Career Writers: Embrace Paradox
By Kathryn Craft | November 14, 2019 |
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
At the Writer UnBoxed UnConference last week, I led a session in which we explored emotional strategies that would keep writers in good stead for the long haul. Of the many we discussed, the necessity of embracing paradox struck a fresh chord with those present, so I thought I’d expand on that in today’s post.
To embrace paradox means to hold diametrically opposed concepts as equally true. Wisdom literature is rife with paradox, suggesting that we receive through giving, gain through losing, and live through dying. “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it,” said Mahatma Ghandi. Experienced writers have personal experience with this truth. Comedians make use of the inherent absurdity of paradox all the time, from Ellen DeGeneres’s “Procrastinate now. Don’t put it off,” to George Carlin’s “If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?”
As a literary device, a paradox asks the reader to puzzle through a challenging concept. Consider these examples:
“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” This statement from George Orwell’s Animal Farm certainly has the sting of political truth about it.
“The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb,” from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, makes us think about the way nature both gives and takes away life.
“Child is the father of the man”—this phrase from William Wordsworth is a concise way of saying that all childhood experiences lay the groundwork for our future lives; in that way our childhoods “father” us as adults.
As a reader, does encountering paradox excite you or make you toss your literary cookies and run for the hills? As a career writer, you’d best make friends with it, because the writer’s life is full of paradox. A few for your consideration:
Writers must have intense focus but breadth of perception.
Writers must believe in their salability even as they receive rejection after rejection.
Published writers must believe in their worth, yet few will receive life-sustaining paychecks.
Fiction writers make things up to seek the truth.
Authors must invest fully in creating and promoting their product while detaching from its commercial and critical success.
Sound crazymaking? It’s the way of paradox. Yet creatives are well suited to its challenges; we are used to being both “this and that.” In any one writing session we might be both mother and child, healer and destroyer. A powerful wizard or a humble shoemaker.
If this much paradox feels overwhelming, start with the basics.
Start with these crucial paradoxes
As concerns the inner wars of a writer, two seem universal.
1) The ongoing fight for dominance between your creative innocence and your inner critic.
Because our need for creativity is self-evident, our poor inner critics have been demonized to the point that many speak of switching off this valuable creative partner while drafting. I only suggest doing so if you are truly stuck in the mire of perfectionism. Without the influence of your inner critic, you might amass plenty of black marks on previously white pages, but did any of them create words that point you into the depths of your story? Despite our need to quantify progress and slap something down on the page, word count is not our ultimate goal. Story is.
Have you ever thought of what would happen if you gave your inner critic a permanent boot? Your ego would be a runaway train. Improving your work would be impossible because it was perfect to begin with! Even if you got a publishing deal, you’d be unable to work with your editor to mold the work into its most marketable shape. Self-publishing would not be a viable fallback position—without a keenly developed inner editor, your efforts would not take you far.
Embrace both. Critical thinking is key to a successful creative career.
2) The second ongoing fight is waged between your inner artist and your inner businessperson.
I’d be surprised if your inner creative wasn’t your favorite child. Yet if we writers have the capacity to embody all characters while bringing any one scene to the page, why in real life are we always trying to give our inner businessperson the hook—especially when she might be the one holding the key to commercial success?
Writing is an art and publishing is a business, and your happiness (and perhaps your sanity) depends on embracing both. Accepting this challenge is freeing. Think of this the next time an editor tells you, “We honor your process and want to give you all the time you need, of course, but if you could turn those edits around in a week that would be great.”
By pursuing publication you are choosing to move into new digs, and they are located right on the corner of Bohemia and Wall Street. When you look down at the intersection from your second-story writing room, will you see only traffic crashes and bloody casualties, or the flow of opportunity that now surrounds you? The choice is yours.
A writer’s need for emotional balance comes to the fore while bearing down on deadlines, slogging through submission, and worrying over launches, when stress convinces us that only a high-wire act can keep us from falling into a pit of anxiety. Embracing paradox can switch up that metaphor. You aren’t on a high wire after all—you’re on the ground, with one foot planted in a necessarily self-critical territory and the other planted in creative hope. This is a position of strength.
While embracing paradox will help you stay centered, publishing can be a tough arena in which to practice. We work in a “hurry up and wait” industry, and when pushed into either extreme, it can feel like you’re back up on that wire. At such times, when your balance feels wobbly, try your best to embrace this most basic paradoxical truth:
Setbacks and reversals are manna for the creative mind and have their own rewards.
There is a Buddhist saying: “A moment of stress only holds on as long as the heart does not let go.”
Ah, paradox. Our ability to embrace it is a mad skill, and it will hold us in good stead as we navigate the highs and lows of the writing life.
Which of the listed paradoxes do you find most challenging? Can you find a way to love that challenge? Share the love in the comments.
[coffee]
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her forthcoming book, Crafting Story Movement: Techniques to Engage Readers and Drive Your Novel Forward, draws from decades of experience as both a story consultant and a movement specialist/dance critic. Learn more on Kathryn’s website.
I really enjoyed your session, Kathryn. Even just sitting at a table full of colleagues, checking off items from your list of writerly struggles and hindrances felt cathartic (we all made lots of check-marks!).
The paradoxes are real. And extremely challenging. But there’s something comforting and freeing about being among our fellow writers and acknowledging them. UnCon has gifted me with renewed determination, and you were no small part of that.
Thanks for expanding on a far-too-brief and important session. It was wonderful (WUnderful?) catching up with you!
Thanks so much, Vaughn. Yeah, pretty sure that could have been a full-day session! Great to see you (and Maureen) too!
This is such a helpful post, Kathryn. I’ve always viewed the paradoxes you mention as sources of conflict, mostly bad vs. good, or even, right vs. wrong (It’s wrong to write for profit kind of thinking). This journey will be so much easier now that I see both sides are viable and integral parts of the journey. Thank you.
Hi Dawn, it is freeing, isn’t it? Once you surrender and accept the dual realities, you can turn the energy used to fight against the conflict to more useful purposes! Great to meet you in Salem.
It was great meeting you too! What an amazing conference.
You did such a great (and eloquent) job of articulating the sometimes painful realities of writing and the business of writing. I’ve been doing this a long time, but until reading your marvelous post, I don’t think I ever felt as understood.
Opportunity or chaos, often both at the same moment, characterize our profession. Thank you so much for your insight.
Oh Stacey, that makes me so happy! Believe me—I see you.
Oh, Kathryn, yes, yes, yes!!! I’ve always believed that paradox was the well-disguised container of wisdom, but you’ve proved with in this post. Hurry up and wait is probably my biggest bugaboo but I relate to all of them. Wish I’d been there to hear you speak! Bohemia and Wall Street. Amen.
So if we live at the corner of Bohemia and Wall Street, do we have to wear a shirt and tie with our pajama bottoms? 😂
Great to hear from you, Susan!
Kathryn, you’ve done it again (as always). A beautifully written essay on a profound subject. I would only add that paradox is at the heart of life for everyone in our Western culture—which is so deeply shaped around polarities of yes-no, right-wrong, strength-weakness, etc. etc. Other cultures don’t divide reality that way, and thus paradox is understood as the natural state. We Westerners start from behind, so we have to work at it in order to embrace complexity, ambiguity, and the multiple truths that, in fact, enrich us.
That’s wonderful perspective, Barbara, thanks for sharing this context!
Kathryn, this is simply wonderful. Yes, this writing life is full of contradictions but what a great blessing! I find the business aspects difficult, though a necessity. Writing is always such a joy. I try to remember Pushkin’s: Write for pleasure, publish for money.
Vijaya: Before I figured this piece out, I’d always said, “I’m in it for the whole wild ride.” What I didn’t yet realize was that there would be times when I’d experience that whole wild ride in any given minute!
Maybe try to find the aspects of the business that you do enjoy, and do more of that? I swear people can feel our tension and revulsion through our word choices, even in queries and social media posts. Instead of the dreaded word “marketing,” perhaps consider that you are spreading your natural enthusiasm and love for your work. Worth a try?
It’s precisely my love of the story and my desire to share it that makes the book promotion a mite easier.
Other writing paradoxes:
The more you are motivated by publication, the longer it will take to get there.
Plot doesn’t grip the heart; inner journey doesn’t grab the mind.
Premise makes for good pitch; emotional punch can’t be described.
The thing you fear to touch is what your manuscript needs the most.
You write in solitude, but with multitudes around. You are read by multitudes but feel alone.
Early readers react to what you’ve written, but rarely can tell you what you’ve left out.
Kathryn Craft is a great teacher of fiction technique; a great teacher of fiction technique is Kathryn Craft.
…wait, that last one wasn’t a paradox. Oh, well. Great to see you at Un-Con. Yes, I was there but I wasn’t. A paradox!
These two especially, I think:
The thing you fear to touch is what your manuscript needs the most.
You write in solitude, but with multitudes around. You are read by multitudes but feel alone.
Love these, Ben! Thanks for the compliment as well. I suppose that if we expect to create worlds we can’t settle for looking at anything in only one way.
This post was exactly what I needed to hear today! The paradox I am in the middle of is: my writing feels like the most important thing to me, but I have little time for it. My career is a huge crunch of time and energy, and yet I need the income to support my writing. But in the spirit of embracing paradigms, I will endeavor to view this challenge from the perspective of gratitude to have steady income while I am pursuing writing with a goal of publication.
Thanks Kathryn!
That sounds like a plan, Riina. So many of us struggle with this one but striving to stay in a space of gratitude is usually a winner.
Kathryn, your are one amazing writing teacher and that is not a paradox, but the truth.
Aw Beth. That a comment was like a hug. I’ll take it! xoxo
Great article. Soothes my mind and heart as I transition from UnCon to the mundane world.
Ah, another paradox Amelia! Living with one foot at home and the other still in Salem. xo
Kathryn, it was great to see you again at the conference. Both paradoxes resonate with me, though the one that gives me the greatest amount of angst is the first one. A healthy balance between the creativity and the inner critic is the sweet spot, but the critic speaks with a loud voice. As for the latter I have never written with a market driven approach, but I suspect the business aspect goes deeper than genre selection. At any rate this is an excellent reminder of the paradoxes we face as writers with sage advice on how to navigate them,
Thanks Chris. I get what you are saying about that loud critical voice. In word count alone a novel can give you 90,000 reasons to doubt your choice! (Wait, that didn’t make you feel better, did it…). Just know that voice can be a powerful colleague. And great to see you too!
Thanks for another thoughtful post, Kathryn.
A favorite paradox of mine is: “There’s a word for someone who chooses between keeping their feet on the ground and their head in the clouds — short.”
😄
Thanks for reading, Ken!
Kathryn,
Another paradox: I’m happy to have retirement income. More time to write and develop skills. But truly regret not sacrificing a second income to focus on writing earlier in my life. Thanks for this post and being so generous with your time and talent at Uncon.
That is a common regret among those of us who came to writing fiction late, Penny. Butjust think of all the rich story material we accumulated during those years, not to mention the maturation of our perspective!
Waste not one more second thinking about it though—we only have so much time left, and must make good use of it!
Great to meet you in Salem.
This was well worth the read! Bravo for writing it.
Thanks so much Gila!