The Danger (and Delight?) of Getting Your Hopes Up

This week I did a cover reveal for my forthcoming verse novel for middle-grade readers, The Lost Language, about two sixth-grade best friends who are trying to save an endangered language and in the process to save their own endangered friendship. The cover, by Kathrin Honesta, is absolutely gorgeous and received a torrent of Facebook love. 

I think this is the best book I've ever written. So does my writing group.  So does my agent. So does my editor. So do all the friends who have read it in manuscript form. And now I have this terrific cover, too. Things are looking good for this book! 

But you know what this means, don't you?

It means I am STARTING TO GET MY HOPES UP.

And hopes can be dangerous. Hopes can be DASHED. Actually, to be more precise, hopes can be CRUELLY DASHED. Hopes can be DOOMED TO DISAPPOINTMENT.

I've had hopes for books before, dreams that this time I'd have my "breakout book," the one that would move me from "midlist" to wider recognition from the world. This has never happened for the previous 61 books. Why would it happen now? After all, as they say, "the best predictor of the future is the past." 

On the other hand, they also say, "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten," and this book is NOT what I've always done. It's my first novel in verse, which allowed me to find my best and truest voice. And it has an intriguing, never-done-before-by-anyone-else premise: the crusade by two kids to save an endangered language (spoiler alert: also a hope that will be cruelly dashed and doomed to disappointment).

I gave a guest sermon once at church that was all about hope and its dangers. Buddhist writer Pema Chodron has written that we need "to begin to get the knack of hopelessness." The Christian's "addiction to hope," according to Chodron, is only a guarantee of continued suffering. Chodron recommends getting decorative magnets that say "Abandon Hope" and sticking them onto our refrigerator doors. In support of her view, there is empirical social science research that hope actually makes people feel worse: happiness levels increase when unemployed people finally decide to give up the job search and call themselves "retired," even when sick people receive a terminal diagnosis and can abandon a futile and heartbreaking chase after a cure. 

But there is also social science research on the beneficial effects of hope, or at least of optimism, its close cousin. Psychologist Martin Seligman's study on optimism versus pessimism in one large insurance company showed that optimists achieved much greater career success, outselling pessimists by anywhere from 30 to 60 percent. It turns out that the old song is correct: The ant with high apple-pie-in-the-sky-hopes is much more likely to topple the rubber tree plant than the ant who doesn't even try because he already knows he's going to fail. 

As for me, I love that pleasurable feeling that the universe might - just might! - be sending something wonderful my way. It's lovely to put myself to sleep at night imagining in delicious detail what it would feel like collect a slew of starred reviews for this book or to get that early morning, late January phone call that my book has won the Newbery Medal. I can savor months of happy daydreams before cold, hard reality bonks me on the head. And the bonk will be a bonk whether I let myself luxuriate in hope now or not. 

In my favorite philosophy article ever, "The Will to Believe," by Williams James, he writes in defense of letting ourselves err on the side of hope rather than fear. He focuses on hope for the existence of God, but his arguments apply to other kinds of hope as well. Yes, if we hope, we risk disappointment, and this fear may cause us to guard our hearts against allowing ourselves to hope. The refusal to hope protects us from the fear of disappointment, but the fear of disappointment, James points out, equally denies us the pleasures of hope. We do not want to be duped, but James writes, “Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?”

So I'm going to let myself hope that The Lost Language will be an enduring classic of children's literature, beloved of readers for generations to come! It may well be a dud instead. Given the number of books published each year versus the number of books that achieve immortality, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of dud-dom. But how lovely it is to tarry for a while in the landscape of hope. 

I'm hoping hard right now for my sweet little book.