I heard about a guy who got arrested on purpose. He walked up to a couple sitting at a restaurant, flipped over the table and started ranting. He got arrested, alright.
Turns out, he did it because he’s an actor, and he wanted to know what it was like.
What would you do for a story? Drop acid? Join the army? Put on a bunch of weight? Go talk to engineers, watchmakers, fishers, surgeons, physicists, homeless people?
I write mostly science fiction and a bit of fantasy. I make a lot of shit up. Like, a lot. Sure, you can wear a suit that allows you to cling to walls and heals when you tear it. Yep, you can totally run a ship that has a garden instead of an engine. Go ahead, shoot with a gun that switches bullets when you shout at it.
Granted, I try to run my stories past a scientist if there’s something I’m worried about nailing after I’ve done my research (aeroponics and photovoltaic cells were SO FREAKING INTERESTING) Luckily, I know a bunch of scientists (thanks, you guys!) But sometimes you can only really get something right if you’ve experienced it, eh?
The novel I’m working on might just require me to run a couple of obstacle courses. Yeah, we’ll see how I go with that.
How about you? How far would you go for art? How far have you gone?
A Practical Crown 
One of the bravest things I ever researched for a story was corpse decomposition rates via a Google image search. Yeah. Nice.
Ew. I looked up some cannibalistic stuff once. It totally and utterly put me off. Eugh.
Put you off cannibalism? Well, that’s a relief. 😉
Hmmmmm… Horse riding on trails and in epic cold in Tassie, archery, fair bit of travel to colder climates so I can accurately describe snow & mountainous terrain, stood in the rain so I could appreciate what it really felt like to be saturated with it pouring from your hair down your cheeks and into over your mouth… Got super drunk then pretended to be a character… That’s it so far 😀
All sounds like perfectly reasonable research to me!