Marginalia: The Power of Paradox and Fiction as Truth

Paradox underpins the message of our new book, I Am Perfectly Flawsome: How Embracing Imperfection Makes Us Better, co-authored with Michele Molitor. [You can join the waitlist here to be notified about early bird launch specials and be eligible to win fun prizes!]

We’ll get to how reading fiction connects with paradox and my marginal notes in two books I’ve read recently, The Whalebone Theatre, by Joanna Quinn, and When Women Were Dragons, by Kelly Barnhill. But first I want to flesh out where that “power of paradox” phrase in my title comes from.

Taking Advantage of Both/And

The paradox we urge you to grow comfortable with in our book is to celebrate imperfection in yourself, your work, others, and the world around us, while simultaneously striving for excellence.

But along the way I discovered a broader literature on the value of paradox. A search on Google Scholar for “research on paradox mindset” yielded “about 159,000 results” with one writer defining it this way:

“The paradox approach, in a nutshell, helps us switch from an ‘either/or’ to ‘both/and’ framing of competing demands. In doing so, we recognise that tensions – between autonomy and control, or creativity and discipline – are contradictory but also interrelated, even mutually reinforcing.”

Another pair of terms may be helpful to draw the contrast: paradox mindset vs. dilemma mindset.

The researchers link this ability to hold seemingly contradictory ideas or goals as true to an array of valuable outcomes, including creativity, team innovation, leadership, self-efficacy, perspective, resilience, and mindfulness. The same writer quoted above went on about the impact on creativity:

“My colleagues and I showed that people who adopt paradoxical frames – or recognise and embrace the simultaneous existence of contradictory elements – could be very creative, even radically creative.”

Another article pushed the point further, with the title Why the ‘paradox mindset’ is the key to success.

Yet another makes the crucial point that:

“Mindsets, however, are not fixed and developing a paradox mindset is possible. … people can change their mindset with awareness and deliberate practice …”

So don’t despair if you find holding a paradox difficult, at first. Learn more about why they benefit you (hint: we have a book about it) and take up the challenge!

When Fiction Is Reality

Now there’s a paradox for you. One of my favorite research paper titles goes, The Fiction That Fiction Is Fiction, by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama. Among the many reasons she demonstrates for why fiction comes with heavy doses of truth, she notes that we developed storytelling, in part, as a way to convey important information at any time, especially when real-world examples or “teaching moments” were not available.

This role of fiction gets expressed in The Whalebone Theatre, which opens when the main characters were children whose “most treasured possessions are their books,” a collection of familar stories. I marked aside this passage to share:

“Their most-loved books have been read so many times, they only have to look at the covers to know how it feels to be enclosed within them. But the worlds contained within the books do not remain between the covers. They seep out and overlay the geography of their lives.”

The children grow up as England is drawn into World War II and the sister, Flossie, who’d never felt she fit into the upper class society of her family found herself involved in billeting soldiers and a German prisoner, along with tending a Victory Garden. On a trip to buy herself some shirts and overalls suitable for such work, she surprises herself on looking in the mirror:

“The Flossie in the changing room mirror looks freckled and strong. Sleeves rolled up. Hair tied back in a headscarf. A Land Army girl.”

And in a nod to our theme of the Flawsomist paradox:

“Flossie looks again at her reflection. She seeks out mirrors more frequently these days, but it is not in order to find her flaws, as it always used to be. Beyond her enjoyment of her new clothes, there is something else: a seriousness in her gaze that her eyes keep wanting to meet, as if she and her reflection were engaged in some kind of ongoing silent exchange.”

Aside from clothing, her physical appearance was the same. But she’d found the value in the person looking back and the “flaws” for a society girl — being freckled and strong — could now be celebrated. They helped her see herself as a Land Army girl.

Toward the end of the story, Flossie’s older sister, Cristabel, reflects on the role of women and what she’s learned since the age of twelve when the book opens:

“People make many assumptions about women, most of them fatuous, and one is that we somehow lack clarity. That we are vague and silly. Personally, I consider certainty to be a kind of arrogance.

“I knew EVERYTHING when I was twelve years old, and with each year of my life, I know a little less, and there is freedom in that. You have space for a good deal more.”

Part of our argument for embracing imperfection mentions that even the laws of physics are subject to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle! And these paradoxical truths about learning and science reappear in When Women Were Dragons.

I scribbled “the learning paradox” next to this passage about a book written by a scientist character, Henry Gantz, reporting findings about “dragoning” (women becoming dragons) that were not yet accepted by the mainstream:

“You should definitely keep this. They’re quite rare. Chock-full of absolutely incorrect information too, as it turns out. Henry will be the first one to say so. The beautiful thing about science is that we do not know what we cannot know and we will not know until we know. It requires an incredible amount of humility to be willing to be wrong, and proven wrong, in order to increase knowledge overall.”

And later in the book, Gantz himself gives a speech to a gathering of scientists after his central theory is confirmed (though many of the details in his writings remained incorrect):

“But really, science rarely gives us answers. Rather, science gives us the means by which we may ask more questions … It compounds our curiosities. … I know it [dragoning] is a lot to take in. … I am here to ask you to accept that which you cannot change … accept them as they are … changed, flawed, and growing. Just as we must accept the world.

“Personally, I think it’s rather marvelous.”

And there’s that paradox again: accepting our flawed, changing world, while striving to learn and grow.

Gantz called it marvelous.

We call it flawsome.

It’s a Process

Perhaps you’ll take some comfort from knowing we’re not perfect at practicing flawsomism, either.

As we close in on releasing our book, Michele and I both keep finding … you know … little things. And a few not so little, that we could add or rewrite or make better.

Discovering this whole line of recent research on paradox mindset is a good example. I could easily have written a page or three about it in the book.

But we have the good fortune of having our Developmental Editor — aka Yvonne — to put her foot down and make us stop.

And this post is a good example of what you might be able to do with some of the material your editor tells you must be cut from the manuscript. Not because it’s bad material, but because the book is cleaner, tighter, and more readable without it. Chances are there will be a sidenote reference to this post in the final version of the book, too. (For what I mean by sidenote references, see my earlier post discussing the wide margin page layout of the book.)

The galley is out now with our Beta Reader group. There will no doubt be a few more edits and typo corrections from the galley readers and again from the print proofs. We’re striving for excellence, remember. But we also know there will be imperfections and we’re already proud of the work that got us to this point.

We’re practicing flawsomists. 😉