My brother used to tell me that one of the advantages of leaving your hometown to go to college or to find a job is that you have the opportunity to reinvent yourself.
No one knows you in the new town. You are free and unencumbered by the past. You can develop new likes. Explore new foods and music. Dress differently. Choose or lose a nickname. You can try new things because the link to most old customs and habits has been severed.
This is actually available to you at any point, but perhaps at a slower pace Character development can happen naturally if you fight for the space you need by de-cluttering your mind. Begin your ongoing sabbatica by asking yourself the following two questions.
1 – Who am I?
2 – Who do I want to be?
Source of esteem
As a new novelist, you will have the opportunity to send your work to colleagues (published and unpublished) literary agents, reviewers, acquisition editors, some of whom may have stellar reputations. Although having these readers review your work can be fulfilling, from this soil of appreciation can grow the thorns of discontent.
Specifically, if you don’t carefully self-monitor and self-calibrate your response, you can be lured into placing your own sense of self-worth into the hands of these colleagues. While this can be satisfying when they hold you in high regard, it will almost surely damage you in the long run.
One reason that you’re particularly vulnerable to the temptation of turning your sense of self-worth over to others is that, at this early stage of writing, they can appear to hold your career advancement in their hands.
For example, whether you obtain a good review is a decision decided by others. Your suitability for a contract is based on what others think of you and your work. Whether you win an award for achievement is determined by someone else.
Based on these observations, it can seem that a useful calibration of how well you’re doing is how you’re perceived by others. It is this natural metric that new novelists bring to their first reviews, bringing forth an important issue of character and confidence that must be faced before any real collaborative effort should be initiated.
The problems with turning over self-worth may not be apparent at first if the first reviews are positive and the interactions between you and your colleague are smooth.
However, when difficult decisions have to be made, and your point of view diverges from those more established novelists, you may no longer be held in such high regard. Since you disagree with them, they may communicate to you that they don’t value your opinions quite so highly any more. Perhaps word gets back to you that they no longer value your writing. This can create an important personal dilemma for you.
The problem associated with putting your self-worth in the hands of others is that, while their approval buoys your sense of self-value, their criticism can capsize it. This occurs when you make the mistake of translating these disparaging comments into the belief that, since they do not value you, you should not value yourself.
The false sense that you should punish yourself saddles you with one of the worst possible and least deserved castigations – self-rejection.
Self-rejection is a first step to intellectual and emotional self-destruction that you must resolutely resist. While you can afford to lose many technical arguments that deal with the writing issues at hand, but you must not lose the fight for your own self-esteem.
Self-esteem is the core belief that you have innate value independent of the opinions that others have of you, and that you’re commendable regardless of what the outside world thinks of you. Sustaining self-esteem is critical to your development as a writer. As you gain experience with your writing, you’ll make many character and thematic decisions; decisions that will generate criticism and disapproval. This disapproval can profoundly damage you if you let it affect your self-esteem.
Self-esteem is not the blinding belief that you’re always right. It is the conviction that you retain your value even when you’re wrong.
Thus, solid self-esteem does not inure, but instead opens you to the comments and criticisms of others. Separating and shielding your sense of self-worth and value from these critical comments insulates and protects you. In fact, this separation permits you to listen to, consider, and accept criticism without injuring your core self-value and begin your self-destruction.
Writing can be painful sans self-esteem. No matter how many times you work on a scene you can’t make it right. You are tempted to lose confidence. Your colleagues, being human and imperfect, sometimes provide inaccurate and unreliable feedback you that reduce your self-esteem further e.g., “Now that you mention it, I never liked the theme of this book of yours”. In the face of this unhelpful feedback, this novelist may compound his difficulty by diminishing what he thinks of himself.
With his self-esteem reduced, the novelist becomes dysfunctional. Lacking self-confidence, he is no longer able to trust his intuition and insight, and his writing progress grinds to a halt. With his novel in crisis, he is unable to exert his influence productively. The self-visualization that he is valueless and can provide nothing of consequence sinks his performance much like a heavy leg-weight sinks a swimmer.
Self-worth is a natural need. Therefore, the writers who links their own self-worth to the opinion of their superiors will do almost anything to gain their approval. Sometimes this weakness is deliberately exploited. A manipulative agent, recognizing how susceptible you are in this sensitive area, can attempt to control you. Essentially, they can dangle acceptance before you, enticing you to write in an. alien style unlike your own. Nevertheless, you may choose to carry out this work because its execution will bring approval and, with it, a false sense of self-worth.
The answer is that the novelist must begin at once to 1) recognize that the healthy development of her sense of self-worth, separate and apart of the criticisms of other is essential to withstand the pressure that inevitably will be brought to bear against them at some point in their career, and 2) there will be circumstances where she will have to choose between allegiance to their own principles with attendant serious consequences, or the abandonment of those principles to the demands of their superiors.
This is the beginning of courage. One of the important advantages of early investment in character sabbatica and healthy self-worth development is the development of this strength of heart.
Before you proceed with your collaborations, first ensure that you can readily identify your source of self-worth. If that source is derived from a well-anchored sense of your value and significance that is independent of external events, then proceed with confidence into your new environment.
However, as for most of us, if you’re uncertain of your source of self-worth, stop first and examine it, with the view of testing and repairing it. Specifically, sever the link between your self-worth and your acceptance by others. Use your character sabbatica to develop a solid, internal, and unwavering source for your sense of value. This source should sustain you regardless of the circumstances of your research.
Character growth develops for you a solid sense of self-worth that in turn provides the stability of your bearing in a tempestuous intellectual environment. The ballast of an independent sense of self-worth helps you to maintain your balance in the face of these unpredictable interactions.
Recognize that, as you progress and your character developments, your sense of self-worth will come under assault. Anticipate and expect these attacks, turning them to your advantage. View your most challenging times as the days when your sense of self-value is tested. Use these times to observe how well your source of self-worth sustains you.
Examine, and either repudiate or repair your source of self-value if it fails you, thereby shaping your character growth and development. Your short term goal is to have your sense of worth independent of external criticism. Ultimately, you want it to be separate and apart from your career trajectory.
Working toward this goal should not encourage inconsiderate actions on your part. While you should always consider what others think, do not let what they express influence your deep seated sense of how you value yourself. Making a mistake should not change your self-esteem, and the need for an apology should not diminish it. In fact a secure sense of self-worth will make it easier to hear clearly, consider carefully, and apologize freely and openly; while you may be under attack, that attack cannot damage your sense of purpose and self-esteem.
Your appreciation of your own value, coupled with your complete and unconditional acceptance of yourself, is the basis of your ability to successfully and wholeheartedly write the best way that you know how.