Inside the Turbulent Journey of Sarah Boon: Secrets Behind the Rise and Fall of a Field Scientist
Sarah Boon: I would say resilience is a big one because it helps you deal with things like rejection, which happens a lot in writing, so resilience is really important. Self-reliance is good because you need to promote yourself. No one is going to do that for you, so that’s your job. It’s also your job to write. You have to rely on yourself to make yourself write, make a schedule, whatever works for you, but you can only rely on yourself to do that writing.
Creative problem-solving – that one’s pretty obvious, if you think about it. You’re writing a book, something’s not working. Is it the scene that’s wrong, is it the plot that’s wrong? You have to problem-solve and figure out what it is that’s not working so that you can fiddle with it and adjust it and make it work. And the ability to focus on the moment is important because when you’re writing you can’t be thinking about other things like, I have to get my teeth cleaned. or I have to go buy groceries. You have to be there, in the moment, writing, and then you can get into a flow state. So those are all the ways that I think fieldwork is like writing, because you need to have the same attributes for both.
