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| Image from www.monahaydar.com |
Don’t get me wrong—I love writing. But in
nearly twenty years of writing and publishing, I’m also well aware of the
pitfalls of a writer’s existence, the cumulative effect of which results in discouragement
and thoughts of quitting, even for the cheeriest types.
On many fronts, writers are vulnerable.
But this isn’t all bad. Yes, Maslow identifies safety
and security as primary human needs. But risk is inherent to creativity, and
when you put yourself out there, you’re going to feel vulnerable. Vulnerability
also has much to do with why we travel, putting ourselves outside our so-called
comfort zones. It also has much to do with why we read—on the page, we
experience vicarious vulnerability without compromising our safety.
Safety
and security benefit with individual, but vulnerability furthers us
collectively, as a culture and as a society. It certainly enhances our creative
work. “A big part of writing is developing the capacity to expose yourself on
the page,” says Steve
Almond. Where we feel most ashamed, most vulnerable, we are also most
likely to connect with our readers.
In “You and Your Characters,” literary
agent Donald Maass
urges authors to find the points of connection between themselves and their
protagonists—and to delve deep into these parallels by probing shared
vulnerabilities. “What fear is closest to your own darkest dread?” he prompts
writers to ask. “What decision has an impossible cost, a cost you’ve paid
yourself?”
In a talk I gave yesterday at Beach Books, I spoke of how
vulnerability works into two titles that, on the surface, appear to be quite
different. In the novel Cold Spell, a
husband leaves his wife and young daughters. Vulnerable and exposed, the wife
becomes obsessed with a glacier and the latent power bound up in ice, while the
daughter struggles with the vulnerability and power in her sexual coming of
age.
Because I write less from ideas than from
voice and character, I wasn’t thinking of any connecting points from this novel
to Wealth
Woman, the biography of a nineteenth century Native woman, Kate
Carmack. In subsistence cultures like Kate’s, hunting and foraging involve more
inherent vulnerability than in well-established agrarian or industrial
societies.
The stories Kate grew up with were thus more about avoiding risks
than taking them. When we live in relative safety, we can afford to be
attracted to risk. Yet Kate made herself vulnerable for the sake of her
community, and her community in turn became vulnerable as outsiders stampeded
in search of wealth—wealth that on the surface would appear to bring safety and
security but which in many ways makes us more vulnerable.
In my writing—and I trust in yours—these
ideas reveal themselves after the fact, as the characters, real or fictional,
spin themselves out on the page. If you want depth in your work, you can’t
afford to go easy on your characters. You can’t coddle them.
“I want characters at the end of their
ropes,” Almond says. “It’s far too late in the history of our species for
sophisticated poses.”
