The Vulnerable Writer

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.”

Keep Writing or Quit?

Or not?  Image from www.henryharbor.com 

Discouraged by a year’s worth of manuscript circulation, revisions, and rejections by the A-list of editors selected by her literary agent, a friend is pondering whether to abandon what has been up until now her life’s pursuit. She’s already had success with one book and scores of short-length work, but the strain of trying to break through with a second title is taking a toll.

There are practical, logistical ways of addressing her quandary—she could try smaller publishers, work on other manuscripts, self-publish. But her larger dilemma presents itself to most of us at one time or another: Do I keep writing or quit?

I’ve been at this a long time—next year marks the 20^th anniversary of the release my first major title, A Distant Enemy. As is the case with most writing careers, it’s been an up-and-down journey of successes, discouragement, breakthroughs, and missteps. I can’t claim easy ways to decide how long any of us should continue to do what we do, but there are important questions to consider:

Why are you writing? For authors such as Marilyn Sewell, writing is a calling. Others have a single project that needs to come out, and once it’s released, they don’t feel compelled to continue.

What does success mean to you? To address this question, I suggest you write for a few minutes about the fantasies connected with your writing life If in five years, each and every one of your writer’s dreams were fulfilled, how would it all look, in terms of income, recognition, your body of work, and how you spend their time. Then take a few minutes to consider each of those areas—income, recognition, body of work, and how you’d be spending time—in terms of what you realistically think you can achieve within five years. Through this exercise, you can learn a lot about what defines success for you: money, fame, awards, the work itself, the creative life. You may also find that some of your ideas about what would make you feel successful are misguided—either internalized from others or skewed toward factors over which you have no control. When measured in terms of what actually matters to you, your writing may be delivering success in ways you’re failing to recognize.

Business or art? Where you place yourself on the continuum between business and art affects your level of satisfaction with your work. Some writers love the business angle and insist that to be successful, all must embrace it. But while it may be impossible to publish and get away from the business part altogether, who says writers must publish at all? Some of the happiest writers I know are those who don’t care about sharing their work beyond a small circle of friends.

Which stories need to be told? If your passion for a particular project is strong, get it out in the world when you’re certain it’s ready. But remain open to the possibilities for sharing it—the process by which readers find it may be different from what you first envisioned, or the timing may be at odds with what you’d hoped.

How would your life change if you didn’t write? If your days would fill with other passions that bring you more joy, your decision is easy. And bear in mind that no matter how long you’ve pursued it, writing isn’t your identity if you can happily embrace the prospect of a life without it. There’s no shame in abandoning a pursuit without having achieved every goal you’d hoped for—that’s simply a fact of life.

Deb Vanasse is the author of seventeen books with six different presses. For more on the writing life, see Write Your Best Book.