Three years at the notorious Drama Centre London helped the author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing understand how to create a character from the inside out

Making a person is no mean feat – especially in the absence of sex – and for a character-obsessed novelist, nailing it is everything. But when I started writing at the age of 23, all I seemed to possess was an increasingly urgent impulse in my head and an unaccountable blankness where I’d assumed the conduits of inspiration would be. The inner insistence began picking words and persistence required me to follow them up, but how to expand beyond those first fragmentary bursts?

Although largely ignorant of what producing fiction might require, I didn’t arrive at the page by myself. I brought Stanislavski with me. More precisely, three years’ training in his acting method at the then notorious and now defunct Drama Centre London, where I’d been taught how to make a person, from the inside out. Initially, I didn’t connect the worlds. Acting is action. Writing, words. Acting is necessarily collaborative, novels are not. Fiction tends to be made in private, while acting when all alone points to the psychiatrist’s couch rather than the silver screen. On top of that, method actors are regularly mocked for their seemingly over-the-top efforts to inhabit their characters; Robert De Niro’s 60lb weight gain to play the ageing boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull or Forest Whitaker learning Swahili for playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. That said, whatever scepticism surrounds the method process, the proof remains in the performance and there’s no denying it often produces emotionally intense, even revelatory experiences for the audience. Naturally enough, I wanted to take that possibility with me.