One of my favorite actors of all time is Daniel Day Lewis. He was Butcher Bill in Gangs of New York (2000), There Will Be Blood (2007), Phantom Thread (2017), and The Boxer (1997). Legend has it, he’s a method actor who becomes these characters so much, it is wondered that if by the time the film starts rolling, is he even acting at all?
With Gangs of New York, he was rude to waitresses with the film crew when they went out to dinner between shoots. In Phantom Thread he learned for a full year of how to make dresses himself with the New York Ballet. He learned so much about oil tycoons in the 19th century, the director allowed him to make up his own lines often because of how aware he was of the way they spoke when filming There Will Be Blood.
The time spent studying these roles induced incredible stress on Lewis, but the results speak for themselves as he is an icon of incredible acting even after his latest announcement of retirement. It is here, I will encourage you to do the same.
Of course, within your limits. I don’t want you to burn out. I just want you to immerse yourself, and that is what we will focus on today.
Learn Something New.
When I was planning out my 6th novel, Mississippi on Ice, I didn’t start by taking courses. It started with a general interest. I was most fascinated by a single question that spurred a year-long obsession of mine, and that was, “Can you live in Antarctica?” To most people, the Google search would end there, but to me, it led to another question, and another. Previous to this, I was fascinated with bartending. I’d gotten my own mixing kit, and had played with mixing cocktails for my wife and myself, but I hadn’t taken it seriously until I underwent the planning of this book. I realized in Antarctica, the only way to remain there year-round was to have a job or a trade. One of these trades being bartenders, as there were at the time of my initial research three places you could pick up a drink in a public building. It was at this point, my journey into obsession began.
I started by watching hours and hours of bartenders working on various cocktails, and learning from google the names of all the tools of the trade. The difference between a Boston Shaker, and a Cobbler shaker, what kind of jiggers there are, and what is the best shaped ice to put in your drink. There was so much to learn, and like many other things, I felt like the more I learned about it, the more I didn’t know. This creates a cycle of learning more and more until you realize there’s only one option left after all the internet searching you can do for yourself.
I had to apply this skill practically. Of course, I could have taught the readers of all the answers Google had taught me, but it’s one thing to read it online, and another beast entirely to practice it practically. With this in mind, my wife surprised me by signing me up for a bartending class at my local community college. There, I had learned so many interesting idiosyncrasies, and picked up skills like learning where the liquor well is, and how to get used to where each bottle is throughout a shift.
With the information I’d picked up in class, I was finally confident in using what I’d learned to write a character who plays one.
Tell Me What You Learned.
It might be the nerd in me that says this, but I believe learning can be fun. In your adventures and short-term obsessions, apply what you’ve spent all that time looking up to what you’re writing. It doesn’t matter if you looked up how to make shoes, making sour dough bread, or even memorizing state flags for fun. Show us what you’ve learned, and it will add to your depth as a person for writing. Dan Simmons, one of my favorite authors of all-time who wrote books like The Terror and Abominable, became a high-altitude mountaineer before writing such books, and it deepened his understanding of the material before moving forward with it as a plot to a novel.
Use that micro focus to build what your character’s world is like. Even if it’s not a hobby, perhaps it’s a job you’ve had in the past with things about it you wish other people knew. I worked pest control for a few years, and learned things like, cockroaches only infest your house if there’s food for them there. Bed bugs don’t care how clean your house is. I also learned rats are neophobic, which means they are afraid of new things, and won’t go near your bait stations if you move them all the time. You want the rat to know that object won’t move if they go near it. Mice, on the other hand will run right out and get into the snap-trap before you even leave the room. I’ve also learned while working in the movies what the butter looks like before it is liquified for your popcorn, and how on average most people who learn the truth avoid the butter altogether. Of course, I learned skills as an infantryman in my twenties, and that came in handy for my Vacation Planet Series.
The point is, don’t just apply what you already know, use those little hyper focused project you started a hundred times to tell us something new about it. Three years ago, I taught myself how to play the ukulele, and I’m excited to apply it to a secret project I’ve been playing with lately.
Just show us what you’ve learned.
Learning Builds Your Writing.
After you’ve done all of this research and applied it to your writing, it not only informs the reader, but it builds the world. If you, like myself, have an interest in history, it’s possible your writing involves some ancient lost ruins that show some regularities with the dead culture, but perhaps something key about it is “off”, and you can explain why with exposition. It will also make your characters smarter. They say, “characters are only as smart as their writers”, and boy, is it true. It’s supremely difficult to build a world or design an intelligent character if you’ve done none of the research yourself. You perhaps are unaware of how your breath sounds when it freezes at -80 degrees Fahrenheit. Perhaps the texture of pottery when it’s newly dried after being in a kiln, or how awkward a sword feels if the blacksmith is more novice in his field.
Whatever the subject, your readers will feel like they’ve not only learned something from their journey through your story, but they’ve also lived it as well through you. Along the way you told them what burned black powder smells like, or the taste of bitter mead because too much yeast was added, or a watered down cocktail because you shook the mixer for too long. It adds a depth to your world that wasn’t there before. If writers build solely off of what they’ve known for decades, then the reader will unintentionally read about the same characters all of the time. Perhaps you should study how other cultures treat criminals, or the wealthy. Immerse yourself in what is normal in one country but is taboo in another. Find that thing, and learn it so you can apply it to your own writing, building up your personal toolset of writing knowledge.
The Challenge.
Write this week even for a few minutes about something you learned that stood out to you. What experience at a job can you use in your future writing? It doesn’t matter if you’ve worked at Best Buy or at a call center, just show what you learned from those experiences that you can use for your writing in the future. What hobbies do you have, or wish you had? Did you learn an instrument, and if so, what small quirks to that instrument can be applied to what a bard knows in a fantasy tale? What sound does it make when it goes out of tune when the conductor points at you?
Just find that thing and write it. Show us your writing on that subject is so clean and particular that it makes us question if you’re even making up the story.
Become a method writer.
