How Stage Actors Can Help You Become a Better Blogger

This is a Guest Blog Post by Rajeev Edmonds of MintBlogger. Follow him @mintblogger

The blogger in you is continuously evolving while you write, connect and engage with your audience. It’s a learning curve that refines your skills, your persona and your approach towards dealing with things that you do in daily life. We learn from peers, from our readers and from the people around us.

Recently, I watched a stage play and found some interesting comparisons between stage actors and bloggers. If we closely observe the professional life of stage actors, we can pick lots of positive things that can help us in improving our blogging skills. Their approach, their team work and their way of dealing with public reaction can give you countless tips on dealing with such situations. Let’s see what we can learn from their daily routine and how we can avoid certain mistakes that may affect our productivity.

Dealing With Criticism

The most successful stage actors very well know the art of dealing with public criticism. The remaining find it a bit more difficult to deal with it, as some of these remarks are derogatory and sometimes extremely provocative. Every actor deals with this situation in its own way. Some may even suffer from temporary mental breakdown, while others just ignore it concentrating on their main job.

Similarly, you are bound to confront your readers’ criticism at some stage of your blogging journey. Even the best of best have faced it at some point in their careers. Sometimes it may get personal and sometimes it’s just a healthy debate initiated by a more knowledgeable person who is critically acclaiming your writing. In the latter case, remaining in denial mode is only going to hurt your reputation. Acknowledging the wisdom where it is due and learning from our mistakes makes the way to move ahead it right direction. In the former case, the best way to deal with it is to completely ignore the presence of the troll.

Learning From Superiors

Some stage actors develop massive egos that can bring an end to their career prematurely. Listening to the director by adhering to his guidelines and suggestions is the key to come up with a well-presented play. As an actor one has to put aside his ego and should be ready to work under supervision.

Similarly, we always look forward to people higher up in the ladder for their valuable suggestions and guidance. Many of us often ask for suggestions and seek guidance from seasoned bloggers and sometimes if we fortunate enough we may get the same without asking them. Whatever is the case, along with suggestions you may receive several remarks about what you have done wrong till now and what you should do to correct it. Are you ready to listen what the maestro is saying about your shortcomings? If yes, then you are on your way to success.

Dual Identity

Most stage actors are completely different from what they appear in public. No matter how close their play character is to their own real life, they are bound to present it in a different way. The actor we know on stage transforms into a completely different human being when he is at home with family members or at a local pub hanging out with friends.

Same thing applies to bloggers who connect and socialize with their audience on regular basis. While interacting with readers and peers we are more formal in our approach limiting ourselves to certain boundaries that are never crossed. The level of engagement and the extent of involvement may differ from blogger to blogger but all have drawn a line that keeps their other side masked.

Multitasking

The most striking similarity between stage actors and bloggers is their employment status. A normal countryside theatre hires actors on contractual basis. With the exception of some lead characters that are paid regularly, almost all supporting characters do it part-time, either to quench their thirst to act or to supplement their current income.

A lot of surveys have been done in the past about the percentage of bloggers taking this as a profession and devoting their full time to blogging. Almost each one of them clearly suggests that only a fraction of bloggers is doing it full time. Majority of bloggers have primary focus on their day jobs leaving their spare time for blogging. If you are doing a day job and feel that you may not be able to blog then take that out of your mind. Majority of bloggers are doing it part-time very successfully.

Memorizing Ability

You may have seen some stage actors delivering considerably long dialogues without any difficulty with full authority. Some play characters have thousands of lines almost filling an entire notebook. The professionals have no problem in memorizing such long text. In fact they improvise on the script and sometimes add their own improvements (with permission from director) at specific places. One may ask how do they manage memorizing such large quantity of text with so ease? The secret lies in understanding the context and the meaning rather than blindly chanting the words.

Bloggers also have to continually read and research about their topics. Things are changing at fast pace and new technologies and services are introduced almost every fortnight. We can observe many bloggers attending webinars and doing podcasts on regular basis. Once they have done the preparation, they are ready to speak on the topic in hand with ease. How do they manage to speak on a given topic for long durations? They use the same approach of understanding the context and logic associated with any subject.

Professionals working in different domains always have something to offer each other that can make them much better than what they were previously. We can clearly see how stage actors can help us tremendously in improving our blogging skills. Not only they can help us become a better orator, but also more importantly they display some effective socializing skills and useful techniques to deal with audience. Have you ever observed and picked some useful things from people working in different domains that may have contributed in making you a better blogger?