How Far Would You go in the Name of Research?

Kitty Johnson

We’ve all heard about method actors who go to extreme lengths to get into character for their roles. These actors feel they need to really experience the lives of their characters. For example, to play the character of Christy Brown in My Left Foot about a disabled man, Daniel Day-Lewis refused to leave his wheelchair for the whole duration of the filming. Robert de Niro became a taxi driver for his role in Taxi Driver and learnt to box for Raging Bull. It’s also very common for actors to gain or lose weight for their roles – Christian Bale weighed only 122 pounds for his role in The Machinist, and Ann Hathaway lost 25 pounds and cut off all her hair for her role in Les Miserables.

These days we almost take such behavior by actors for granted. But what about writers? Do we need to deliberately set out to experience situations for the sake of our writing? Surely not. After all, we’re writers – we should have enough imagination without doing that, right?

Well actually, yes and no. I think it depends on what you’re writing about. Authors of detective stories are not going to kill people to find out what it feels like to be a murderer. At least, I hope not! But they are likely to draw on their experience of grief when writing about the victims of such crimes. 

I’ve recently started writing a novel with a main character who wants to perform stand-up comedy. She likes to challenge herself to do scary things as a way of feeling alive and to remind herself she can be brave, and she’s also sick of her job and trying to find a new direction. My intention too, is that the reader will learn more about her through the material she chooses to write and perform, and to create conflict within her family when they’re not happy about something she shares. 

Of course, I couldn’t just write about someone starting to perform stand-up comedy without having a go myself, so, earlier this year, I signed up for an online stand-up comedy course which culminated in a five-minute performance to fellow students. 

It was fabulous to be back, because for me, this was a refresher course – I’ve written about a character trying stand-up before, in my self-published novel The Dare Club, about a group of newly-separated people setting each other challenges to forget about their problems. Apart from experiencing the sheer terror and emotions of it, I needed to learn some techniques for writing jokes and such banal things as how to deal with the microphone on stage. So, that first time, I booked myself on a weekend stand-up comedy course in London, and then, two months later, I returned to perform a 3-minute stand-up comedy routine in a Greenwich comedy club. 

It was an absolutely terrifying but completely empowering experience. Waiting in the upstairs room with the other performers, feverishly repeating my routine to myself to make sure I knew it off by heart. Going downstairs to sit in one of the chairs arranged around the back of the club behind the audience, moving on to the next chair as comedians performed, all the time getting progressively to that stage. Then, finally, going up on stage into the dazzling lights, dealing with the mic, and saying that first hello. Launching into my act. And the laughter! When people laughed – admittedly, the audience consisted of supportive friends and family, but even so – it felt fantastic. I was buzzing for weeks afterwards.

Now that I’ve got a taste for challenging myself, in the future I might even choose to write more novels that involve me doing exciting research. Though maybe not quite in the way I stated at the end of my stand-up comedy performance in Greenwich.

People say to me – “If you wrote murder fiction, would you actually kill someone to find out what it feels like?” I say, of course not. But I might put an orgy in my next book…

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Kitty Johnson is the author of Five Winters. She has an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia and teaches occasional creative writing classes. A nature lover and artist, Kitty enjoys walking in woodland and on the coast with her dog and makes collages and paintings from the landscape. She loves a challenge and once performed stand-up comedy as research for a book—an experience she found very scary but hugely empowering. Kitty lives in Norwich, Norfolk, in the UK with her partner and teenage son. 

Kitty also writes as Margaret K Johnson.

Website: https://www.kittyjohnsonbooks.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kittyjohnsonbooks

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/kittyjohnsonbooks

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing