I’m going to be fairly honest right now. I generally try to keep my posts very positive and uplifting in some way. However, there are some situations that I don’t always feel so optimistic about. The positive spin on this is post is The Art of Procrastination.
We all have things that scare us, so we avoid them at all costs. With a lot of things I try to claim that I’m procrastinating with a purpose. I do still believe that I can do that with some things, that with delaying the task I’m actually preparing for it in an incubating kind of way. But here I’m going to admit that not everything works that way.
Hole of Despair
I imagine this as the hole of despair in a character’s story arc, taking place in the ending portion of the story. When the main character finally comes face to face with the real problem, the internal one. For me, it’s realizing that I delay good things simply because I’m scared or it’s something hard to do.
My Hole
I’m afraid to finish a story and have it ready to publish because then I’ll have to decide how I want to go about it. I’m used to forever being in the editing and developing processes so that’s where I’m comfortable. But that is avoiding my ultimate goal. You can’t ever reach a goal if you keep avoiding it, those are my profound words of wisdom for the day.
Despair
The unfortunate and depressing part of this post is that I don’t have a solution. Aside from “stop avoiding”, I don’t know how to get past the scary things. This is what brings on the inner turmoil and why everything has gone wrong for a character in a story. He or she finally realizes that there isn’t an outside solution, that the problem is their own inner beliefs or attitudes.
The resolution of a story begins when the character realizes the solution, or understands what they’ve been doing wrong and have made the decision to fix it. The internal face-off for a character may be one of the most difficult parts of a story to write, because it’s hard to show, and it’s hard to understand. But this is, by far, the most important and impactful.
Regardless of the difference between fiction and real life, we all have our holes of despair. What are some that you have already overcome? How did you do it? What is the hole you are facing now? Or maybe still refusing to face?
