Day Ninety-Five, Ninety-Six, and Ninety-Seven: Bridal Shower and Research

So I had been doing so well on this blog, and then (noise of something falling off a building into the air and down) Crash.

Friday was the bridal shower, where I received this amazing bracelet of the Deathly Hallows symbol. I am wearing it all of the times. 

Saturday and Sunday, we volunteered at various things around town, including Mardra Sikora and Marcus Sikora's film debut of Black Day. 

I also did research on one of the scarier things in my book. And something arose within the research and themes of my book that I hadn't really dove into. And that's how far do you go for research?

I'm not talking about how much research one should do versus how much writing one should do. I'm talking about the depths I've found that writers are willing to go in order to understand the reality of a situation.

One that comes to mind is Strindberg, who would date and/or marry women so he could set their relationships in situations that would mirror the stories he wanted to write. So he would manipulate his lover into some sort of scenario, and then he would write down their dialogue verbatim. 

How awful is that? 

This came to mind while looking at the scientific method, or how far science will go. How much some scientists have gone in their exploration, hurting themselves and others. I mean, think about Marie Curie. 

It's a cousin to the question of how far you go in memoir, and the more I write, the more I think to myself that perhaps all art constantly butts heads against a personal life. Even outside of research, you also have the idea of personal responsibility to those who exist in our Muggle world. 

It's a well known fact that artists are awful partners. Dickens was a brilliant author and an awful husband and father. I myself didn't date a lot when I was in high school and college, because I didn't want a distraction from my work. I decided a long time ago that I would only give a good chunk of my time to someone who I really loved, and look, the wedding's in a week.

So how do we balance our sense of self as a person and our sacrifice as an artist? I think there has to be a balance. I don't think we can give up our art, and I really don't think we should give up ourselves in order to create art. They need to work together, or neither will work.