Method Writing
On the poverty of the imagination, suffering for your art and method writing as a version of structured reality.
My reasons for training were partly cynical and partly opportunistic. I hadn’t written anything that felt real to me for some time having lost my transcendental faith in writing. Something like what DeLillo called a ‘kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment.’
When I began, I only intended to stay long enough for one match and then I would use my experiences to write some short stories about pro wrestling. But the experience was so challenging and validating, I found myself fully immersed within the practice.
For a time, I forgot about writing entirely though it was never far from my mind. I suspected I would write something up about it but the thought of writing about my experiences felt to me like a derivative activity, something like a report you would do in school after the summer holidays and the writing up would just be a procedural that even if it showed some flair, would still be chronological and artless. It felt to me something what Norman Mailer (2007) worried about fact-based writing in terms of his ‘poverty of the imagination’. I thought non-fiction was just writing down what happened!
The notion of method acting has been around for some time. As Hadley Freeman (2021) writes:
For decades, this has been the general feeling about actors: the more method, the better. After all, if they don’t eat raw bison and sleep in an animal carcass (Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant), stay in a wheelchair and be spoon-fed by the crew (Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot) or lose so much weight that they start to go blind (Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club), they’re just playing make-believe. And why should they get all that fame, adoration and money just for that?
However, in a recent feature in The New York Times, the actor Jeremy Strong came under fire for ‘not getting the joke’. Strong stars as Kendall Roy in HBO’s Succession (2018-present), a comedy drama based on the machinations of a global media dynasty something like the Murdoch’s.
In the piece, Michael Shulman (2021) paints Strong as somebody with a preening intensity and monk-like solemnity. Strong claims to take his character’s life as seriously as his own, which appears to be very seriously indeed, and Schulman believes a certain naiveté on the part of Strong, playing the character straight, unable to see the joke is part of what makes the performance so effective.
The piece was roundly (and correctly) pilloried for its dismissive take on Strong and the way sources were used from his colleagues to suggest not only was his method was madness, but that he wasn’t in the same league as the big boys.
A HUNGER ARTIST
Nevertheless, Shulman’s piece suggests some of the sheen of the method actor may have worn off. At its height, method acting is a boy’s club and a form of the starving artist par excellence. Like the Franz Kafka story A Hunger Artist in which an artist starves himself in a cage for the enjoyment of spectators.
The hunger artist became famous though still felt dissatisfied, and as fashioned changed and the public interest waned in his performance, he became even more determined to starve himself until he vanished from his cage. The story is a joke about how artistic solemnity and self-abnegation means more to the performer than the crowd.
While method acting may enable its practitioners to perform to a higher standard, how much of the method, like my foray into pro wrestling, is the performance itself? Strong’s co-star on Succession, Brian Cox, says that method acting, like authentic casting, ignores the craft of acting (Cox, 2021).
If somebody is the thing that they portray, then is that acting? Isn’t the art in the craft? In the imagination? In an embodied performance of artistic skill and empathy? I have some sympathy with the view that acting is acting. The same as novels are about making things up. But the relationship with the real does contribute to the strength of a style. When Italian-Americans, some with criminal pasts or mob-connections were cast to play roles in The Soprano’s, this was seen as a good thing and something that added to the realism of the show.
As a lover of creative non-fiction with an addition to the ‘thrill of the real’, I like my creative non-fiction (if at least not some of my fiction) to be 99.1% pure meth, the kind of blue crystal purity of Walter White’s potent cooks. It’s a reduction and impossibility to think anything can be ‘real’ but that’s the aspiration and making things as authentic as possible can make for a heady aesthetic high as well as correcting some imbalances in terms of off-screen casting and power.
Authentic casting has its place, as does authentic experience in novel writing, ethically, artistically and in terms of inclusion. But some marginalised writers are raising the problem of being pigeon-holed into the kinds of things that those marginalised are expected to write and the parameters of identity can limit both ways. If being an Italian-American with possible mob-connections makes you authentic, does that then mean you can’t play other roles and characters? Must artists be prisoners of their own experience?
Monica Ali (2022) has complained of the limitations of representation from lived experience and only being allowed to write ‘brown people’. Similarly, Brandon Taylor (2022) says, ‘I first started to write out of a desire to write someone like myself into the canon. But I soon felt I'd exhausted the idea of representation and wanted to move onto deeper questions.’
There is something live about representational art that is able to portray the brutal tenderness and tender brutality of the world accurately. Small details matter to me. Points of verisimilitude. The authenticity of lived experience to paragraph Nabokov, is like a clean bullet in flabby flesh.
I am reluctant to write outside of my experience because my writing feels weaker that way, though I would be open to the possibility of others do so provided they did it respectfully, in dialogue with those they represent and with sufficient artistic quality to make it believable. While many now fear or claim they’re not ‘allowed’ to write outside their experience, that’s not necessarily the view of these novelists. It’s as much about what and how and done ‘with care’ as Hari Kunzru puts it but there is an ‘ethical urgency’ to explore the subjectivities of others. Here a failure of art becomes a moral failing.
This kind of reality-based art I favour requires research and knowledge of the ‘real’ situations it seeks to depict, which is what method acting is as well as craft. Like literature, some artists are able to imagine while others find their material grounded in reality. But how far can method go? Would a death scene in a film benefit from actually killing an actor? Does un-simulated sex that’s tastefully shot look any different to simulated sex? Should actors punch one another in the face for real? Interesting, De Niro getting in shape to play Jake LaMotta and then gaining 60 lbs, for instance, or Christian Bale’s extreme weight loss in The Machinist are garlanded, while Daniel Craig getting jacked to play James Bond or Chris Hemsworth bulking up to play Thor are not offered the same artistic credibility.
People don’t win Oscars for getting buff. It matters that De Niro looked in shape in the ring, it matters that Day Lewis will have gained some understanding of being confined to a wheelchair, it matters that Charlize Theron gained 30 lbs to play the serial-killer Aileen Wuorno – in as much as it adds to the performance on screen.
Hadley Freeman asks:
And seriously, what is the deal with “method acting”? Why not “method writing”, or “method interior designing”? If a novelist lived like his characters while writing a book, people would think he was insane – why laud it in actors?
I agree with the point of Freeman’s article that the end result is all that’s important but disagree on the point about ‘method’ writing. It is not unusual for writers to conduct research. For most, this amounts to some reading, perhaps a trip somewhere and maybe some experience of something, like Toby Litt for example taking part in Cumberland wrestling or going to a recording of WWE Smackdown for his book Wrestliana (Litt, 2018). It is writers of creative non-fiction who are more likely to take part in immersive research and writers of autofiction who are most likely to use their own lives as material.
It may seem mad, if not wholly implausible, for Andrzej Sapkowski to pretend to be a monster-hunter Witcher, and yield negligible results given the extent of the fantasy. But it might not be a bad idea for somebody writing a book about pro wrestling to go method and become a wrestler. Growing up as the son of the wrestler and with some insider knowledge, I had a sense of what the world of wrestling was like, and wrote a few short stories based on legends my dad had told me, though it all wrote fake, like fiction. The only way to surpass that was to become a wrestler myself and articulate the lived experience of being a wrestler.
Method acting is a rehearsal technique which essentially enables performers to understand a character’s inner motivations and feelings by taking part in experiences that the performer comes to embody. But even so, it’s not sufficient to simply be the thing: to have the experience. This knowledge needs the craft of artistry to truly illuminate it. I can’t just write down what happened and that’s that. Similarly, I wouldn’t be the best person to play myself in a biopic because despite having lived the experience, I wouldn’t be able to remember my lines, nail the role or be myself authentically on screen. Whereas if I had the acting skills of Tom Hardy, perhaps I would.
In my version of method writing, instead of rehearsing for a performance like a novel, I ended up part of my own structured reality. In this respect, the experience enabled me to rehearse feelings and experiences that would be useful for a narrative, but it had the effect of dramatizing my own life in the way that reality television does. In this sense, the first draft of the novel would be performed by myself as a pro wrestler and self-conscious protagonist within a future novel in my search to find a strong style and the realest way to wrestle.
STRUCTURED REALITY
This created another paradox in the search for realism. I had abandoned novelly novels in favour of pursuing a literary equivalent of strong style, only to find myself in self-consciously willing scenarios that would be more conducive to a narrative arc rather like structured reality television shows where participants are placed scenes are pre-arranged for the purposes of entertainment.
Shows like Made in Chelsea, Jersey Shore and The Only Way Is Essex feature ‘real’ characters who play versions of themselves. Made in Chelsea, for instance, centres on the trials and tribulations of a bunch of Sloane Rangers who keep the production crew up to date with their comings and goings and allow some situations to be constructed for dramatic potential. Like kayfabe, it’s difficult to know exactly where on-stage persona begins and ends but the impression watching real lives as if they were a soap opera.
Many of the more interesting strands where those beyond the structured reality of my foray into pro wrestling and the difficulty became finding a satisfying conclusion to the story while many of thoughts and memories were still taking shape.
It wasn’t until I had retired from pro wrestling, become a dad, give up drinking, that I was able to properly reflect on what had gone on. It was like leaving a decompression chamber: I had to reduce the gas in my veins after the experience of being a pro wrestler.
Norman Mailer (2007) said:
One of my basic notions for a long, long time is that there is this mysterious mountain out there called reality. We novelists are always trying to climb it. We are mountaineers, and the question is, Which face do you attack? Different faces call for different approaches, and some demand a knotty and convoluted interior style. Others demand great simplicity. The point is that style is an attack on the nature of reality.
I wanted to write as simply and unselfconsciously as possible, mimicking in part the carefree ruminations and insistence on sincerity above style of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s method, combined with a need to hold nothing back emotionally, that the content would be no-holds-barred. Style is how writers mediate reality and an overly baroque a style reeks of confection and artistry.
Whereas a more matter of fact tone, a certain flatness of voice and even appearance of being un-crafted works better for getting to the heart of the material. Mailer (2007) said his style was ‘virtually nonexistent’ ( in The Executioner’s Song and that all he had to do was write simply because the material was so good.
Similarly, I was exhausted by fine writing, the supposed transcendent lyricism that was really sublimated religiosity within the bourgeois canon and the exhausting attempts of postmodern novelists to make war with cliché. Strong style in a literary context would be hard-hitting, emotionally sincere and without some of the formal excess of the literary novel. It is writing invisibly.
In some ways the ancestors of Breaking Kayfabe are George Plimpton’s series of creative non-fiction works in which he volunteered himself as an amateur into the worlds of professional sportsmen.
In Out of My League (Plimpton, 2016), originally published in 1961, he attempted to see if he could strike out a major league baseball star with amusing, if humiliating consequences. Other forays into boxing, American football, ice hockey and other sports followed in which the gentleman amateur pitted himself against the professional, often with amusing and self-deprecating consequences.
The writing of Kayfabe began in this spirit, as a project with the vague motivation of realising the author’s childhood dream of becoming a pro wrestler having learned the basics in a field one summer with his former pro wrestling champion dad, and the focussed on exploring the world of wrestling as ethnography and relaying details about training and the mythos through embedded information.
The story had deeper routes though, and rather than the gentleman amateur, I was ended up wrestling for four years for many of the biggest promotions in the UK, main-evented shows and won titles, including the All England Championship. I had surpassed the rank of amateur and caught between something formally and personally straightforward and something more conventionally creative non-fictive. With the urging of my doctorial supervisor, David Flusfeder, I focused more on the personal reasons for becoming a wrestler. The story then broadened out into something more auto-fictive, in which the performance of the self would take place in the ring and on the page in its retelling. Perhaps, there was method in the madness after all.