« Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? » John Keats
Adversity—it’s not exactly something we embrace with enthusiasm! And yet, here, Keats advises us to use it as a catalyst for growth. How, practically speaking, can we use adversity? How can we use it to spur us to change and improve, instead of grinding us in the dust and making us feel powerless? After pondering this, I’ve come to see that when adversity comes our way, when it smacks us over the head, we still have the ability to make a choice about how we’ll respond to it.
In a nutshell, we can use it or let it use us.
On the writing front, adversity — defined as ill fortune, misfortune, or a trial — comes to us in many forms:
We can find ourselves stymied by a writer’s block or hit a rough patch when our prose limps along on feet of clay. We can face revision decisions and feel like throwing our pages up in the air because we’re confused and frustrated. We can read something wonderful by someone else and fear our story will never be as good or as popular or as….whatever. Or we can polish our prose and buy it dancing shoes and send it out into the world only to have it meet rejection and be forced to regroup and revise yet again.
I could go on, but it’s painful and I know you get the picture. At some point, if you’ve been writing for a while, it’s likely that you’ve faced all these trials in one guise or another. Here’s the rub: Adversity comes with the territory. If we’re striving to write dangerously, to get out of our comfort zones, to do something that matters to us, well, the world is going to smack us down. Not once, but more than once.
So let’s rethink our mindset about adversity. When it comes our way—and it will!—let’s use it to activate us to up our game. If we get rejected, let’s use the pain we feel to make our characters experience their pain more deeply. If we feel envious, let’s use that to push ourselves harder. If our revision stalls, let’s take a pause that refreshes or ask for help so we can get back on track.
When adversity hurts us, let’s make sure that’s not the end of the story. Let’s compel it to help us, to make us better, as we all write on!
