Risk and Recovery, Part 1
Risk’s a part of all real creative efforts. We stretch, we move out of what we know into pure discovery, and we take on risk. It’s a leap out of our comfort zone. We become the one who doesn’t know.
That’s super exciting to me, as a writer. it makes me feel alive and creative.
But it also makes me nervous, especially as the risks get bigger. So I’ve learned to survive my risks over the years with four tools, which I’ll be sharing this month, one each week, along with exercises you can try if you’re facing a risk or trying to recover from one.
The idea for this topic came from a reader who said she’d risked and gotten rejection, which surprised her a lot. She experienced a setback and wanted to know if there were easier ways to approach risk and better ways to recover.
Here are the topics I’ll be discussing each week this month:
1. rating the risk: external or internal risk (today’s post)
2. knowing where the risk will hit my life hardest if things go south (December 12 post)
3. figuring out what would satisfy me at minimum and adjusting my attitude (December 19 post)
4. preparing for the risk in an appropriate way (December 26 post)
Part 1, today’s post, is about two types of risk we usually face—external and internal—and how to rate your comfort with each kind.
Since your comfort or avoidance is also reflected in your writing preferences, we’ll look at risk for characters as well, since often our storytelling is a reflection of how we chart our creative lives.
External or internal risk
I believe most creative folk are wired towards a certain kind of risk, one that’s familiar and acceptable. We fail at the other kind. This is why a particular risk can be frightening for me but ho-hum for you.
We can loosely group these two types of risk into external or internal. I’ll explain how they’ve worked in my writing life, and you can see how they might appear in yours.
Most of my life, I’ve been easy with external risks. No hesitation to saying yes to a year living in Europe in my twenties. Starting a business when I was in my thirties, complete with investors when I knew nothing about running a business. Taking a solo drive cross country with zero planning. Sign up for a class on a topic I’m new at.
To me, external risk felt exciting, adventuresome. I was really alive. I could move fast.
My writing echoed this. I wrote fast-paced stories with little introspection.
Over time I realized that in my life and my writing I was unconsciously avoiding the slower pace of internal risk and its emotional vulnerability. If a relationship got dicey in my younger years, I was out of there fast. And I had trouble being vulnerable in a group—I remember after a rather difficult critique from an instructor at a summer writing conference, I literally abandoned my story.
Anything that came too close or demanded too much introspection was a risk I refused to take. Eventually, I was bored by it. I wanted to live in a fuller spectrum of risk-taking and train myself to recover faster.
Balance creates tension
A fuller spectrum of risk-taking means dipping into both kinds of risk. I found that a balance of these two kinds of risk created the best momentum in my writing life, keeping me moving forward into new opportunities of growth. It was a kind of right tension that let me move ahead creatively.
I also found my writing getting stronger. I was bringing both kinds of risk into my storytelling and that let the story move ahead. Because in good stories, I learned, there’s a kind of sine wave that moves between the two types of risk, creating that balance and the inherent tension.
Take the story of a solo car trip across the U.S. The character escapes a frank conversation with a new love who is unhappy. But on the road, alone with himself, he can’t forget the unfinished relationship. He stops to text his love even though he’s nervous about saying the wrong thing and making things worse. Something happens on the call to make him more anxious. He takes it out on the road trip, chooses a different route than planned, ends up with car trouble. He needs help so he has to call his love again.
We are moving back and forth between external risk and internal risk, and one promotes more of the other, creating a rhythm of successful tension. Not just plot and action, not just introspection, but a marriage of the two.
Taking the leap
If you’ve read this far in the post, you might be wondering about adding more tension to your writing life. Most of us don’t need more tension in any part of our lives, right? There’s plenty in the world around us, and our creative work is supposed to be nurturing and supportive.
But I believe the creative life is also a life of risk. It can hurt us, though, if we don’t understand our tendency around risk. If we leap too far into the kind of risk we aren’t skilled at. If we don’t give ourselves a safe way to recover.
First, understand how you naturally deal with these two kinds of risk. Are you more at ease with internal risk? Or external risk? How does this echo in your writing? Do you repeat yourself, taking steps into places you know well rather than venturing into new ones? Self-awareness around risk is the first step.
Types of risk in the writing life
In a general way, we can sort the adventures of the writing life into external or internal risks. You can use these examples to assess your own tendencies, become aware of what you do easily and what you avoid. Then maybe choose a risk from the other group to build your risk-taking muscles and balance.
External risks
pitch an agent or publisher
promote your work on social media
self-publish
talk about your writing on podcasts
sign up for a writing class on a topic you don’t know well
hire an editor
Internal risks
submit your work for feedback from a class or instructor
make big changes in your story based on feedback
start over with a piece of writing
join a writing group for critique and feedback
write about something intimate or secret
These are just a few examples. What would you add, from your experience?
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Getting comfortable with these two kinds of risk is a real skill, I’ve learned. This week’s exercise might give you some insight into what you lean towards and away from, in terms of risk in your life and writing. And how you might begin to find more balance and get unstuck, if you are.
To try this first tool, you are going to look into your history.
Choose a period of your life covering around ten years. In no particular order, begin to list any risk you took during that time.
Then rate them. Were they external risks or internal?
Do you find more of one than the other? Did you enjoy one kind of risk more than the other?
Next, find a ten-page section of your current writing. Using two highlighting colors, mark the external one color and the internal the other. How many does your character face of each?
Share your questions and insights!
Photo by Micah & Sammie Chaffin on Unsplash