Recovering Agency: how to stop Noping out
It’s been a long time since I wrote one of these. Every time I started, I’d pull out the excuse box: Hectic at work. Too busy having IRL fun. These days I’m reading more than I write. Not in the mood.
Then I went surfing, which is where I learn most of my life lessons these days. I’ve written before about my challenges with surfing and somehow I keep going back. The longer it’s been between surf sessions, the more I stand in front of the ocean breathing deeply in acute terror. This is what I’m going into? Willingly? Why did I think it was a good idea? A wave crashes loudly and I think, The blank page has nothing on this. And then I walk in.
Seriously, who willingly walks into this? Cloudy skies, ominous-music statues, trees being whipped around?
Even when the waves are amazing, inevitably I’ll have a bad fall within the first ten minutes. Get smacked in the face with whitewater and sand. Get rolled around in the washing machine of a wave after wiping out. And surface, gasping for breath, clinging to my board, wanting nothing more than a break. A few minutes on shore, just to stop shaking.
Except. That’s when I most need to keep paddling. Before the next wave hits, I need to swim out of the impact zone, and quickly, and use that time to get my breathing under control. I need to make a rapid, active recovery. This is the hardest part. Some days I do it. Sometimes I don’t, and just Nope out guiltily to have margaritas by the shore.
The theme of this most recent surf session: Keep moving forward. Wave knocks you back six feet? Take two steps forward. Eventually you’ll get through.
I spent the months since my last post Noping out of writing publicly. I do like that word, although the spellcheck doesn’t. It implies a kind of defiant moping and rhymes with wiping out, which is what happens a lot in surfing. I got smacked in the face one too many times, couldn’t break past the impact zone, and decided to have some margaritas instead.
I still kept writing for myself, little notes and plot ideas and world-building tidbits that I might someday use when I was ready to go back. Of course, I kept reading. But I stopped posting on Twitter and Substack. I stopped writing articles for magazines. I needed to catch my breath, and figure out what I actually wanted to write about next.
As an author not dependent on writing for my financial solvency, I get to do that. But, I realized, Noping out is not something a protagonist gets to do. They’re stuck in the ocean, in the impact zone, and they can’t just go back to shore. (This is usually called a crucible, a reason that keeps the protagonist moving forward, because going back is impossible). In my first few drafts of Driving by Starlight, I was a little too realistic, giving Leena time to Nope out, lick her wounds and wait for circumstances to be a bit better before moving forward again. It was one of the reasons that first draft was rejected during submissions.
It’s not news that authors use protagonists to vicariously live out fantasies, but writing and imagination are also how we can learn things vicariously. If we can write characters who can manage an active recovery while being pummeled by circumstances, maybe we too can learn their resilience.
Here’s hoping, anyway. Deep breath. Walking back in. Baby waves.