Words are worth a million feelings?

As a novelist and a human, I am plagued by the voice of my inner critic at times. Given the lagging sales of novels and author earnings right now, my inner critic has been clamoring a lot lately about how "a picture is worth a thousand words" so maybe I should just shut up with the novel writing and use my photography skills to tell stories. There are so many good ways to tell a story with pictures, or do visual storytelling, now and "who reads a whole book now anyway, we don't even read Facebook posts that require us to click See More " (a friend who chooses to remain anonymous).

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then why do we write novels? Do we still need novels?

Since my inner critic won't shut up otherwise, I have to have an answer so I thought about some of the most compelling photographs I've seen lately. Most of them are from the assorted Scuba Diving magazines I get now that I'm a (relatively) newly certified Scuba Diver. I've been a photographer for twenty plus years (i.e. earn money for selling photos kind), but I'm too new to Scuba Diving to master the challenges of taking good photos underwater. Even if I was better at capturing the light underwater just right, I still think it wouldn't be enough. Even the exquisite composites of expert underwater photographers (e.g. Cathy Church) don't sufficiently, satisfactorily, tell the heart of the story.
The pictures are beautiful, otherworldly, maybe even evocative (they make me want to tell stories sometimes), but somehow they still lack some dramatic punch. They say nothing about the millions of feelings or thoughts wrapped up in them unseen like the Electromagnetic spectrum. That picture says nothing about the chaff of the oversized dive computer against my wrist bone, the clinging suck of the wetsuit collar on my neck, the overwhelming dryness of the air I have to think about pulling in through the zinc taste of my regulator, the salt in my eyes because the mask isn't really that watertight, the hollow rumble of my stomach because I've traveled so far and it doesn't pay to eat much before going down, the pressure and extra degree of chill of each depth of water pressing in on my ribs, or my nagging wonder about where my dive buddy just wandered off. No matter how pretty, the picture doesn't explain why I learned to tolerate all of this discomfort to see this stuff first-hand.
I am weightless here thanks to the magic of neutral buoyancy, free to move in ways that are typically impossible under the influence of sobering gravity. My pictures don't show the school of Seargeant Major fish following me like curious puppies, bumping at my elbows as I try to frame the shot. I can feel the ghostly, delicate, caress of the hundreds of tiny Common Jellyfish against my bare skin as they ballet by. Just out of frame is a mysterious grotto where the light slivers and wanes around a dozen sharks at rest and the Amber Jackfish ahead does her best to keep an eye on them and an eye on me. Below me are even deeper gradations of blue, seeming unending and even wider than the sky above that is reduced to a simple translucent lid of sunshine overhead. I want to put the camera down. I want to tell the deeper story.
This moment is pure exploratory joy, like walking the moon. There is a good probability that no other living human has been here and seen this. There are still things here without any given names. The life and light on the reef, even the reef itself, change by the hour. Every snapshot falls flat. You can't tell from any of my pictures that this is the first time in two years of incredible stress and common grief that I feel like I can really breathe deep, despite the pressing weight of the entire Caribbean ocean around me. The pictures lack emotional context. I think novels exist because words are worth a million feelings.
Novels can go below the surface into the oceans of our souls. In such brave, new worlds I think words still have greater currency.

The Scene that Playing with Matches lost to Hurricane Harvey

The good often comes with the bad and vice versa. My newest novel was published on November 14th and we were flooded out of our house on August 28th. Writing and editing the novel mostly occurred before Hurricane Harvey impacted Houston...but not all of it.

I was traveling for work and fun in the weeks prior to Harvey and trading rewrites with #AffinityRainbowPublications' editors (and my amazing mentor Erin O'Reilly) so I e-mailed myself a scene intending to slip it in before the final edits. Harvey had other plans. I spent my first full night home after those travels putting pets, furniture, important paperwork, and survival rations upstairs instead. Things get lost in such circumstances.

So now we're back in our house, putting our lives back to normal, and I finally found the lost scene. I think it would have added something special to the book, but maybe not. Maybe fate stepped in for a reason. What do you think?

Gus flopped over in bed and picked up the phone on its fifth ring. "Hello."
Her sister's voice rang a little too joyously, "Happy, Happy Birthday, Sissy."
"Thanks, June. What time is is anyway?"
"I'm surprised you even have to ask."
Gus groaned. Of course her sister called to tell her happy birthday at
the same time every year, the exact minute she was born six forty
five in the morning, Eastern Standard Time.
June laughed. "So how goes the dating?"
Gus grumbled and shifted in bed, trying to clear her head enough to
speak with some articulation, but June rushed into the silence, "Oh, I,
uh, oh, I didn't wake you up when you had a guest. Did I?"
That set Gus laughing. "No. No. Fat chance."
"Well, given your tone of defeat young lady, I'd almost rather I had.
So the dating is going that well, huh?"
Gus grumbled, her tongue still thick with sleep and fatigue.
"Well, I know the right woman is out there for you," June said with a
pregnant pause at the end of her sentence.
"But?" Gus prompted.
"But nothing. I didn't say but," June protested, her voice hitting
false echoes of merriness.
"It was implied in your tone."
"So what being a psychologist makes you a mind reader or something."
"Sometimes I can predict behavior before it occurs, yes, but in this
case I think it is being your sister that does it. I can hear you
thinking it almost."
"But," June started and then they both laughed before she could continue,"but maybe you're being too
picky."
"I don't want someone who has never had baggage. Just someone mature
enough to have dealt with it already. Someone without any deep, dark
secrets or unsettled regrets or haunting ambitions."
"Hmm." The sceptism was clear in June's murmaration. "Honey, we all
have baggage still even if we dealt with some of it before. Even you
have baggage still."
Gus felt it too, she had to admit, but she couldn't name her own.
Maybe it was something too small to see for herself, so she challenged
June,"Like what?"
"You're scrappy."
"I'm scrappy? How on earth is that baggage?"
June sighed. "It's in everything you do. You were stuck in the middle
in our family and you had to fight for time and attention. You're
small and pert and pretty and you still have to fight to get people to
take you seriously even though you're a doctor. I don't think you can
help it. It's just a chip on your shoulder. You think you have to
fight for almost everything still."
"I don't think I have to fight for my family's love and attention."
"Granted, but you had a few decades to deal with that particular
aspect of your baggage already. What about romantic love? If someone
showed interest in you my dear sister, can you honestly say that you
would take that interest seriously if you didn't have to fight for it
first? Or would you just assume they gave it because they wanted some
thing from you?"
"What do I have that anyone would want?" Gus looked around the tiny
bedroom of her rented apartment. The hundred year old walls flaked
flat paint that probably had lead in it.
"What you have always had in spades, baby girl, lots of truly
compassionate, beautiful empathy. I'm no psychologist, but I'm sure
you feel like it is a limited and tested commodity. I know I do for
you."
Gus shrugged even though June couldn't see her. "Maybe."
"Maybe." June echoed before adding, "I understand why you might guard
your heart, why you'd want someone already beyond their baggage. I
just think that might be a little too much to hold out for and one of
these days I'd really like my call to interrupt some sexy morning
gymnastics."
They broke into laughter again, and as June bid her a happy birthday
one more time before hanging up, Gus made a wish closely mirroring her
sister's corny sentiment. Sexy morning gymnastics would be a great birthday present.

I'm a little sad the scene didn't make it in, but the two 5-star reviews the book has since garnered on Amazon make me think all is well that ends well. I feel extremely lucky just to be at home again and blessed that my entire family is safe, even our pet fish. Our neighborhood is rebuilding, and the reason I wrote Playing With Matches in the first place seems more true than ever: continuously challenging our own preconceptions helps us build many resilient and worthwhile relationships, including a lasting love.

Harvey arrives on our doorstep, enters the house an hour after this photo, and we spend 24 hours sheltering upstairs in the dark with the Coast Guard circling.

Life and Other Full Contact Sports

As an I-O psychologist specializing in teamwork and leadership in extreme environments (e.g. outer space, healthcare), I've spent an insanely large portion of my time reading about, debating, and defining grit, determination, perseverance, and resilience. My wife would say I've expounded ad nauseam on the minute variations in these near-synonyms with a less-than-entertaining obssesive scientific curiosity. (Note: I can also use words like they're going out of style soon.)

My professional preoccupations and my amateur athletic forays into team sports like Rugby have taught me that it is easiest to maintain confidence and sportsmanship when you're winning. It's even still pretty easy when your losing epic battles but believe you'll win the war. The real grit comes in when there is no doubt you're going to lose, when you have to politely keep trying despite the 11th straw that broke the camel's back being heaped on your head, when you have to sing and dance in the freezing cold to keep your soul alive in a Nazi concentration camp of unfairness (ala Viktor Frankl or Primo Levi or Dietrich Bonhoeffer). And even if you manage that kind of grit, then the brutal need for resilience to survive the survivor-guilt and emotional fall-out post-events might still kill you or your kindness (e.g. see the perils of returning from a year on the International Space Station).

This all isn't to say that my challenges and extenuating circumstances have been especially awful or particularly unusual. They are the stuff that all of our lives are made up of: living out of our home while our house is repaired after flooding during Harvey, the death of a good friend, the death of my sweet mother-in-law, unexpected work contracts, hiring new employees, having a novel published, a car recall, an infection, a sprained ankle, a lost wallet phone...you know what I mean. We all have excuses, even good ones; but it's like my grandfather used to say, "Excuses are like assholes. We all have them and they all stink." 

I failed Nanowrimo 2017 because I chose to let my challenges and extenuating circumstances take priority. The point here is why. Why did I do that? Why does it matter?

Grit and resilience, those animals of perseverance are extremely complex and unbelievably messy. Taming them requires a lot of quality self-care be done and be done first. First, I must be kind to myself, so that I can be kind to others or there is no point in perseverance. Rude perseverance is dishonorable in that it does too much harm for too little return. 

As a respectable statesman and third-rate poet, once wrote, “Life is mostly froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone. Kindness in another's trouble, Courage in your own.” (― Adam Lindsay Gordon)

I will lose Nanowrimo 2017, but I make great stone per Gordon's advice. There is nothing wrong with writing in December. I chose to let other things take priority so that I, and my support network, can live to try again. 

As Cherry-Gerrard concluded at the end of The Worst Journey in the World, "And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore.... If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg. " 

Mostly what matters, is that I just don't quit exploring. I keep writing. All I want are those penguin eggs, the knowledge of how to write these stories well. I will do whatever I have to do to make another, the next, one more author-expedition into writing fiction possible.

My Nanowrimo 2017 failure is ultimately just a weather delay.

The Penguins are Out There, just like the Truth.