Is literary martyrdom an unavoidable consequence in writing fiction?
Self-care resources for writers for National Suicide Prevention Month
(This post is written to support September as National Suicide Prevention & Awareness Month. Please take a moment to educate yourself via samhsa.gov/newsroom/observances/suicide-prevention-month. If you or anyone you know is facing mental health struggles, emotional distress, alcohol or drug use concerns, or just need someone to talk to, you are not alone. Caring counselors are available 24/7 via the Suicide and Crisis Hotline at 988 or 988lifeline.org.)
A number of past posts here on Deus in Fabula looked at different aspects of expressing and sharing a character’s inner experience in written fiction. As I wrote in The privilege of writing inner experiences: part 1, “Written fiction stands alone as the one art form through which readers (and listeners with audiobooks) get to share that inner experience of another.” Writing fiction, then, is a great opportunity and a privilege.
Yet there are challenges and costs in the process. Unlike actors, who live the inner experience of their characters in real time and usually do so in the presence of other people, writers often work alone and in slow-motion, having “to hold themselves in that emotional space for extended periods of time and without necessarily getting to a point of resolution.” I gave an example of this in The privilege of writing inner experiences: part 2, suggesting that writers must often dwell in that space for perhaps 50 times longer than a scene might play out in real life.
Such time dilation is why writing emotionally intensive stories, even just scenes, can lead to the kind of emotional exhaustion, even trauma, that many accept as just the price one must pay for reader impact. That’s why Emotion, “inpletion,” and devotion: part 1 challenged the very notion that good fiction is all about emotion (agitated feeling) and offered, in part 2 of that series, the possible antidotes of “inpletion” (calm, deep feeling) and devotion.
All that said, I recognize that striving for such ideals and fundamentally changing one’s approach is not necessarily in the cards for every writer (and artist in general). Many writers are specifically drawn to grapple with deep, personal issues—or even societal ones—through their art, sometimes sacrificing much themselves in the process.
In this post, then, and to support National Suicide Awareness Month, I want to acknowledge these challenges and encourage writers to invest in various forms of self-care. For the latter purpose, I highly recommend Kathryn Vercillo’s excellent post below, which offers a many insightful and effective self-care tips.
The price of emotional intensity
Every book and course I’ve looked at about the craft of fiction beats the same drum: Emotion, emotion, emotion! I can understand why: people read fiction to feel something and to share in the innermost experiences of the characters. For consumers, sharing that intimate inner experience is the special purview of written stories.
Writers, then, must necessarily be far more emotionally present with their characters than readers. Writers must even be more present than the characters themselves. That is, if we allow ourselves to pretend that fictional characters have a bit of consciousness (which does exist, by the way, in the writer’s own), they “live” their experiences only once in the story world before moving on. They also do so in “story time,” which is even faster than real time. But writers must not only live those experiences in slow-motion but do so over and over through every draft and revision.1
As human beings, we all know that extended emotional turmoil—regardless of type of emotions involved—is exhausting. Whether weeping with despair, hollering or lashing out in anger, or jumping up and down with excitement, we can endure only so much before our bodies, minds, and hearts need a break.
Yet deliberately engaging in that turmoil is part of the writer’s job. As I mentioned in Emotion, “inpletion,” and devotion: part 1, as observed in various “Author’s Notes” and other accounts, this aspect of writing exacts a toll on authors’ well-being and even mental health.
For example, in the Acknowledgements of her contemporary novel, Winter Loon, Susan Bernhard thanks her family this way:
[To] the FamSquad—my husband, Ben, and my children, Olivia and Miles, for putting up with lousy meals, lost weekends, and me crying about it, crying about it, crying about it.
I think also of Fiona Valpy, who, as I wrote about in my recommendation, had to immerse herself into the space of a Gestapo torture prison and Nazi concentration camps to write The Dressmaker’s Gift. She opens her Author’s Notes this way:
The research I carried out for some sections of The Dressmaker’s Gift was harrowing in the extreme, but I felt it important to persevere in order to do justice to telling the stories of some of the very brave women who worked for the Resistance and suffered in Nazie concentration camps during World War Two. Reading their stories led me to dedicate this book to them.
That dedication reads as follows:
Dedicated to the memory of the female Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents, who worked with the French Resistance movement in World War Two and lost their lives in the concentration camps of Natzweiler-Struthof, Dachau, and Ravensbrück:
Yolande Beekman, Denise Bloch, Andree Borrell, Madeleine Damerment, Noor Inayay Khan, Cecily Lefort, Vera Leigh, Sonia Olchanezky, Eliane Plewman, Lilian Rolfe, Diana Rowden, Yvonne Rudelatt, and Violette Szabo.
And their sisters-in-arms whose names were not recorded and whose fate remains unknown to this day.
And Valpy was just talking about her research. What did she go through during the actual writing of the story?
“Being a writer is easy,” I saw recently in a meme graphic. “It’s like riding a bike. Except that the bike is on fire, you’re on fire, everything is on fire, and you’re in hell.” Joking aside, and despite the fact that this same quip is offered for many other professions,2 there is a lot of truth to this where writers are concerned.
Indeed, it seems that some writers are even traumatized in pursuit of their art, especially if their stories deal with difficult personal or socio-political issues with which they’ve personally struggled and suffered. Like many other artists, writers often use their art as a form of therapy or catharsis. Taking these matters deep within, they sacrifice themselves for the sake of telling a story that they believe the world needs to hear.
Honoring Octavia Butler
The late ground-breaking science fiction writer Octavia Butler comes to mind here as a possible example. In her 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, she grappled with issues of survival in a dystopian 21st-century America that’s rapidly decaying due to environmental neglect, corporate greed, and a growing chasm in wealth distribution. The protagonist, Lauren, is also inflicted with a syndrome that causes her to feel any physical pain she witnesses (which had to be painful to visualize). On top of that, Lauren is ladened with an inner drive to found a new religion and belief system called Earthseed (which I discussed in Genuine spirituality in fiction, part 2 and part 3).
These are no lightweight subjects to address, even in fictional form, which leaves me wondering about the demands they must have placed upon Butler as an author and a human being. This is just my personal speculation, but those demands seem rather heavy…perhaps too heavy. When I read Parable of the Sower in August 2023 I felt weighed down myself by the burdens that Butler shouldered, so much so that I haven’t wanted to read the sequel, Parable of the Talents (see the side note below), which Butler herself took another five years to write. I can only imagine the psychological and emotional toll that Butler endured in writing those works.
And she unfortunately never got to the other four novels that she’d planned in the series: she apparently battled writer’s block and depression to such an extent that she had to set the whole project aside. She ended up writing only one more stand-alone novel, Fledgling, before her death in 2006 at the relatively young age 58, likely due to a stroke.
The facts of her life leave me wondering, again, whether there’s any relationship between the difficult themes with which she wrestled and her depression, writer’s block, and early death. Even though my experience with matters of mental health is quite limited, I can’t dismiss that possibility. There are many examples of artists who suffered for the sake of their art. Ample medical evidence also demonstrates a clear link between stress and both heart disease and stroke—and putting oneself through emotional intensity when writing stories has to be considered a source of stress.
Authors like Butler are literary martyrs.
Side note: my disinclination to read The Parable of the Talents is not a criticism or diminishment of Butler’s seminal work or of the many readers who are deeply inspired by it. Her work is powerful to a degree that it simply isn’t for every reader. Indeed, what stands out most about her work is not so much the stories in themselves but that they opened a doorway to the important literary space known as Afrofuturism, “a subculture, genre and aesthetic that explores speculative futures through the lens of the African diaspora – the displacement of Africans and their descendants worldwide and African culture.” (See Past, present, and future of Afrofuturism, published in the Daily Lobo, the student newspaper of the University of New Mexico.)
Avoiding the martyrdom: self-care for writers
About twenty years ago, before my wife and I decided to have a child, we began working with the wonderful homemaking guidance offered the Marla Cilley, otherwise known as “The Fly Lady.” Honestly, it was life-changing, and we cannot recommend her enough. In fact, when we met her at a book signing in 2006, Cilley was deeply touched by my then pregnant wife’s comment, “Your work is what helped me know that I could have a child and not be overwhelmed.”
One of FlyLady’s main points is to not turn homemaking into martyrdom, and making time for self-care is one of the primary ways to avoid that fate.
The testimony of many writer’s “Author’s Notes” and lives of writers such as Octavia Butler underscore the need for writers and artists to similarly invest in appropriate levels of self-care. Truly, writers need not to martyr themselves to have meaningful impact any more than parents and homemakers need martyr themselves to raise healthy and mentally healthy children. Contrary to certain popular expectations, including an advertisement I heard recently during a writing podcast, writers do not need to be tortured and depressed to do their best work.3
To that end, my book Solving Stress: The Power to Remain Cool and Calm Amidst Chaos (written as Kraig Brockschmidt) is my own contribution to this space. Among other things, Solving Stress shows how to use deliberate tense-and-relax exercises to learn to relax at will so that when someone says, “Just relax,” you actually know what to do. The book also guides you through other breathing and meditation exercises to increase your self-awareness to release tensions when they first appear and then concludes two chapters on creating a harmonious environment both within and around you.
Second, you might enjoy looking into the use of flower essences for health and well-being. I recommend the scientifically validated Spirit and Nature Flower Essences not only because I’ve used them personally but because the founder, Lila Devi, just happens to be a close friend and my downstairs neighbor!
Finally, let me again acknowledge Kathryn Vercillo’s work on her Create Me Free Substack that explores the complex relationship between creativity and mental health. The post linked below, especially, again provides many helpful tips including some of those I provide in Solving Stress.
Overall, Kathryn focuses on ways to increase your self-awareness especially where it intersects creative work. “Establishing boundaries,” for example, setting limits on how much time you spend in your creative work, “helps manage the intensity of your emotions and prevents burnout.” But go read the post for yourself, and while you’re at it, consider supporting Kathryn as a paid subscriber, especially as she offers sliding scale discounts (described in this post). She is, in fact, the one who inspired me to make similar discounts for Deus in Fabula.
(If you like this post, bless the Algorithm Angels and select the “heart” icon ❤️ even if you’re not a subscriber. It helps!)
This thought gives one pause to consider how much our own Creator, God, must endure the sufferings and emotional upheavals of all his characters—us.
From being a radio announcer, a manager, or a social worker to being an actuary, a high school student, a nurse, a doctor, a priest, etc. Enterprising merchants have made all manners of appropriate swag.
That same advertisement included a testimonial from one of the podcast’s hosts: “In my own life, therapy has been essential to figuring out how to navigate an industry seemingly designed to give all of us anxiety.” That, of course, is a statement designed to manufacture the need for the services being advertised.