Not that anyone does this consciously, like gets up in the morning and says 'fuck it, I'm divorcing my wife and robbing a bank for material' but do you think in some sick twisted kind of way you find yourself gravitating towards drama in your life on some level thinking it might be useful material later or even that you are 'living the story' that might be told later?
Don't really need to go and find drama, it somehow usually finds me just fine. (Hmm is this like the one about assholes? Where if you find assholes all day, you probably are the asshole? Am I the drama queen?)
Nope, I just observe the seemingly endless well of drama that happens all around me and take my inspiration from there, leaving my own life as drama-free as humanly possible.
Not drama; action. I'm easily bored - though I'm sure others would deem it "male anxiety" or something. Breaking out of your comfort zone is important not only as a source material for writing. If I had never done that, I wouldn't have lived in a foreign country, wouldn't have met some of my best friends, wouldn't have started longsword fencing, wouldn't have gone 20 miles up the mountains just for the sake of it and so on, so on. A lot of that inspired me for my writing too.
I don't think a writer that would have to resort to that sort of thing would ever be a good writer. That sounds like harsh words, but I do not mean it to be, I just think it shows that they are not looking at life the way creative minds really work. Writing...or any of the creative arts...is seeing the story, the picture, the drawing where most people do not. A great photographer for instance, does not need to go to the Eiffel Tower with a gorgeous supermodel to get a great photo; they can just walk around their bath room and find a unique way to frame an everyday item, and turn it into a stunning photo. We as writers do the same thing, but with words. A good photographer might snap a picture of a bar of soap in a soap dish, make it black and white for increased contrast and a sense of drama, and then maybe in the mirror reflection capture a silhouette of a person taking a shower in the shower. For a good writer, that bar of soap might be what kills the unsuspecting showering homeowner by the serial killer. I could easily write a novel on "the bar soap killer" and it would be far more memorable then striking someone over the head with a lead pipe! A reader might never look at a bar of soap the same way again. My point here is, we need not get exotic: we just need to look at everyday life, and even everyday items, and through creativity, make a story out of it. That is the wonder of the creative arts, and creative people: we can make something of nothing...just by visualizing it.
True, though perhaps without going through lots of emotions and experience a writer cannot depict such things in a way that resonates with readers. I am reminded of an old Phillip Roth quote, 'whatever does not kill you makes you a better writer.' I took this to mean all the drama and horrible situations that can occur in life are good in a sense they can be used as fodder for material. Afterall, good stories do tend to be things going wrong. Eventually Roth himself would retreat to the countryside and live like a monk though, so I think he got through his 'needing real life stimulus for material' phase. There is also what I call the 'John Updike method' - where you basically stay in the comfort of the suburbs and write all day. Then there are writers who have a more journalistic approach, like George Orwell living in total squalor and starving himself to get 'Down and Out in Paris in London.' A writer needs to know pain to write about it. But a writer in too great a deal of emotional distress will not write, as the work requires a degree of comfort
I am not sure. Steven King is a really nice guy; a former school teacher, and not a mechanic that makes cars come back to life that kills people. Tom Clancy is not a real life KGB Spy, and Stephen Crane was not a Civil War Soldier. I think they pull it off though because like the best actors, they put themselves in the moment, and inject enough sensory words to pull it off. That is what we do as writers, we make it feel as if the reader is really there, but it is all jut a big con-game. But how do con artists get victims? They add in enough truth, and enough detail, to make the victim think what they are presented with, is real. Writers do the exact same thing. In fact Tom Clancy was so good at what he did, when he wrote the Hunt for Red October, the CIA investigated him because his details were so good, they thought the only way a writer could get that, was to actually be one. Ouch... But yet I also know what you are saying. If I write about something I have actually experienced, those details are more vivid in my mind, and more details for me to draw from. My main characters are always a combination of me and other people for sure, just because it is easier.
He did use his addiction to alcohol/drugs as a source of inspiration quite a lot. Also, would Tolkien have been able to write LOTR if he had not been to war? Dostoevsky probably wouldn't have been able to write about all the extreme states of madness and what no had he not been through those depth of despair himself. Do I think you should go through horrendous pain just to write about it? No Is it necessary for great art? Possibly But I understand I may also be believing in a romantic myth of the 'tortured artist.'
That drama and trauma could give inspiration is quite a different thing from someone deliberately creating drama for the sake of writing a book. Sorry, but that sounds mentally ill. When your life, your relationships, and even the people around you are of lesser importance than a good story and your writing, that's a bit twisted. That's saying the figments of your imagination is of greater importance than real people and real relationships - there's a certain detachment from the real world there that's just wrong. It feels like the reasoning you often see in a crime novel behind why murderers murder - somehow whatever cause the murderer was after was of greater importance than the lives of those around him. My experience has been that one cannot write without living life and being in relationship, because inspiration needs to come from somewhere. The writer who would go about destroying his own relationships for material will eventually find himself without any more people to destroy, and thus, his source of inspiration gone, so his writing will simply go from bad to worse from there. Only by then, writing is all that writer will have, so to admit his writing might not be good enough would be too painful to consider, rendering him incapable of taking critique. Guess what happens to the quality of writing when one won't take critique? I do actually know a woman who lost her marriage to writing novels. It's sad when fiction becomes more important than the relationships in your life, and likely that would only be symptomatic of a greater problem.
Good post! I have personally found that when I have gotten too comfortable in life, I have not been inspired to write anything. But getting out of ones comfort zone does not HAVE to be creating false insane drama. When my life was almost unbearably awful, I wrote more 'to the bone' with more energy and passion in it. Maybe I felt like I HAD to write in those times. I guess this really is that old 'tortured artist' myth thing. But your post is full of sanity and I admire that. I still believe that sometimes for creativity you have to be really far away from conventional thinking, which sometimes means being self-destructive or yes isolated. But it isn't sustainable, and even if that does lead to better works - it probably isn't worth it. I suppose it might be more true for non-fiction or auto-fiction. Like the George Orwell book I mentioned before or some of Bukowski's books and beat literature or Hunter S Thompson stuff. You couldn't write that stuff unless you lived a really out there risk taking life. But if they had normal lives, would they have written just as good stuff albeit in different genres? Would they have written at all? We know the answer with Orwell I guess, but it's a question I think about sometimes with certain writers. This concept is a big reason why The Earle of Oxford authorship theory is so prevalent for the 'real' Shakespeare. That guy was suspected of murder and having scandalous affairs with courtly ladies - things that you'd kind of expect from a man who wrote about love and death so insightfully.
OT , but this is a urban myth... the CIA did not investigate Clancy because of red october or any other of his books, all be it one widely circulated across reddits and other places that stories of no substance go unchalleged ... it probably originated because the FBI did carry out a background check in 1989 when then VP Dan Quayle invited him to join the space council... In fact there is hardly any espionage in red october, which is nearly all naval under water adventure... what little espionage there is... is fanciful boys own stuff, combined with very basic truths like that agents use dead drops... if the CIA investigated every author who put that level of detail in his books they'd do nothing else, and we'd all be in trouble
Ian Fleming though did work in Naval Intelligence during WW2. I'm not buying this "you must have experienced pain to write it". Most of us have never killed someone, yet I imagine many of us have written about it. Stephen King did use an attack he witnessed where a St. Bernard became aggressive at someone as an inspiration to write Cujo - a novel he doesn't remember writing because he was mostly high at the time.
The interesting part of that kind of crime would be the emotion guilt, and I don't think a writer imagining what extreme guilt is like would be as able to convincingly depict it as someone who had actually felt it one way or another. Not all writing needs to be this intense obviously. You can write more detached with plots more like puzzles than psychologically intense, and there's an audience for that.
Well "extreme" is proportional--you don't have nuke a village to experience extreme guilt--but I do agree that it would be more difficult to write about an emotion that one has never experienced than it would be to write an extreme experience that most people who never experience. Like killing somebody or flying a ship through an asteroid field. But to get back to your original post, it doesn't seem as if anyone here has actively created drama for the purpose of literary research. Like, I'm going to do something really out of character to see learn how to write about it.
The best writers will research the topic by interviewing actual killers. You can do a lot with empathy, even if you've never experienced that extreme level of emotion yourself.
