I have recently been introduced to the Canadian TV series
Slings and Arrows
. I've watched the first season and a half of it on DVD now, and am really enjoying it.
Part of what is so fun to me, as I watch, is thinking about the acting process. I am not a stage person, not at all. But it is fun to consider the connections between the acting process and the writing process. The whole obsessing over a little detail, knowing that you're being pedantic and knowing that it is ok to be so, the feeling that everything you say is not quite understood... that all comes through as part of the acting process in the show, and it seems to fit with my own feelings in the writing process from time to time (OK, much of the time). But what I really love is the connection that it all brings between people once the task is done. I don't mean to say the work is perfect (we all know it never is), but that it is bonding, bringing the human experience to the foreground, and bringing humans together in the process.
So, for all that the acting or writing process is something of a lonely journey, it is also a very communal experience. And that is kind of cool, when you think about it.