Confidence.

Confidence
by Bradley Gunson

Confidence goes a long way. That is, until it blinds you.

Overconfidence makes you think your writing is flawless while confidence makes you strive towards making your writing flawless.

I first began writing with the confidence that only arrogance could bring. I had the “I can do better than that” attitude in regards to successful authors, when I had only just thought of the initial concept of a story. So I got to writing. I wrote the whole of draft 1, and it was fantastic.

Only it wasn’t.

I learned just how bad my writing was, and my confidence in it dwindled. Still, I persevered. I wouldn’t be defeated by that, I would improve, and become a great writer. So I learned, with the great help of the writing forum Mythic Scribes and its community, while writing through draft 2. About the halfway point I received very positive feedback and my confidence in my writing skyrocketed. Only this time, I had been humbled. I knew that I wasn’t the best writer ever, and I knew that my writing needed improvement. But it was good. From this point onwards I have written faster, better and I have felt good about it all. I am now proud of my work, and I believe that this time I deserve to be.

This is what a writer needs. This is what everybody needs. Confidence and humility. Confidence to strive to be the best you can be, and humility to know that you aren’t the best. Nowhere near the best. That’s what life is, striving towards your goals. Remember that pride isn’t a bad thing, despite the need for humility. You must find the balance.

A. E. Lowan puts this perfectly, “To be a professional writer takes 50% hubris and 50% humility. The mad audacity to publish and still accept you’ll always be learning.”

So if you are a beginner writer, without having learned the craft before hand, and you think your writing is amazing, it is likely that you suck. Oh, don’t worry. We all do at first. And that’s okay. (Better to learn early on how to improve, anyway, rather than after a full draft. Damn you draft 1.) Even if you write the worst thing ever to disgrace paper with its touch, it’s all fine. We all have to start somewhere, and there’s nowhere to go but up, from there.

As Chuck Wendig wrote in his blog post, “If you want to be a writer, then write. And suck. And write your way through the suck.”

My advice to any writer is to have people read your work. If you’re not confident enough to show people you know, then post it on a writing forum to strangers for critiquing. Learn through this how to improve and what to improve on. And do it. Keep writing, even if it’s bad. Keep improving until you are confident in your writing. Then improve some more. Don’t stop. No writer is beyond criticism, not even the most successful authors.

In any aspect of life, work towards becoming confident in something. Learn how to do it. Learn how to do it well. Learn how to improve. Strive to become better, and if you do become the best, keep going.

Records are meant to be broken, so challenge yourself, and keep improving.

Fairy tales. I, like so many others through the ages have had these first stories dig deep into my heart, first by the “hearings” and now by the “tellings.” (‘Fore fairy tales ARE meant to tell and not necessarily made to show) Cinderella, Rapunzel, Blue Light, Little Tin Soldier, The Frog Prince… well maybe not the Little Match Girl, that one always makes me cry but the story still resides in my library as much as the others. Dark tales, that’s what fairy tales were before they were sanitized.

Perhaps this modernization has lead those not actually familiar with the tales to think the fairy tale world is all light and fluff. They weren’t. Even as a child, I never wanted to actually STAY in that world. Are you kidding me? The risk of being eaten or murdered, mutilated, beheaded, incinerated, neglected, abused or other unpleasant things were quite high. These lands have places where you might be required to slice off your own pinkie finger in order to finish a ladder to reach your beloved… and if you were naughty you could have your eyes pecked out or made to dance in iron shoes. How many young princesses lost their voices for years while watching, usually their brothers, be transformed into beasts or fowl? However, in fairy tale land the payoff IF you survive and you are GOOD and a little lucky, then you got a happy ever after…supposedly without any post trauma stress disorder syndrome.

What magic do these dark creations with its cookie-cutter protagonists and antagonists, woven with repeated thematic story lines have? And why do they work?

Is it because they bear a message, perhaps a moral, and offer children a means to problem solve and build emotional resiliency? Well, you can easily google studies that will point affirmatively that these dark tales work in a child’s psyche as a means to explore the dangerous and the distressing in a reasonably safe environment. I mean, the big bad wolf does not usually leap from the book to get you, does he? And the reader, a child or perhaps an inner child or two, will experience (through the story) that by being good, kind, and clever you usually can find a way to overcome the obstacles even if truly horrific things are happening such as parents abandoning you in the woods, having to throw a fake good samaritan who had wowed you with a candy house into the oven to protect yourselves from the slaughter, or discovering your husband has been keeping his murdered wives up in the room he’s forbidden you to go in.

See dark tales… Interesting fact. When things get too sanitized and say the witch doesn’t die at the end of Hansel and Gretel children have more nightmares. Why? Well, the witch is still out there…and that’s frightening. The story you see is not yet complete and add a child’s fertile imagination… Begs the question, as a reader yourself, do you get frustrated with stories with loose ends or do you like it that way so you can keep imagining?

These stories also work MOST…. (writers cue for attention) …because they represent the building blocks of archetypes. Characters, story quests and setting itself are all archetypes. After all there are probably dozens if not hundreds of Snow White story versions told throughout the world. Same character, same quest with only minor differences. How many stories are in a castle? In a child’s room? Or in the woods? If I say Rupunzel do you immediately think tower and loneliness and the Three Little Pigs do you feel a big breath and the foolhardiness of building with substandard materials?

Does this mean I’m suggesting the story you’re writing should be able to be plugged into a Grimm’s or Hans Christian Andersen tale? I would hope not…or at least not usually. And I’ll explain why in the next paragraph. But the case is… people are hardwired for stories and these fairy tales make up an important part of our “cultural language.” The wisest course would appear to use archetypes’ skeletons and then flesh it and dress it into our own story’s uniqueness because using aspects of the archetypes taps into that soul deep communication.

But it’s important to remember in fairy tales much is missing… for example, when Little Red Riding Hood is entering her grandmother’s house we don’t know if the basket feels heavy in her hand, or if she really picked the flowers along the path or she just pretended and took a nap, or if she waved to the woodcutter on the way because he was related on her dead father’s side or ignored him because he smelled like garlic. We don’t know if she was afraid of the wolf or if he reminded her of her first puppy which her mother made her give away. We don’t even know if she’s hoping her grandmother will give her a huge hug and a new hood. But in fairy tales it doesn’t matter because these details can be added or changed at a whim. What’s important are the main elements like… grandmother what big ears you have..what big teeth you have. Can you imagine how many of us could get plopped into a fairy tale’s archetypical spot and the tale would proceed with little change.

Hence the fleshing and dressing… For example, what happens if Red is a teenage boy, or the location is the moon or Red is really a werewolf herself? These would be in the making for a probable interesting twist to an archetypical story. Also bear in mind, traditional fairy tales are stories at the simplest level. They bear no subplots or subtexts. They could be likened to mother’s milk, nourishing but eventually we grow to need bread and meat.

The most important thing in a story though is to be able to make that connection with the audience…to have them take away something, some sort of emotional experience one gains by journeying with the protagonists and experiencing the changes and revelations along the way. After all, plot is a series of events but story…that is what happens, the affect and changes on a person as the events unfold.

Well, fairy tales contain “story” by having the reader project much of him or herself into the hero/archetype. We imagine Hansel and Gretel are thrilled when they find their way home and are reunited with a now presumable loving father, that Cinderella is happily married since she’s out of poverty with someone who treats her well, that Red is grateful to be rescued from the belly of the wolf and will be more careful about strangers, or at least the toothy kind, but gets to live happily ever after with her grandmother…or even that the one-legged tin soldier had a brief bittersweet moment of happiness when he realized the toy ballerina loved him enough to join him in the flames. We get all this by how we would feel in those situations.

This may suggest that to create the greatest emotional reach to our audience we should create just enough of an elegant skeleton so our reader will project their own emotions through our characters. It bears consideration. After all, I don’t think I’m the only who finds it difficult to get into stories which leaves me unemotionally moved.

What are your thoughts?

Is it better for a writer to be a therapist for his or her protagonist or for the villain?

Seems like an easy thing to fall into…. you know… be a therapist by harvesting all these juicy emotions and situations where real life turns on its ear and the emotional fall-out needs some sort of silver lining. Savor a bit of that “doctor, heal thyself” mentality. After all, emotional coin is what’s needed to purchase a character’s fleshing-out. You know, pump the air into a flat character.

And We can monitor their development. But we cannot be kind.

Instead we can note how throwing barriers and frustrations against our characters cause them to react and evolve. Yeah. I suppose a therapist is out of the question. Storytellers should be psychologists albeit sadistic ones. Yes? And then the characters clam up when we “pop them on the couch.” Guess they have our number –oh reason number 5 for writer’s block.

How to get the characters talking again… I know. Change of venue…perhaps storytellers do best from hanging out in their villain’s lair knocking back a few drinks with the big bad laughing at the situation the naive/stupid/pretentious protagonist is in and what he/she doesn’t know. Perhaps we, the storytellers can drop in and gossip with the minions to get the drop on what a real mental case they think super-villain is BUT the payout will be better than their meager lives would be otherwise. Maybe we would pop over and commiserate with our protag’s sidekick about how poorly things are going with her friend, Protagonist wonderful, and remind her she may be neglecting her own life. I suspect by the time we get back to our protag we can revel in the feeling of being a two-faced backstabber who is sure to cause conflict on every page.

Does this mean we’re more like scientists not only observing the human equation but holding experiments? Interesting thought. We could invite all the cast to an impromtu happy hour and take note who socializes with who, who avoids who, who confronts who, who flirts with who and who hides in the corner. What happens in no-crap situations like if romantic interest gets hit with the tab or bartender hands villain a box of kittens.

(What would be the takeaway for an exercise like this?) A stronger idea who your characters are, who they want the world to believe they are, what their failings are, what their strengths are, and what the optimal change would be. We’d know how each one would react to disappointment, frustrations, hairy situations AND also how they react to each other. We would have already put thought into why they do what they do. We could inform other storytellers that no one reacts in a vacuum, there are reasons for what the characters are doing for all to see and it doesn’t always jive with what they are feeling inside their skins. (See, this is great for making for external/internal conflict.)

And one more exercise dear social scientist for dissecting the psyche. Have you considered how you have changed in the last year, five years, 10 years. What was your turning point? Your spouse’s? Your parents? Your best friend? Afterall, how your protagonist and other POVs evolve are critical to story so why not grab some real life inspiration?

I’ve been working on various ideas on how to further flesh out my story, make it real, and while the process is exciting I can’t get over the other idea of why stories are important. It isn’t just for the creative outlet but it is to connect with others. I, like many others, want to make an impact, to help/inspire/guide in some way. And that happens if and when we can touch a reader who can relate to our protagonist. Perhaps we can help generate the thought ‘If protagonist extraordinaire could get through xyz then maybe I can too.’ Or perhaps we can generate the desire to do better than protagonist unlucky by causing the reader to think “I can do better than that with my life” by seeing what NOT to do.

So I’m going to wager this — storytellers are not the therapists for society but more like the mentors and cheerleaders (or doomsayers). We find a way to connect without being preachy and we can change the world.

What’s your thoughts?