Tag Archives: Suffering

Sufferings and Joys

by Andrew | 2 Comments

Today’s the day that the days get longer than the nights, and the sun is shining, and my hyacinths are smelling sweetly, and it’s time to sow seeds, and all over social media people are celebrating the joys of spring.

But – and I don’t want to spoil the party – for some reason lately I can’t get away from the idea of suffering. Maybe it’s taking a meditation course, where we’re paying attention to such things. Or maybe it’s hearing yet another story of someone’s sickness, or reading another story about war. Or maybe I’ve just become a winter person. But just because the sun is shining a little longer today, it doesn’t mean suffering is going away. The cycle is just turning.

Also, I’ve come to feel suffering is probably a more substantial and authentic driver for story than conflict. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: conflict is a primary engine in certain sorts of stories (war stories, crime stories, etc.). And it probably features somewhere in most stories in some fashion or other. But conflict feels overemphasised as the core principle of stories, and especially in cookie-cutter creative writing classes. No wonder there’s so much conflict in the world! And no wonder so much writing feels a bit formulaic. Let’s defer to St Ursula (again):

Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing’
– Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft

So how does change take shape in our stories? Experiencing change – or impermanence – is, after all, one of those facts of life that Buddhist teachings say we can’t avoid, and change usually leads to joys as well as suffering, major and minor.

Buddhist teachings also acknowledge suffering as a basic fact of existence; sometimes the idea is translated in a less catastrophic and more everyday fashion as dissatisfaction.

Much suffering is attributed to three ‘root poisons’: hatred, greed, and ignorance. So if we want to avoid suffering for ourselves and others, how might we reduce their presence in our lives?

And to prove I’m not a complete misery-guts, let’s note that these afflictions also have opposite virtues identified as the ‘beneficial roots’ of joy: love, generosity, and understanding. By contrast, how might we nurture these qualities?

Because my default mode is to think about writing and stories, I began to consider the ways in which these descriptions of suffering offer story arcs for our characters, and used these for writing experiments in the masterclass on Character earlier this month.

So for hatred and its related qualities:

  • How might anger feature in the lives of characters?
  • How might they have been pushed away or rejected?
  • And what might they themselves push away or feel aversion towards?
  • What might they be running away from?
  • How might they be driven by fear?
  • How might self-loathing, shame or guilt drive their actions?
  • What pain have they experienced?
  • What wounds do they carry, and how might they have injured others?

And thinking about the opposite quality of love:

  • Where does their open-heartedness begin?
  • And where might it be challenged?
  • What acts of kindness do they perform?
  • And what sort of benevolence has been shown towards them?
  • How might they show compassion in relieving the suffering of others?
  • And how might compassion be shown towards them at times of need?
  • How do they show love to others, and how do others share love with them?

Thinking about the root poison of greed:

  • How might your characters be defined by attachment?
  • What are their desires, and how do they shape their stories?
  • And how are they affected by the desires of other people?
  • What do they crave or grab or grasp for?
  • And what do they cling on to?
  • And thinking about attachment in a more positive way: what might characters in fact gain from holding on to, or committing to?
  • It occurs to me that too often in less successful stories characters’ commitments or desires don’t really feel earned: so: how do characters earn whatever they gain or lose?

And by contrast, exploring the idea of nonattachment:

  • What is the role of generosity in their stories: what are they given, and what do they give to others?
  • What freedom might they enjoy in letting go or giving things away?
  • What sacrifices have they made in the past, and might they have to make in the future?

And to consider the root poison of ignorance:

  • How are your characters’ lives numbed out by what they don’t know?
  • How do misunderstandings cloud their relationships and experiences of the world?
  • How might your characters be deluded, or held back by illusions?
  • How might indifference or inertia shape their lives?
  • How might their stories be driven by doubt or uncertainty?
  • What foolish decisions do they make?

And on the flip side of understanding:

  • What might characters gain from knowing?
  • How might their stories be informed by their increased awareness of the world around them?
  • What do they come to appreciate?

I recently realised that hope doesn’t really feature in these reckonings of suffering! Which begs the questions:

  • What is the role of hope in the story?
  • And also its opposite: despair? Which can be crippling?

This gives me food for thought – about happy endings, which might be hoped for, but which in stories can so often feel trite: unearned or lazy, or simply not set up adequately. In fact, might the clinging and illusory aspects of hope stand in the way of characters seeing the simple joys in the world around them? And the happy ending is already here, and a character finally sees this.

‘There’s no place like home,’ says Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, whose journey takes her from doubt and ignorance to understanding and appreciation. It turns out her suffering and joy are actually bound up together in the same place – they just needed some unravelling and a bit of growing up, which of course required those adventures with the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion.

I don’t know that it’s necessary to use all of these frameworks: in fact, that might get overly complicated! But these are ideas that might help in developing clear narrative arcs or resolutions for what might at times be subtle storylines. The move from hatred to love, from attachment to freedom, from illusion to understanding: these are journeys that touch on all the big themes and deepen characterisation, and properly explored can bring depth to characterisation and storytelling. You could explore some of these questions in the manner of the notebook practice of Field Work or filling out a Character Questionnaire.

And a final question: how about doing a loving-kindness meditation for your characters: May you be free of suffering. What would that involve?

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My next masterclasses are on: Setting and Situation on 8 April, Story and Plot on 13 May, and Form and Structure on 10 June.

And I’ve blogged about suffering before in another context: Suffering for Your Art, aka Pull Yourself Together.

Suffering For Your Art, aka Pull Yourself Together

by Andrew | 2 Comments

As a guest at a recent Words Away Zalon on mindfulness and writing, I made a passing reference to Kellie Jackson about the manuscript as a site of suffering. It was a bit of a throwaway remark, but I’ve been thinking about this idea since.

First, and most simply: as an editor I see a lot of writers suffering over their writing. Uncertainty about technique, confusion about feedback, frustration and even anger about rejections, envy at the success of others, doubts about the very idea of the book in the first place, sales figures for the last book. Angst, worry, fretting, the workings of Monkey Mind: these are very real obstacles that writers suffer, whether they are at the beginnings of their careers or experienced authors.

Weren’t we supposed to be doing this because writing is fun?!

Secondly, I’ve recently been taking a series of classes on Buddhist philosophy. The foundation of Buddhist practice rests on the four noble truths: suffering is a basic fact of life; suffering has causes; those causes can be alleviated or ended; and there is a path to that end of suffering. Simple principles, simple observations.

I found it hard to relate to this idea of suffering back when I first encountered it – in some encyclopedia, I think – in primary school in the 1970s. That Victorian notion of progress and the forward march of history with a certain Judeo-Christian tinge: that still carried weight then, and a midcentury faith in the future offered all sorts of technocratic utopias.

But as I get older, I understand the relevance of this teaching about suffering on both global and personal scales. The innocence of Ladybird books about Kings and Queens and Marco Polo gives way to way to the truths of history and the threats of the anthropocene. And we all experience losses, or struggle with challenges. I still have that habit of seeing the glass a quarter full, but at times life really does suck.

Which does remind us that all things are relative. Yes, you might be struggling with this book you’re writing. But take a look at the sufferings in the world around us: disease, hunger, the climate emergency, grieving communities, grieving families. I’m rationing the news and social media at the mo, so who knows what today brings, but it will include some or all of the above. And then there are all the losses that don’t make the headlines too.

So beside any of those things, let’s place the worries permitted for writing a book. Sometimes, in fact, the Buddhist concept of suffering is translated more subtly as dissatisfaction, and that might be a more useful way of looking at things.

Of course, we seek support and guidance in our writing. But at a certain point we really do have to gather our energies, and regroup, and maybe ask why we are doing this, and what we can do to help ourselves further, and take a long hard look. Pull Yourself Together: that is the title of my own as-yet unwritten self-help guide (a family joke – I’m not always known for being patient with the moaning sorry suffering of others). I’m in the middle of Natalie Goldberg’s online Way of Writing at the moment, and she says we have to grow a spine. At a certain point, we have to cut through the worries and the struggling, and listen to ourselves and just write.

With that rather hard-faced perspective, try this as an exercise in writing or revision: write for at least ten minutes for each of the following prompts:

  • How is your writing suffering?
  • What are the causes of your writing’s suffering?
  • How can those causes of suffering be ended?
  • What can you do to help end that suffering? Maybe think about: craft, process, further studies or training, feedback, other forms of guidance and support? Break these aims down into a list of tangible tasks: pull yourself together (this might take more than ten minutes as an ongoing exercise in planning and list-making).
  • Also: translate the word, and consider your sufferings as  dissatisfactions, and ask yourself how you can be satisfied.

You might want to try these as free writes, Natalie-style: write without stopping, keeping the pen moving, following your mind and getting it down on paper. Then maybe, later, read it aloud – read or send as a voice note to a writing buddy.

No harm was intended to any religious faith in the writing of this post! I don’t profess to be a Buddhist, or anything else other than someone who loves books and the world of writing. For what it’s worth, I also have four planets in Aries. I never used to think much about astrology until someone explained what that means to me (shocked at how accurate!).

Happy Easter! My favourite pagan holiday, full of Aries energy for fresh starts and cutting through. My birthday usually falls nearby, and I consider it an international festival for eating well, enjoying the garden, and thinking about books and bunnies and birdsong.