Why are novelists treated differently than the authors of scientific, technical, historical, essay, editorial, and persuasive genre?
We, as novelists focus on the emotions of people reacting to their changing worlds. Those responses spark sentiments in our readers, scratching an itch they didn’t know that they had. In writing, we flush out and examine the depths of human personality, not just to inform but to generate a reaction. And in formulating and contemplating our novel’s characters, turning them over and over in our minds, mixing them with our own we tap into what is deep and special about humans. Part of the essence of humanity. And readers, seeking inspiration, yearn to learn what we know.
How can we do that?
I don’t think that it’s in our typing, nor our outlines, nor our writing and rewriting, but in our nonwriting, character exploration.
Character Sabbaticals
We have all heard (and may be envious) of senior people in hallowed institutions who go “on sabbatical.” Freed of the worries of daily academic and professional life, they are at liberty to pursue an intellectual interest of theirs.
Sabbaticals typically last for a year. The activities can be unrelated to the traveler’s grant-supported research topic, coding project, or administrative life. While fulfilling though, these sabbaticals rarely produce a tectonic shift in the core belief of the traveler.
The sabbaticals that I describe here are shorter, powerful, and enabling, reaching into your essence.
Plus, they are free.
A character sabbatical is a block of time that you take by yourself to plumb the depths of you. Its specific goal is to bring you to turn over your fears, beliefs, and motivations in order for you to see, to touch, and to understand who you are.
To rebecome the “why” of you.
I hope that you can take hundreds of these sabbaticals through your life; they will adjust, alter, and steady your course.
Disconnect-Reconnect
The key to the character sabbatical is the sequence “disconnect reconnect.”
The disconnection is of you from your work. Overworking drives your work activities and work thoughts deeper into you. You can’t seem to let them go. They become part of you and may appear to be inseparable from the rest of you.
This disconnection is pathologic because you lose sight of where your work ends and you begin. The goal of emptying your mind, discussed earlier, was to prepare you, to open the door to your character sabbatical.
A one-day character sabbatical permits you the opportunity to completely separate from work. You don’t have to walk the land in sackcloth and ashes eating locusts and honey, but you should get away from the trappings of your life. To first empty your mind. Then to enter a time of thoughtful, full contemplation.
To most of us, the notion of a day sabbatical seems, well, far-fetched. You have a critical work schedule. You have a family. You have friends whom you would like to see and would like to see you. Each of these is also important. Since you face these pressures each week and weekend, the concept of a character sabbatical is pushed farther into the future until it disappears.
However, ask yourself, if you were suddenly diagnosed with terminal illness, would you not break away from your daily life to regroup? How would you sustain the death of a loved one? By commuting to work? How about the destruction of your marriage? By drinking a beer and watching a Sunday football game with your friends while checking your email as usual? Are these not pivotal episodes in your life when you must disconnect from the daily flotsam?
Don’t you deserve time to unplug from “the real world”, to reassess, feel pain, develop new thoughts?
In fact, there are pivotal decisions that you are in the process of formulating right now. “Am I going to quit my job or not?” That requires important thought, more than just the time that you are stopped at red lights on the way back and forth to work. You may be involved in an issue involving morality at work. Doesn’t that require more time and consideration than throwing an occasional thought its way when you are feeding your dog? “Will accepting his marriage proposal lead to my working longer or harder? So should I set aside the notion of tenure and promotion?” These are monumental issues that you are either dealing or will deal with.
Without explicitly generating the mental space to focus on our motivations and values, you can lose sight of what is fundamentally important to you. Or worse, your values and motivations can slowly, imperceptibly alter over time with neither your appreciation nor approval. The midcareer scientist who comes home one night overwhelmed with disgust for her life and accomplishments is a common outcome of this neglect, her values and motivations, under external pressure for years, having shifted.
First and foremost, you require your own attention. Take your sabbatical. If your significant other is traveling with your children, rather than take the time to research buying a new car or reviewing a recent trove of novels, or setting up a new computer, break away for a character sabbatical for your own good.
Finally, if you cannot take an extended time for such a break, take shorter, regular, more frequent ones.
When I would travel for business, I would at my own expense extend the travel by a day. That day, in a strange town, I was alone with time for reflection on the issues I was facing or on what I had just been a part of. To be open to myself. To let me think the thoughts I needed to think but had been too busy to take the time for them.
The “lost time” of all these days was handsomely rewarded as I rediscovered and adjusted my career over the years.
Given the amount of travel I did, this time of reflection was the best investment in myself that I could have made.
When my travel schedule finally slowed, I would take weekend drives, leaving before dawn and driving for five to six hours. I was still available for my family by late morning, but would have spent twelve hours in contemplation over two days.
This is the fight for your character-sabbatical time.
But once you have won, and the time is on your hands, what do you do with it?