passive young women

i was bad at writing conflict in my fiction. maybe i still am. but at least now i know why

Artemis of Versailles, 4th c, bce

writing, at its root, is about making decisions. not just in ‘how will i say this?’ but also in how a character faces whatever they must face. here’s the thing, though. i hate making decisions. for a large part of my life, it was easier to let others make decisions for me rather than disagree and face the potential fallout of a disagreement.

as a teenager, i was held to high academic standards; a couple of times i was grounded for grades lower than B’s. in penance, i had to read philosophical and self-help books and complete a book report about what i’d learned. the seven habits of highly effective people is still embarrassingly burned into my mind. is it any wonder now i find myself obsessed with rise-and-grind culture, using productivity hacks as a kind of ritual magic. i’m convinced if i can just optimize my sleep, my diet, my exercise, the gap between my motivation and what i want to get done will become frictionless, and i’ll get the work done with ease. of course, this isn’t true. it’s the effort itself that get things done. and i suspect the pressure i put on myself to succeed still comes from a deep desire to avoid conflict. it’s now a conflict with my innermost self — so i never have to confront the feeling of failure. i sometimes feel i was built, by the bricks of my father’s decisions, to be a perfectionist.

i thought i might take control of my destiny — i wanted to write poetry, to pursue painting and go to beauty school, to drop out of high school and work at wal-mart. most of all, i wanted to escape the pressure of getting into a good university. but i was told i wasn’t allowed, and so i let my decisions be made for me: choose a stable career path (laughing that any of us thought journalism was an acceptable degree for this), or join the army.

“Bear in mind, people with eating disorders tend to be both competitive and intelligent. We are incredibly perfectionistic. We often excel in school, athletics, artistic pursuits. We also tend to quit without warning. Refuse to go to school, drop out, quit jobs, leave lovers, move, lose all our money. We get sick of being impressive. Rather, we tire of having to seem impressive. As a rule, most of us never really believed we were any good in the first place.”

—

Marya Hornbacher

, Wasted

after high school, i abandoned creative writing and graduated with my journalism degree into a market where newspapers were collapsing. i knew i’d never find work at a daily. i didn’t think i had the gut or the rigor for tight deadlines or investigative work. i tried PR and quit. i tried marketing, quit. applied for JET programs, public affairs roles, never heard back. difficult bosses and these few failed stints led me to a job in technical writing. the deadlines were feast or famine, often times leaving me with empty swaths of time sitting at a desk, questioning my existence and typing sad stories into textedit.

it was my dream world. i wanted to soak in it, all the time. but in all my very early work, i found myself writing around the pain and conflict i wanted to explore. stories that came right up to the climax and then stopped just before it — landing on a cliffhanger, as though that was enough. i suppose in some stories it can be... but being frank, i misunderstood what it was i trying to do. in great short stories, i often experienced this kind of epiphany at the end. a moment of intensity that suddenly shifted my perspective.

it’s hard to describe exactly what i mean. the first time i remembered feeling that way was when i’d read amy hempel’s ‘in the cemetery where al jolson is buried.’ read it all the way through if it’s new to you. even now, ten years later, that final line hits and i choke up.

i think, in my early work, i was trying to mimic this mysterious feeling. i would stop right before the height of the action, leaving it outside of the narrative. the reader should imagine it for themselves, i thought — as though they were just supposed to “get it.” i was avoiding the biggest part of the story, the pay off, the place where it all seems worth it!

*

jungian psychology says that our conscious self and our subconscious self are linked in a constellation of opposites. our known self and our unknown self live in a state of direct conflict with each other. the theory goes that any conflict you’re consciously aware of functions as a mirror for something in yourself you’re not willing, or not able, to see.

to look into the mirror would be painful; that’s why i avoid it. the terror of knowing myself is possibly more painful than the terror of being known.

*

i had a second issue with conflict in my work.

for a long time i never thought about the themes i wrote about or the characters themselves. i don’t think you have to in order to be a good writer, but i’d get feedback in workshops — a lot — about the passivity of my narrators and the lack of decisions they’d make about their lives.

“but why does she let all of these things happen to her?”

“she feels absent on the page.”

like an errant fingernail peeling off the edge of a scab, it was annoying to be asked to look beneath. i took it personally, like my own identity was being questioned. leave it there! was the general feeling. stop touching that.

i deflected this early feedback as criticism about writing unlikeable female narrators... it was easy enough to dismiss it as though people just didn't get my work. but i did feel like i was struggling to get things to actually happen. it was a skill issue. aside from getting a character from point A to point B, i wasn’t able to effect a satisfying change in a story, even if the change was a net negative for the characters.

you might notice this struggle i had with my writing is also a conflict.

so, if i could trace the chain that linked the conflict i was aware of through the mirror, maybe i could find what was holding me back. pull it into the light and learn from it, try to make my writing better.

i was, yes, a lot of the time, writing passive women. i still do! but i think at the time i wasn’t willing to accept it.

i wasn’t willing to think about why i was so interested in telling these stories with this particular kind of narrator, again and again.

what was my relationship to my writing?

why wasn’t i seeing how to transform it into momentum in the story?

*

my first writing mentor, the late tom spanbauer, spoke about writing as a way to turn around the psychological torments of our lives as though examining a many-faceted gem. to get up under and in the painful truths we know, and with fiction, lie and lie and lie until “a space of possibilities” opens up. he called this process dangerous writing, and held a workshop throughout the 90s that lasted until 2016 or so.

“How a thing is made, how it was conjured, decides how it appears.”

— Tom Spanbauer

a former student of gordon lish, tom built an incredible community over the years, with students like chuck palahniuk, monica drake, joanna rose, jennifer luack, and more. he gave people the space to think about how they examined the great hurts of their lives, and how it could become a gift to your creative process.

when i wasn’t writing stories during my day job, i was researching how writers made their living and how they learned to write. that was how i found tom’s workshop — through palahniuk’s wikipedia page. so i went to tom’s website, ordered his books, and sent an email off into the dark, wondering if i’d ever hear back. tom’s work was devastating, filled with heartbreak and yearning and grief. his fiction is the kind of work that makes you feel kindred with its pain.

some time later, maybe a year, i got an email about registration. i booked my plane ticket to portland immediately and was set to attend a in a month's time. this was 2013.

between sending off my money to tom and the workshop itself, i got laid off from work.

probably for spending so much time on wikipedia and trying into textedit on the clock.

*

we received an assignment to bring to class. i thought long and hard about what to write, and settled on a story about a friend from university who had commit suicide. i’d never been able to talk about the circumstances around it. why it made me feel guilty. the assignment was a simple one: write about a moment in time where after, you were different.

“for example,” tom's email said, “you were going along this way and then something happened, and after it happened, your world was different…. also, this is important, your piece should be written in the first person. if you’re writing about a moment that after you were different and you don’t quite remember the details, then lie.”

so i did. i showed up on that first day with those eleven writers (including

Rob Hart

, peter dirk, kirsten larson, and r leo olsen) and when it was my turn to be workshopped, i passed all twelve copies of my stories around and read it aloud.

tom looked at the papers.

everyone else around the table looked at their papers, too.

i shuffled my feet. the top of everyone's heads bent down, their eyes on my work. i was being examined, i thought. i was hoping for praise.

then tom opened his mouth.

“this is tough.”

i didn’t know what tough meant. i thought maybe he meant, “this will be tough to fix.” all my life i’d been so stuck in my perfectionism, in the pressure i put on myself to succeed. it turned me into a person who could only look inward instead of out. my first reaction was to assume this was a criticism, rather than, perhaps, the story of my friend’s passing was tough to read about. the crux of the story was even about this sentiment and how it failed me: how i couldn’t get outside of myself. i couldn’t get away from my obsession with being "not good enough." and yet there i was, assuming the worst.

at the table, i felt hollow. hot and ashamed. i couldn’t believe my audacity — that i thought i could give my friend’s life justice somehow, or explore my grief this way. i wrote it wrong and fucked it up. a story with twee metaphors, prose trying too hard to show off. it fell flat on the page. not even a story, but a vignette of a time something happened to yet another passive young woman, where she was putting herself at the center of everything.

i’ve lost my notes for the class, so i can’t say what feedback i actually got. i don’t remember it. i remember, more, the pain i felt at being terrible. i remember, more, the awe i had of my peers, and the grief in the stories they wrote. we were to take our feedback from workshop and rewrite the piece for the next day.

at five p.m. i went back to the place i was staying, ate a dinner of jarred olives, and shuffled through all twelve copies of the story. marked up with various colours of pen, marginalia. i thought about all my failures up to this point. what was i doing here? i would never succeed as a writer — i would never be able to successfully write what was in my heart, about the things i felt and thought about, i would never be able to do anything more than write disjointed prose about people who just let things happen to them and nothing much comes of it. nothing ever changed. i was sure every story i wrote would be the same listless ramble.

i wanted to quit.

i decided i wouldn’t go back for day two. it was shameful. i read over journal entries i’d written about my friend when he’d passed. i cried. i kept thinking about the shame from workshop.

when i heard the news about his passing, i was totaled. i felt guilty my friend died because i had wanted to die, too. we never talked about it. because i hated myself, i didn’t let my friend get close to me. and now we would never be able to rectify it. it was the first time i’d faced what wanting to die could do to the people who loved you.

“Since we’re all human, by going inside to our own particular battles, really what we’re all doing is fighting a much larger battle that is overarchingly human. To talk about being human is to talk about the pain and sorrow in your own heart. To put that story outside yourself in the act of writing is to create an invention through which you can understand your own humanity.”

—Tom Spanbauer

my story was about the fear i’d never overcome this. it had real costs, regrets. there was no job to go back to at home. this was the only thing in my life, right now, that demanded my attention.

i don’t know what compelled me to keep trying. tom's demeanor was always encouraging. his ways of teaching fiction helped you get into the heart of something. to keep pulling at the thread of the thing you were trying to write about, until it was all unraveled.

i wanted one thing. just to write. i would keep trying to tell this story in a way that felt right, that felt it did justice to my friend. so i must have faced into my discomfort.

then i kept doing it with everything else.

*

the seed of all stories is not something that lies outside of ourselves.

there’s that gordon lish quote i come back to again and again.

‘find the fundamental losses of your life. that is where your artistic powers lie.’

how do you stop avoiding conflict in your work? the answer is one that’s already inside you.

pain is universal. it’s the one thing we can all rely on, aside from birth and death.

over time, i was able to confront myself more readily on the page and go deep into the pain i experienced. this isn’t to suggest writing autofiction or memoir is the way to overcome the avoidance conflict in your fiction. i didn’t have to write about all that pain, but i was able to put my characters in pain. i was able to do it justice, write hurt and violence and loss and yearning with empathy in a way that felt, over time, closer to the stories i envisioned in my mind.

examining the conflict in yourself, even if you don’t resolve it, gives you the ability to map out conflict in the dream world.

i didn’t have to change who i was to become better at writing, but i did change in the process of trying. i just had to consider the nature of my pain. i had to decide to face it. observe it within myself. think about how it worked. why it was doing what it was doing. this was both real and imagined pain — both the stuff i was avoiding, and the why. why did i let myself be controlled, so much of my life? why didn't i do what i wanted? and what was the pain, there, when i realized what i'd lost out on because i'd made so many decisions out of fear?

with practice, i was able to think more clearly about conflict. what are all of the things i could possibly put in this character’s way to make it harder to get what they want? what are they avoiding? what do they want? if they don’t know what they want, that’s fine—but i needed to understand this, then, was the central conflict.

why doesn’t my passive young narrator know what she wants? i, as the writer, needed to decide. at the very least, i needed to write into my indecision until something made itself apparent.

writing became a place i was practicing at conflict, at trusting my decisions. in all of the control i either gave up or did not have in my earthly life, i was now making them, by the hundreds, in my stories. thinking about anything that could go wrong, catastrophising the worst case scenarios for these little beings. i was contemplating not just my suffering but suffering as a whole, and what it meant to live through it. i became captivated by stories exploring personal conflict in tragic, extreme, and challenging ways, all of which have made me feel less alone, deepened my understanding of humanity. in my dream world i was safe to explore conflict, but i could do it better now. or at least, i was willing to keep trying when i felt dissatisfied.

i have often said writing is the only place in my life i feel truly free — a space i know i’d never give up, no matter who tells me to.

---

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