On Era-Shock and Other Potential for Overwhelm-ment

I was realizing today that my last month of research before plowing into writing this NaNoWriSpr manuscript might be pretty intense at times. Good thing it's the holidays so I'll have breaks, and in the spring I'll have teaching and occasional academic writing to balance it out, because I can tell already that this will be intense at times.

It's not the writing that bothers me. I'm pretty sure I can do the writing. It won't be perfect all the time, but past experience has shown me I can produce large chunks of text.

Here's what worries me:

• Era-shock: This novel's set in a different place and time. I've lived in other cultures for months at a time before, and it can be exhausting to process all that difference. While I'll have respites from this other culture and time, I'm trying to think my way into this different world, and that's going to be overwhelming at times.
• Emotional Contagion from Main Characters: As often happens in fiction, things will go wrong for my characters. Regularly. That often happens in Story. I'm going to have to work through their emotions with them. That's going to dredge some stuff up. They'll probably drag me down with their bad moods some days.
• Dealing with Ongoing Conflict: Story is made of conflict, and I am required to think my way into what my characters will think and feel about it. This means there will be emotional labor associated with it. Must. Mentally. Prepare.
• Characters Will Likely Die: Let's face it--beyond at-times-unlovely lives, some of my characters might not make it to the end of the story. As someone who bawls every time Beth died in Little Women, I can tell this is yet another source of emotional labor.

To my characters: You better be thankful I'm willing to sacrifice to make you live, dangit! This process will be rough at times! Rewarding? Absolutely! But yeah.

Some extra support over the next few months would be great, folks! Cheer from the sidelines if you can!

The Trouble with Empathy

So for the last 10 years or so, I've been noticing that my creative writing has been building my empathy muscles. Thinking from my characters' perspectives requires me to try to understand people I often don't like. For the most part, this is a good thing.

The problem is that now that I'm in the habit, I can't stop, even when I'm supposed to be maintaining some sort of professional distance from the subject matter. (No wonder I find quantitative social science difficult.)

The thing is, now I've been sensitized, I find it more and more difficult to remain untouched when I encounter difficult or dark subject matter. The problem this week is that my rhetoric of conspiracy class, despite its seemingly amusing quality (and yes, it DOES make me want to watch "So I Married an Axe Murderer" again, especially the part about the triumvirate), also has much dark subject matter. It highlights the ugly outgrowths of fear and suspicion, including much prejudice. And it doesn't help me that many of the researchers writing about often seem to thinly veil their disgust for the type of people who would feel such emotions (disgust I so easily empathize with).

Vinita Hampton Wright warned me this side effect of the creative life in The Soul Tells a Story, so I shouldn't be surprised. Still, working through my emotional responses to all of this involves a lot of emotional processing, which takes time. Sheesh, it's annoying to have to expend this sort of time during the school year dealing with this sort of thing--I expect it when I'm doing creative writing, but am always shocked, for some unaccountable reason (probably having to do with the expected academic distance), to encounter it in my academic work. The worst part is, I think, that it gives me a preview of the sort of thing I'm going to have to deal with if and when I start writing the type of novel (and I have a few in mind) that have actual villains. It's going to take courage to go there.

Some days it would be so easy to think that all of this were the result of some sort of conspiracy against me. I'm sure God's in on it, somehow--he usually has it in for any self-righteousness, anger, bitterness, etc. I try to hold on to. Hm, the Trinity--sounds triumvirate-like...maybe that empathy for the conspiracy rhetoricians won't be so hard to find after all. After all, my engagements with my faith make me realize I have all sorts of fears. It could be so easy to move into that sort of outlet for them.

Quotes (and Comments): The Powers and Perils of Noticing

"Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in lterature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on....

"By thisness, I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion."

--James Wood's brand-new book How Fiction Works, p. 65, 67
(a review in Slate)

"Creative work teaches you to pay attention, and this is something that few people do well or often. We spend hours and days at a time just trying to get ahead of an impossible schedule or solve one of many problems. We don't have time to sit and watch what light does to the color of the living-room wall at a certain time in the afternoon... Well, if you are...writing a story that contains an afternoon scene, you will pay better attention to what physical qualities make the afternoon different from morning or evening."

--Vinita Hampton Wright, The Soul Tells a Story, p. 33

Okay, so it's the search for this kind of concretion, this perfect detail, that sends me out into the world and into books and online looking for way more details than I could possibly include in my fiction. This effort also serves me well in my academic work, actually. Looking for just the right detail is important in both domains.

These sorts of efforts, however, have their consequences:

"An artist has to become super-sensitive to life in order to notice what others miss and to develop what others may ignore or consider unimportant. The longer you work at your creative gifts, the more sensitive you become. The longer you work at your creative gifts, the more sensitive you become.

"Of course this means that you're more sensitive to everything....You notice sadness or anger in the eyes of passing strangers. Increased sensitivity will nourish your art, but it will wear on you at times....

"Be grateful that you cry easily... This means that your senses are fine-tuned, and that's good for your art."

--Vinita Hampton Wright, The Soul Tells a Story, p. 201-202

Okay, so this seems to be where my creative and academic selves diverge a bit. As an academic, I notice the detail needed for my essays quite a bit, but can mostly focus on the details in my head or on the page in front of me. It's sensitivity I've cultivated to the sorts of details needed for my creative work that make my brain shut down from overexposure if I spend more than a few days in a city like New York, where there's way too much for me to notice all at once. (Then again, there's also a sensitivity to the theory that knits ideas and things together that's definitely developed by my academic side.)