Sacrifice

Having finished today's bout of writing early (I force myself to keep expectations low; I can't afford and don't want to react to my job like a burden), and having no plans until 4 p.m., I found myself browsing TV Tropes, my favorite site for killing some time. And I found myself on the page for Enforced Method Acting, and reading some of the both hilarious and horrifying stories of things done to and by actors to get scenes just right: Mark Hamill not who Luke's father was until just before the revelation, William Friedkin discharging guns on the set of The Exorcist, the voice actor for Ikari Shinji literally strangling another actor while recording dialog for a violent scene. The list goes on and on and actually gets pretty absurd in places. And as I sat here reading it, I felt a little twisted, because I couldn't help but feel kind of jealous that they were pushed that hard.

I'm not a proponent of true art being angsty, or nonsensical, or indeed any one thing by default. But I do think art is something worth gambling on and worth doing right, whatever that means. Creative works mean more to me when I know that something about them pained the creator, that they really challenged themselves and pushed their boundaries doing it. There is a place for comfortable art, but it's not the art I'm interested in. Research topics that disgust you; show up drunk for a scene where you're supposed to be miserable; spend an hour staring at your grandmother's ashes before you try to write a biography of her life. Much as it's done to death as a joke, tears really do season art, and I am at my happiest with creations when they take me a little out of my comfort zone.

So again, I'm kind of jealous, because I don't have a director to do that to me. I can't show up drunk to my keyboard (well, I can, but I am one of those rare writers who writes total crap when intoxicated); I can't have someone fire off a gun at me; I can't actually strangle a character before I write a scene where I kill them via asphyxiation. These are impossibilities, and it makes me wish I'd found my calling somewhere else.

A little. There are stories about writers taking it that far--writers who buy cow tongue from a butcher to see what it feels like to cut it with scissors, writers who did a drug just to find out how to describe it, writers who deliberately base characters they're going to kill on people they love to get that proper wrenching feel out of the death scene.

I won't do drugs just for research purposes, given a nasty experience with hospital morphine, but I try to follow in their footsteps. I try to push a little, try to strain myself, try to find my boundaries and give them a good swift kick. Here's hoping that it really does give things some added flavor. And here's to all the artists who bled a little for their art.