I want to be up front with you. This will be a very challenging read. If you devote exclusive time to your character and the development of courage you will prosper although your career trajectory may be altered if not shattered. If you do not, then you will lose yourself and what you stand for.
This is a terrible choice. But ideas and principles do not live in and grow in a platonic and peaceful environs, but instead in our demented, slaughterhouse of a world. Here, terrible sacrifices from the good among us are required. These are not sacrifices of principle. Quite the contrary. Principles stand, but loss of position, prestige, bonuses, power are sustained.
Courage requires the strength to see your trajectory changed, even destroyed because you stand for your principles. A literary agent comes to you and says, “You have great theme for you novel, but you don’t really know how to write. Sell us the draft, and we will recraft and write it.”
What is your response?
For many writers, this is a very easy choice. If they’re in it for the money, then sell the thing and move on. They can learn to write later, but for now, here is some money on the table. The principle is the money.
But for many others, the choice is different, because the principle for them is not the money, it’s the craft of writing.
Character sabbaticals help to prepare you for this because through them, you see clearly the consequences of the exercise of this principle. Loss of income and what you could do or buy with it (first brand new car? A home down payment?). Ridicule from colleagues.
Courage is seeing the bad outcome and accepting that outcome as the price of living by your principles.
There may be some of us (God bless them) born with courage. However, most of us have to grow it on our own. It is in the space of the character sabbatica that you can achieve this. Here, bring in a tough, ethical situation to your character. Maybe it is local, maybe it is national. Ask yourself what would you do in their position, and most importantly, regardless of the answer, why? Be absolutely honest, even though you may not like the answer you get. What answer do you want? For what do you stand? One that requires money, or one that takes something from you? Is the sacrifice of real worth?
Can anybody take your self-value? If not, is anything else taken from you really worth having?
It is essential that you ask these questions and do this development before you are in the midst of a writing or publication-negotiation crisis. Now is the time for you to leisurely explore in a stress free atmosphere your answer. Draw your redline and know why you put it there. Embrace a position, stand for an action that you will be able to call your own and hold fast to. In this fashion, when the crisis comes, you have already done the hard work. You know what you’re going to do. The decision is easy. And the sacrifice is worth it.
That is courage.
There are times in your writing career when you’ll have to choose between two egregious alternatives. Each requires you to pay a different but unbearable price. Regardless of your decision ─ you lose. Prepare yourself now, before that crises comes, to do what you believe is right, with the conviction that selecting the right answer, despite the losses will give you “peace at center”.
For example, after your novel is published, you receive a notice you are being sued for plagiarism. As you study the complaint. So you study it, you see that a novel has been published, before yours. The theme is indubitably related to the earlier work. You haven’t read discussed, or even known about the previous book before your wrote yours, so a theft intention is not the issue. However, the two works are related.
How do you react?
There are several defensible reactions. Capitulate completely? Fight till the end? Something else? What is the best action based on your principles and are you prepared to pay the price for them. A wrong choice requires you to pay a price from which you may not recover for years. But will you recover from an admission of guilt on the record? Of ignorance? A drawn out, legal drama involving, lawyers, the court system, depositions, etc.?
The question is not, which approach causes the least damage. The question is, whether. you are prepared to sustain the damage which are the consequences of aligning with your principles?
Take their place
It is important to avoid second guessing the performance of others. Spend some time reviewing the following.
Dr. Deborah Birx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFKQGGf1iiI Elizabeth Cheney https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R1Nu23nx2o
Dr. Tony Fauci https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFoaBV_cTek
Each of these individuals chose to take a position. Were they courageous in your mind? More importantly, what would you do in their circumstance? As they did? Something else? Why? With the exception of Rep Cheney, neither anticipated they would be in that circumstance that day. Were they prepared or unprepared?
These circumstances will likely not happen to you. But other ones will. Perhaps worse. How do you plan for these? And how do you decide what to do?
Why do principles matter?
This is an elementary question, but let’s explore it. After all, if courage requires a sacrifice of great cost, what then balances the cost? Why are principles worth so much?
Principals are the glue that holds society together. Without them, culture falls apart. There is no longer a common bond between individuals. With no societal compact, we lose the common understanding that binds us together, or that governs our interactions. We no longer work together. Families themselves become dysfunctional. There is no common connection between individuals that sustains, but only ephemeral common interests. Society with no bond, disintegrates.
It you want to see a community without principles, go to a dog pound.
Principles have developed slowly, lagging behind the development of technological advances in civilization. Different religions attempted to incorporate then. The Ten Commandments, The Koran, The Magna Carta, The New Testament, The Rights of Man, The Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution with its Amendments, The Emancipation Proclamation and the United Nations Charter are epoch moments because they asserted what early civilization was aching toward.
That men had value, innate to themselves.
In their own way, they asserted that bonds between people are based not on mercurial connections but the sustaining bond of value and respect. This concept slowly expanded to finally include people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community. These are still under assault, but human dignity − the innate value of individuals, not because of who they are, but simply that they are − is a bedrock of our civilization, nation, state, city, community, and neighborhood.
Without principles, we have nothing together so we fight to sustain them. And we pay a price for principles because without them, nothing of value is left
Costs and their anticipation
We have talked about costs. Loss of prestige. Reduction in salary. Criticism. The loss of a book contract. Lucrative writing contracts lost. Your career is not just altered, its shot down. Thus, a smaller house for you and your family, and state schools rather than private schools for your children.
These are the costs of your principles.
If you are not prepared for these staggering losses, you may not be able to sustain them. In fact, you may give up on your principles to retain them.
The key to accepting, and then adjusting to these losses is to anticipate them. To expect them. To know that you will have to deal with these important setbacks in the future.
In your character sabbatica, examine your reactions to these potential losses. Examining these issues early permits you the leisure to turn them over and over again in your sabbatica without dealing with the emotion that attends actually sustaining the loss. What does it mean to you to have to downside a house? What real loss will be sustained? Will you be reduced in some important way. Can you recover? Is it better to have a smaller home in the first place?
Use your sabbatica to grade how important these potential costs are to you. By exploring these issues early in your career, you have the opportunity to arrest their growth in your eyes, to perhaps move from “I need them” to “It would be nice to have them, but they are not all important. I could live without them, as I have so far.”
Bring your significant other into these conversations. You are beginning to make a determination about your lifestyle based on your principles. He or she have a right to know.
You have now calibrated and corralled the loss. It is acceptable to you?
And you have addressed the most important question. By devaluing theses potential costs, you are close to the answer to the critical question, “By holding fast to my self-worth and self-value, what can be taken from me that really matters?”