Desire and Doubt Are a Slow Burn
On prep, doubt, and following the image before you’re ready
Main character collage - she’s my FMC and her heart is caught between two.
The images you see in this post are from a card spread I did this week for three characters that have been slowly moving into my mind, to live rent free, until I write their stories. They came to me last Fall as a quirky idea for a romance novel. I took some loose preliminary notes on this story idea into a dedicated notebook I set apart as ‘story ideas.’
Creating this container for the stories that walk into my mind, unbidden, is my way of honoring the images that the Muses send my way. It’s akin to keeping a dream journal, something I haven’t done in years, as the dreams have gotten so busy, movies in my mind throughout the night, that I’ve become too overwhelmed to track.
So instead of tracking the dreams, something I did so diligently in prior years (such as the dream of the angels carrying me to Portland’s fire department that I shared in a previous article), now I’m holding this notebook as my tracker of story ideas, the new dreams that inhabit my waking hours.
As this story has niggled at me more than others, I decided to do the preliminary work around it, to unfurl the thread it has given me and see where it will lead me. I even bought a couple of books on how to write a novel, as a way for my Saturn in Gemini to put bones to this scaffolding. As I read these books, I’m taking notes on this story and seeing how these characters will flesh out.
But while stuck on their motivations, I decided to use my own way of working: why not do a card pull for each of the main characters to help me see beyond what felt like my rational mind controlling the narrative? And I was surprised to see the cards both cement some elements about how I was perceiving these characters while revealing yet unexplored ones.
The cards are putting meat on the bones of these entities that are moving into my mind and slowly making themselves at home.
My creative mind is becoming a landlord and these characters are my dwellers, who have their needs, demands, and also will offer me experiences that, as of yet, I’ve no idea what they may be.
The uncomfortable romance between desire and doubt
When I was in third grade, my teacher accused my mother of writing my composition homework for me. This caused some drama in the school, because my mother was the teachers’ supervisor, responsible for the curriculum, syllabus, and teacher training. In terms of authority, only the principal had more leverage than my mother.
I was called to the principal’s office for a meeting between my teacher, my mother, and the principal presiding like a judge. I didn’t know what was going on, but when I saw my composition, which I vaguely remember being about rain being some kind of fairy, I was confused as to why my mother was being accused of doing my homework for me, and thus of making sure I would get good grades.
It turned out that my composition was the best in class, and the teacher couldn’t believe that I, at that age, could write something so creative. And my mother had not even read it. After my mother was made to read it right then and there, she countered that not only had she not written it, she was proud to see that all her work of exposing me to reading and books was paying off, as she could see that I had the talent to write.
The teacher was excused for her accusatory behavior, and my mother walked away with the confirmation that her pedagogical skills were working just fine: her method of working with me through stories since I was a tiny toddler was showing dividends.
This memory came back to me as I sat down to write this post, to illustrate how long I’ve wanted to write a novel in my life. But despite that early success, one that was marred by the drama around authorship, I have doubted that I could do so.
And in looking back, I realize that desire and doubt are a forced-proximity, slow-burn, yearning-filled love affair.
I used to think desire would erase doubt, but now, as I sit here taking notes for a story I feel pulled to write, I also feel desire and doubt sitting on my shoulders like a pair of angels, pulling me in different directions.
The desire has been there since I was young, although as the years went by, desire gave way to a sense of obligation mixed with embarrassment, when friends turned to me with an expectant smile, asking me where was the book they’d been waiting for and were sure I should write. Even my mother expected the book, although, thankfully, she didn’t push it as she pushed me in other ways.
Others’ expectations fattened up my own expectations for myself, and that led to doubt cornering desire, until last year. For a long time I thought doubt was the enemy of desire, and vice versa.
But now I see them more as an odd couple in forced proximity, needing to work together, and me (or you, because I’m sure you also struggle with the tension between desire and doubt) needing to move from a paralyzed position to become a weaver of these two. The tension between them can leave us paralyzed for years, decades even, until our muscles give in and we realize it’s not about either/or, but both/and.
Desire and doubt are not to be severed, but woven together to make the third thing, which is what we’re creating in and for our lives.
I don’t have the full answer yet, but I do see that desire and doubt are threshold dwellers who pose two important questions we must ask ourselves.
Desire asks: do you want this?
Doubt asks: do you have what you need to do it?
But of these two, doubt is often an anxious and poor communicator, and the question comes as: can you really do this?
Desire asks us to connect with our inner compass of true want; doubt comes to ask what we need to feel resourced to go through with it.
That’s the pivot I realized as I prepared to write this post. In hindsight, doubt has led me to lean into what felt more nourishing: writing blogs (I started back in the days of Blogspot, remember that site?), essays, and articles. But now it’s time to expand beyond ease and give more room to the original desire of writing stories, where I get to channel characters and worlds onto the page.
Like my mother years ago walked away from that accusation with a confirmation that her methodology around literacy for me was working better than she intended, I now see that my cave year, reading like a true book dragon, not only nourished my famished soul, it courted me from a reader’s chair back to a writer’s chair: first to the love I have of writing what I consider essays, but now to that buried desire of writing stories.
The very genre worked on me as it works on its characters: it wooed me, reignited my creative juices, and now it beckons me to take my Threshold Lovers’ hand and cross this untried creative landscape.
The unexpected character that arrives to upend the rut of the status quo.
Toes go tentatively first, unsure of where the current will take me
Desire beckons my toes to the water, while doubt still holds onto its coping strategies, and mine is research. Don’t get me wrong, research is good and necessary, but it’s easy to get stuck in the “I need more prep, more info, more, more” and not put pen to paper to write a single scene. This is where I fear getting stuck, as I haven’t written any scenes yet, and I don’t want my doubts to leave me in the friend zone of research, forever yearning and never sealing the deal.
But if doubt is asking me what I need, then I’m trying to resource myself for this crossing: first with my notebook, to capture the ideas, flights of fancy, and vibes for this novel that landed on my shoulder last Fall. The characters arrived somewhat fuzzy, coming from my desire to see this type of heroine in books, embracing the idea shared by Toni Morrison that if you can’t find the story you want, you should write it (I’m paraphrasing).
So a dedicated notebook is my way to use the body instead of just the screen. Something about writing my notes in my messy handwriting brings my body into the equation. Now the cards, and perhaps later a collage for the characters and story itself, like a vision board, are my ways to engage with the image and help the story become more defined in my mind.
The other part of this process is looking for the social component to help the journey not feel too alone. I’m looking for actual fellow wanderers, perhaps by joining a writing group for encouragement and accountability. Bouncing ideas around in my head, or pulling in my husband as a brainstorming buddy, isn’t always as nourishing as finding others in this threshold landscape.
All of this is still toes going into the water, not yet dropping in up to my chest. Tentative not just because of my own inner doubts, but also because I want to stay present for each part and not give up from a shock to the system. This may all change, but for now this is where the friction is in this process.
On reading and writing
I’ve also been thinking about the acts of reading and writing.
Reading isn’t passive and never was.
It moves from consuming to digesting, and digesting leads to rehearsal, in our fantasies, dreams, and flights of fancy. That’s where the metabolizing happens, where we transform what we read into something now woven into our lives. The year of reading wasn’t the passive part before the writing. It was my body learning the moves it’s only now being asked to perform.
So what about writing? Writing, for me, is how I find out what I’m really thinking, and each time I return to the same topic, the threads get more interwoven. But writing creatively brings something past the transmission of ideas through my fingertips: the aliveness of characters and their stories.
I believe thoughts are entities. They travel through space and time, lie dormant for centuries, and return to whole cultures in threshold times. Stories carry even more charge, because they hold feeling more vividly than ideas do.
To write one feels akin to a shamanic journey, where you cross the field to meet others and bring back what they gave you. It asks for a release of the ego’s control, so the story and its characters can land.
Years ago I saw Elizabeth Gilbert on her Big Magic tour, and she said stories arrive at your door and wait a while for you to write them, and if you don’t, they move on to another author. That image stayed with me, and made me wonder how many stories have rung my doorbell only to find I wasn’t home. Now that they’re knocking again, I don’t want to lose them. I’m ready to answer.
The other MMC who has a thing of two to learn as our FMC makes her choice.
The friction of the discomfort
If in my last post I talked about trust and faith, I’m now testing myself against my own ability to build trust with my creative self. The not-yet, not feeling fully ready, doubting one’s follow-through, is real and uncomfortable. So much so that this is where what Steven Pressfield names Resistance enters through the cracked foundation. In The War of Art, he describes it as the force that rises whenever we try to move from a lower to a higher self, and to me it speaks in the most soothing, rational voice we have, much like a seasoned serial killer that the FBI will never catch.
The temptation of resistance is to close the gap fast through endless prep, research, and list-making, with the end goal of getting us to quit. Resistance abhors uncertainty, not-knowing, and is extremely protective of our status quo. Resistance is like a helicopter parent who thinks it’s asking out of real concern for the children’s wellbeing, only to do real damage to their ability to build resiliency and trust their own capabilities.
Resistance will cut us at the knee, then come to kiss it and put a bandaid on it.
This is the place where we have to have faith that we are never fully ready. That’s not a failing or an excuse; that’s what the field, the landscape we meet once we cross the threshold, demands.
Being fully ready means carrying all our old armor, tools that worked for different thresholds but will not do for this one.
Each threshold is about expanding our abilities, and if we bring a full suitcase, how are we to bring any souvenirs back from our excursions?
Crossing a threshold is like packing for a long trip to another country. You pack what is necessary, but you leave room for what you’ll find there and bring home. It’s a balancing act. I know, because I’m an expert luggage packer, and despite doing well for years, I still find it stressful.
All this to say that the friction of discomfort is a necessary medicine in the crossing.
It shows we’re no longer in Kansas, and this is a road that tests our mettle, but also serves as a birth doula to aspects of ourselves we had no idea were hidden in our psyche’s basement.
The proof is in the pudding
Back in early February, I heard of an event happening this month: Romancing Portland (Sept 11–13). I saw they were calling for workshops, and on a “jump before you’re ready” impulse, I sent in my workshop idea and waited months to hear if it was accepted. When I got their yes, I was both elated and anxious, for now I had to move from dream and idea into reality.
Now that it’s just a few days away, I’m excited, but also nervous, about stepping onto the proverbial stage to share about the Threshold Lover with a room full of romance lovers. My talk is titled “Meet Your Threshold Lover: The Eight Companions Hiding in Your TBR.“ Wish me luck!
At the time, as I was packing up my old house to move, I sat down and threw a line into the world with this dream of speaking at a romance convention. Months later it returned with a yes, and here we are, soon to bring into the physical world these ideas that had been living in my imagination all this time. It was, for me, a play on trust and faith: faith in my idea, still untested, as a way to build trust with myself by showing up for my own ideas and giving them room to run in the world and prove themselves.
As a scout in the field, I like to test my own ideas on myself, and come back and report my findings to you.
What is knocking at your door?
What image has been knocking on your door?
What has been calling you but kept getting postponed to “someday”?
Someday is a very seductive land, a place where all things go for an extended vacation and many never return.
If you’re in Portland and love romance, join us on Sept 13 at Romancing Portland. Come and say hello.
Curious which Threshold Lover is yours?
The same eight companions I'm bringing to Portland this weekend are waiting in a short quiz. Thirteen questions, a few minutes, and a companion.
