Purposefully creating drama in life for material

I was going to say, I thought the term for those who create or gravitate towards drama was "drama queen".

 

Gonzo journalism.

 

It need not be an illegal or "bad" thing though.

Like I am writing a novel about an industry I have never worked in, so I have thought about asking some people in the area who work in that industry if I could join them for a day or so, just to get a better feel for what that industry is like.

I am not convinced I need too, but if I did do something like that, that would be what the original post was alluding too.

When I was a kid I went for a ride-along with a police officer. In that instance, it was just because I was a kid, but if a person did it because they were writing a story about law enforcement, that would be what the original poster was semi-talking about.

The thing is though, we got Youtube, and just about anything is on there. It is not the same as doing it in real life, but I am constantly looking up youtube videos to pick out details that make my novels better.

 

Honestly, I remember a few times in life being invited to social events or basically choosing to stay in over going out and thinking 'good, I can focus on my writing now!'

But who knows if those events might have led to inspiration for stories or insight into character ?

But yes a writer who breaks up with someone so they can write a scene about a break up would be a little insane. In fact, this itself feels like it could be a story of some kind.

Maybe stuff like this is in the back of my mind to soften the blow of tragic events. For example, I occasionally get paranoid I will someday be arrested and thrown in prison. My next thought is, 'at least I might be able to write a decent prison story out of the experience.'

 

drama in life is not the same as we experience drama in fiction. The first one fuels and traps us in one or two emotions, we just cannot get out. In the end, it is just overwhelming and negative. Of course I am not referring to wartime experiences, or anything involving understanding the human condition like that. The second it is a well formed experience, often reading on to find out how to get out of it if necessary. Compassion can take you a lot further into understanding the human heart and write a rich experience, even if imaginary.

So to answer the OP question . . . no, I don't purposefully create drama in my life just to write about it. I rather be a happy bunny. I do, however, explore events in my life or take some dramatic scene I witness by acquaintances, neighbors, strangers and then let the imagination run wild to see if it takes me somewhere interesting. It usually does.

But from social media and reality TV, I gather people do love cheap drama.

 

I read somewhere (maybe in McKee?) that by the time you're 4 years old you've experienced all the emotions in very powerful form—basically all you'll need for writing.

That covers the actual emotions themselves. Of course to get specifics of various situations it helps to have experienced some things in your life.

 

This is so ridiculously true! I once realized that almost everything I've drawn, painted or written has been either for, with or about somebody I knew. And that's just another way to say it all grew out of various kinds of relationships. Now that I live a very isolated life (no relationships) I seem to have dried up inspiration-wise.

And I know relationship doesn't have to mean romantic/sexual, it can be a friendship, an acquaintance, or even a rivalry. Any way of relating to another person that brings up emotions. But I haven't even had a decent rivalry lately.

EDIT: I just remembered—a few years back I wrote a story on a message board, and the relationship it was based on was with the people on the board. I loved that board, and there were a lot of really cool people there, some of them were real characters. It doesn't need to be a face-to-face relationship.

 

One usually experiences most nuances of the spectrum of human emotion throughout their life. From there, creation/dramatisation only requires exaggeration/imagination.

 

Intriguing question. I'm with @Madman: drama turns up by itself, like clockwork, I hardly have to go looking for it. But it depends whether it's internal or external drama that you're looking for.

External would involve car chases, robberies, stock market collapses and physical death or physical threats to life. As Christopher Hitchens said, to really know life, you have to have experienced poverty, war and love.

Internal dramas would be psychological threats and horrors such as those depicted in the 2004 film 'Closer', where no one dies but there are eye-watering betrayals and rifts. The 'Before Sunrise' trilogy (again talking about a film rather than a book, but still a story) depicted life unfolding dramatically but in an interior, psychological way - I know of at least one person who walked out of the film bored stiff because 'nothing was happening' ('just two people walking around talking'), but to me, everything was happening, and I was gripped from beginning to end.

I remember reading about Graham Greene reporting that his girlfriend said that if she were drowning, he'd observe the situation in order to write about it, rather than jumping in to save her.

 

Although almost everyone disagreed with me in this thread, I still think it's tough to write without at least using emotions you have experienced. I don't know if good writing can come from being totally detached from life. For example, could someone who lives in total isolated solitude write well? I know some writers have supposedly lived this way, though usually when you scratch the surface it turns out they had a lot more going on than their reputation suggests (Kafka comes to mind for this).

I think when writers get too disengaged from the world/relationships their work starts to suffer.

 

Mostly I aim to gather research instead of experience.

I'm very hopeful for my solitary life in the future. I've picked out a beautiful cabin in the woods to write my manifesto in... Sorry, I meant manuscript.

Red Badge of Courage is considered one of, or maybe the best, american civil war novel. Vets from that war loved it and thought it was extremely accurate. It was written by someone who had never once seen battle.

 

Yeah I'm all about research too. Whenever I start a new project I read/watch/listen to anything I can get my hands on which is even remotely related. All that feeds into my emotions for the work as well as pure facts. Of course I'll be drawing on archetypal emotions I have experienced myself (disappointment, regret, excitement, etc), but they very much get bolstered and shaped by the research material I'm taking in.

 

I think in life, we all experience dramas whether we go looking for it or not... in writing I use many of my experiences for inspiration, and incorporate those into my characters. For example, in the story I am writing at the moment, the main character has gone through a relationship with a narcissistic and emotionally abusive man. I drew inspiration from my own experience, but I certainly didn't want to live through that drama!
My character is also a brutal, emotionally unstable sky pirate who will do just about anything to achieve her goals. There are some things you just can't experience for yourself, and that's where the imagination comes in as a writer! Also from reading other sources.

 

Life sucks; use it.

I never lie in fiction; I only distort, stretch, twist, allegorize, and re-skin true stories.

 

Fair point. It's certainly possible to access those emotions while living cut off from human contact. But I think creativity works better in tandem with connectivity. When you're both apart from and a part of society. There's a danger, in my view, of work getting quite masturbatory once writers live in a bubble.

Some visceral life experiences work to shake things up in the mind and stop one from merely stagnating personally. Yes, there have been successful writers who just lived in equivalents of gilded cages and wrote all day (Updike!) But well, I never liked Updike.

 

I do some of my best work when detached and disengaged from the world.