I’m sorry I can’t write your essay for you… But

Once a week (sometimes more), almost every week, I get a very polite email asking for help with an essay, dissertation or thesis. I love getting emails, I like to help, I welcome it but…

Some of you may know that I am engaged myself in a 100,000 word doctoral project of my own and I am heavily involved in the long dark journey up my own arsehole, which is a PhD.

I appreciate that you have chosen an exciting topic and are now engaged in finding source material and I do want to help you, but if I replied in detail to all those requests, I wouldn’t get a single piece of my own work done.

So here’s where you need to start, The Library. Not Google, not Yahoo. Your Library. Read books on your topic, you can’t shortcut it by speaking with me, I do want to help, but only if you have specific questions, and only if I think you’ve actually exhausted the other options. I don’t answer broad questions. I will answer specific ones relating to Practical Aesthetics when I can.

If you have a question about Strasberg vs Stanislavski, you need to read Strasberg and about Strasberrg and you need to read Stanislavski and about Stanislavski, you need to go to the academic journals, and particularly TDR which has plenty that can help you. But I didn’t spend all those hours reading that stuff to summarise it for you. You can search on this blog for lots about Strasberg, Stanislavski, Mamet and Practical Aesthetics, but you need to help yourself.

If you want to know about Practical Aesthetics, you can read my blog, read True and False, A Practical Handbook for the Actor, Robert Bella’s chapter on PA in The Training of the American Actor (called The Handbook of Acting Techniques in the UK) and Karen Kohlhaas’ book The Monologue Audition, all of which deal with Practical Aesthetics in detaill. Once you’ve read all that, I’ll help you further.

Please understand I’m not trying to be mean, and I’m trying to help actors to navigate and negotiate the difficult business of our profession, and I also want to help people know more about acting in general. But I can’t answer all those emails unless you’ve done all that you can already. There’s 502 blogs here. Start with the books and journals, move to the blogs. After that, you can persuade me to help you.