires. After year five, more of the actor’s peers will start to take an interest in other jobs.

At this point, or maybe a little sooner, it starts getting better. By now, enough time has passed that the actor can recognize how to find some structure in their life. The rest of their career will be spent improving on that. They learn to accept that the trains will forever be feral. But they can at least relay the tracks every now and then and clean the flagstones.

The freelance actor’s priorities have shifted from goals to process.

I feel this very deeply because I am going to die.

Low bar-bell

This January, I had a blood test to measure my cholesterol. As I remember it, the doctor looked at my results, quietly shook her head, and started measuring me for a coffin. Asked if there was anything I could do to stave off oblivion, she sighed at the pointlessness of it all and asked me how much exercise I was getting.

I had tried before to join a gym but never managed to make the habit stick. What I have learned in the months since I asked the doctor to put the measuring tape away is that the only way I can trick myself to keep going is by throwing the concept of results out of the window.

I cannot care on a day-to-day basis about turning my sludgy veins into limpid mountain streams. Instead, I have to actually like the gym and all the things in it. I care deeply about my treadmill settings. I am obsessed with incline. I have strong opinions about how far to spray the equipment from with the sanitizer bottle. I am a geek about process.

It’s a microcosm of the acting career.

Process Over Goals

This week, I’ve been applying to voice agencies. It’s a thing I seem to do once a year or so and have been doing since, if my e-mails are to be believed, 2012. For somebody who does quite a bit of voice work, eleven years and no bites is a hell of a burnt up train. If the only thing keeping me going were the goal of representation, I might have been tempted to close that particular platform by now.

But over time I’ve become interested in the process. I look for what I can change. Speak to people who’ve done it successfully. Make spreadsheets. The journey there has to be as interesting as the outcome. We cannot be seduced by just setting goals.

Goals are useful if they give us direction, not if they give us panic. The acting business is advertised as a great rolling jamboree of glory and failure but we’re not at the Olympics. We are academics. We have to be. That means taking an interest at the most granular level in everything.

On a pure bringing-life-to-text front, that can look like finding a script-reading group, joining a class, watching plays and films, analyzing other actors’ performances, reading the literature… whatever works. On the ongoing career front, we need to be equally geeky about all the B2B, learning how it all fits together and not being too bothered when things don’t work. We are station managers, not train managers.

It’s not easy. Goals sound great. Not achieving them builds up pressure like the bottom chamber of a Moka pot with a blocked up spout. ‘Where’s my damn coffee?’ we cry.

Finding the joy in process is hard but with practice, it gets easier, and helps to channel that pressure. The more pressure we take off ourselves, the fewer times five trains will drive though my skull and murder scores of shufflehats.

News

I was recording earlier this year for the mobile game War Robots. The video is now out, you can see it here.
You can also here me providing fake film trailer announcements in the two most recent episodes of The Allusionist, which, if you don’t know it yet, is a great podcast about language.