Thanks so much for this week’s column and the “Your Turn” section! I love how you broke down reading for the room vs. reading for the camera for each type of audition. In the past few weeks I had gone on a few different auditions, some with many people in the room, some with just one person, some with cameras and some without. I found myself wondering if I should have been making different choices based on who was there and whether I was going on tape or not — thanks to you I know I should, and will try to plan accordingly!

Thanks for your compassion and willingness to publicly share your (and your family’s) personal experiences for the sake of knowledge-hungry actors like myself. I really appreciate your attempts to demystify the business for us, and I know lots of others do too. Speaking of family, it’s kind of uncanny how your columns seem tailor-made for me recently — my mother’s not secretly calling you every week, is she? Just kidding.

It’s funny; I get a lot of email asking how I come up with my column topics and what the criteria is for any particular “Your Turn” letter being chosen. Many actors feel — like you do — that I must be eavesdropping or speaking with their roommates, mothers, castmates, etc., since the topics are often issues they’re facing.

Let me demystify my process for selecting topics. First, I go through my everyday life and, if a topic “presents itself” (like The Room vs. Camera piece, last week, which was very clearly a topic after prereads for a film I was casting), that’s the one I’ll do. Or, I’ll jot it down to write about later, if I have too many “hot topics” in mind. When I’m struggling to come up with a topic in the future, I can revisit that list.

In addition to receiving hundreds of emails a day (most of them from actors who read my columns… or who should be reading my columns), I spend a lot of time on message boards (Showfax, PARF, WildOgre, Canadian Actors Online, TalentPIMP, SAG Actor, Behind the Celluloid Curtain, the Hollywood Happy Hour email group) and get a good idea of what issues are important to actors… almost at the moment the issues become important to them. There have been many times when posts on an actors’ web board or a series of emails at the Hollywood Happy Hour list are the foundation of a topic for my columns. I also do a lot of guest-speaking (with Q&A) at free events and in several acting classes, so I hear what’s on actors’ minds there too.

Sometimes my husband will come home from acting class talking about an issue that was hotly debated that night. And I may explore writing about that. Many of my friends are actors (and almost all of my friends are in the industry, although I do take my own advice and maintain “civilian friendships” to stay grounded in “real life”), so I’ll hear about trends in commercial auditions (something I wouldn’t know from a CD POV, since I don’t cast commercials and haven’t attended a commercial audition since 2001), get asked about various goods and services that are being marketed to actors, and bounce column ideas off my actor friends to gauge their “worth.”

I think some of the topics I select have to do with an overall “feeling” of what’s going on at any given time, with actors as a group. In addition to believing that there is some sort of “collective consciousness” out there, which steers group experiences into issues for discussion (or column topics), I’ve also been a part of the entertainment industry long enough that I can track patterns and see rhythms in the timing. For example, most actors aren’t very excited about their agents right after pilot season (so, that’s a good time to write about agents and managers, as well as how to deal with being dropped, which happens most after pilot season). I’ve also noticed that a wave of actor funk seems to come around whenever the weather gets extra nice. I’ll try to put my most “newbie actor” type columns together at those times when the concentration of new-to-town, New Year’s resolution, I’ve gotta give it one more shot actors is highest. And, I always try to balance my “beginner” advice with “working actor refresher course“-level advice, so that no one reader gets bored or feels left out (hopefully).

It’s hard to know which topics are going to strike a chord with my readers until the work is out there and I begin to get feedback. As I’m formulating each week’s column and fleshing out the little details, I’m just hopeful that someone reading will find some little nugget that helps along the process of being a working actor. And I hope readers are entertained, inspired to do good work, and left feeling positive about the amount of control we all have over our chosen paths. In a way, I guess it’s like an actor performing a role: You do your prep work, you make your choices, and then you go out there and perform. You may not know right away whether your performance touched someone, but you keep doing the work and, eventually, enjoy the curtain call.

Bonnie Gillespie is living her dreams by helping others figure out how to live theirs. Wanna work with Bon? Start here. Thanks!

Originally published by Actors Access at http://more.showfax.com/columns/avoice/archives/000412.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.