The Fundamentals of Good Mistakes for Beginners is a blog about actors working on improving their work.
“The actor should be able to create the universe in the palm of his hand.” – Stanislavski
There are two kinds of mistakes: good and bad. The bad kind is what you want to avoid, and the good kind is a sign that you’re pushing yourself.
I’ve studied with a lot of great teachers, and seen many more in action. What’s common among all of them is that they’re not afraid to have their students make mistakes in class.
They don’t delight in it or look down on their students for it, but they also don’t fear it or try to avoid it. They allow it because they understand that mistakes are an integral part of the learning process.
It’s often said that we learn more from our failures than our successes, and I think that’s true. Mistakes let us know where the edges are – where we can go further and find ourselves in new territory. They’re what push us beyond our comfort zone into skill development and growth.
Good mistakes are how we progress as actors, or any other endeavor. In this blog I hope to cover common questions about making good mistakes and help you build techniques for handling them in your work.
I’ve been thinking about mistakes this week. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how to make good mistakes.
Making a mistake isn’t bad. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard an actor say “I was really bad because I made no mistakes.” In fact, when people use the word “mistake,” they often mean exactly the opposite of what they’re saying. A mistake is something that leads to success. It’s a choice that works out. It’s something you did right by accident.
What makes a mistake good? What makes it bad? And why do we make them in the first place?
“You have to make mistakes.”
The phrase has been repeated in acting classes and seminars for as long as I can remember. It’s what people say when they want to encourage actors to be spontaneous, creative, and daring — all the things they fear they won’t be if they’re too careful. And it’s what people say when they want to encourage actors to get up on stage and start acting instead of just talking about acting.
However, the way that this advice is usually phrased implies that every mistake is a good mistake. It implies that there are no bad mistakes.
I disagree. I think there are some bad mistakes an actor can make — mistakes that aren’t productive at all and just waste time. So I’ve put together a short list of some of these bad mistakes, with an explanation of why you should avoid them, with the hope that you might be able to spend more time working on more fruitful kinds of mistakes.
An actor’s performance is a combination of many things: physical skills and instinct, but also knowledge and experience. The more you know, the better your work will be. This blog is about what I’ve learned about acting and how it has helped me as an actor.
The reason people are not good at making mistakes is that they fear the very thought of them. The problem is that they think they don’t know how to fix it. This is a very scary and intimidating thing, but the reality is that there are ways to fix mistakes.
Mistakes can be fixed in three ways:
1. Identify the mistake, 2. Understand why it’s a mistake and 3. Fix it.
This sounds like a simple enough process, but it’s really not as easy as it sounds. If you’ve ever tried to fix a mistake before, you’ve probably experienced this anxiety and confusion when trying to get your point across.
The first step to fixing mistakes is to identify them. This might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many people don’t do this step properly. You have to be able to accurately identify the mistake before you can attempt to fix it. If you don’t do this step right then you’ll never be able to move on and actually fix the problem. To identify the mistake you need to find out what exactly went wrong and what caused it. The easiest way to do this is by talking with someone who has already made the same mistake or knows more about it than you do.
