Following crisis, the protagonist must choose, decide and act.
Will she or he return to business as usual, keeping secret what they have learned, or will they share it with others?
Will they share the healing they have undergone with others, or will she or he choose the safe path of saying little or nothing about the internal changes that have reshaped them?
Risks come with sharing the good news of our survival, moving beyond that time of initial upheaval and broad sweeping changes.
We face the possibility of those we tell refusing to believe us.
Those who do may grow envious, and then exploit the doubts still others hold and turn who groups of people against us.
The stakes for isolation and abandonment remain high.
Writers face this each time we write.
Most everyone holds a story inside their hearts and imaginations. Few will take the time to pen or type out that story.
Still fewer will invest the time and money in revising, editing and refining what they have written.
And even less will to the extra mile of printing and binding that story or novel, or seeking out and persevering to find a literary agent who will connect the writer to a publisher who will print and bind the story.
Securing an agent sets another ball into motion that may require more edits and revisions as deemed necessary by the agent before or while seeking a publisher for the work. Landing a publisher often begins a whole new match.
Self-publishing provides no easier route. The writer must wear many hats.
And with the stigma of lower quality work attached to self-publishing, although that is changing, the dedicated writer must work extra hard to demonstrate her or his work stands a cut above.
And then there is the money, and as always the incredible investment of time.
Much commitment goes into writing and making one’s story public and then finding new and creative ways of promoting and marketing that work, while following the tried and proven methods.
It takes an inordinate amount of dedication and passion to develop a process by which a writer/author does this and remains in love with the process of writing and connected to her or his family and friends in way that energizes their writing and their desire to craft engaging and entertaining stories.
To be certain, the writing life requires a large leap of faith.
The path we trod of writing, crafting, refining, and then marketing and promoting while beginning the process for another work resembles that of the protagonist after she or he has faced that first and all-important crisis.
As always, the question we must answer having undergone the change and transformation bequeathed by every novel, story, essay, or novella we write, “Will I do it again? And if so, how will I evidence or rather how will this next work evidence the battles in which I have triumphed and on which I now stand?”
We transcend not by winning, or surviving, but by returning to that from which we came, going back to where it all started, where the first sign of changed dropped upon us and delivered the first upheaval that started the ball rolling and us down the path of survival.