I often advise my clients and students who are having trouble writing with any regularity to pick a specific time and place to work each day. Starting can be one of the hardest parts for a lot of people, that feeling of being stone cold and uninspired is so daunting, so like the experience of failure itself that they’d rather clean their gutters than do this thing they actually love doing. If you choose a specific time, you can prepare yourself mentally before you sit down. Also, there’s something Pavlovian that often kicks in after a week or two, where you begin shifting to this creative frame of mind as you go through the ritual of making the coffee and turning on your computer.

This has certainly been the case for me. I’m such a creature of habit that I have certain mugs I use for coffee and other mugs for tea, and a specific order for how I stack our colored dinner plates in the cabinet. You could set your watch by what time I’m at my desk each morning. It’s very comfortable for me, and I can get a little cranky when my routine is disturbed. But if I’m not careful, it can feel a bit restrictive too, as if 6:22 AM is the only time I can really start writing.

I realized this recently when I found myself on a couple occasions with totally open afternoons and a story I wanted to get back to. The challenge, as always, was letting go of everything I’d been thinking about and reading about and watching about through the morning and early afternoon. It seems so important when it’s rumbling around my head. Something important has energy, and I always want energy. But my mind needs to be clear, needs to be made available for the new ideas I hope will come, and so I sit there, drinking tea, waiting and forgetting.

I’m forgetting to care about what seemed important and waiting for a little inspiration. The forgetting isn’t really hard if you know that’s what you’re doing. Pull your attention from anything and it fades; put your attention on something else and it grows. I’ve been practicing this my whole life, and yet it still seems a little magical every time I do so. How easy to doubt the very source of all my power, as if there were really something other than the direction of my focus that could change what I see and feel and create.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

If I’m completely honest, for as long as I’ve been aware of it, I haven’t been a fan of the phrase “self-love.” Its intentions were obviously good, but it too often conjured in me images of spa weekends and boxes of chocolate truffles and binge-watching a Netflix series, all of which are fine, but not anything to which I aspire. Also, love to me always seemed more outward-facing. I loved a story or a person or an experience. I felt the love within me, but largely, I thought, as a consequence of what I perceived and appreciated.

However, if writing has taught me anything, it’s that the best way to really understand something is to see it against its opposite, which, in this case, would be self-hate. Unfortunately, I’m plenty familiar with this practice, and there is literally nothing worse. The world is big, and full of so much and so many, but I am and will always be the only portal through which I know it. I go to bed with myself and wake up with myself, walk with myself and sit with myself. My own company, my history and desires, are inescapable. To hate them is to hate everything, to find pleasure and joy in nothing.

Sometimes, when I’ve been very down, I’ve found myself drawn to the page to sing my blues. Do I just want to complain? At first, perhaps. Except there’s no reason to complain unless you can imagine, or remember, or crave something better, and before long it’s that something better I’m describing. You can’t describe something unless you can first see it, feel it, and know it. And where is it being seen and felt and known? What is the very source of this better thing?

I often feel that I lose track of myself when I write, but it’s maybe more accurate to say I connect to my truest self. This inner artist just wants to love and create and appreciate everything, including my other self, the one who bangs around the world and scrolls on his phone and thinks he should practice his guitar more often. I don’t really hate anything or anyone, but I do lose track of the one who loves. Fortunately, he’s never very far.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

I’ve had a few bouts of insomnia lately. I do not enjoy these solo journeys to nowhere. I’m the sort who tries to tough it out in my bed, stubbornly hoping I’ll eke out a couple hours somehow. Sometimes I succeed, but often I end up flopping from side, to back, to side again, my mind caught in a loop of gripes and concerns. These cranky, worrisome thoughts are like silver fish waiting for a quiet moment to slither from the cracks of my subconscious. Once they’re out, it feels like my world is on fire, and who can rest when the house is burning?

This is why it’s often a better idea to just get up and read or do a crossword. The world of things you can touch and see is a good distraction. Sometimes, though, as I sit in my office trying to divert my mind toward restfulness, I’m beset with a strange sense of failure. None of my troubled thoughts are new to me. Some feel as old as I am. Plus, there’s nothing original about fear; it’s boring and predictable and useless but coiled nonetheless with desperate energy. Success has always meant freedom to me, and here I am hounded by the same old crap. I can distract myself all I want, but those worries will be back.

Then, of course, the morning comes and, as I do every day, I go to my desk to write. My workroom is nearly as quiet as my bedroom at midnight. I love this quiet, however. It’s the perfect environment for fear’s only true antidote: a new thought. A new thought needs an empty mind and a blank page. Yes, they will come while I’m showering or mowing the lawn or even in a great conversation, but there’s nothing like sitting down and purposefully inviting them to remember what I’ve forgotten when caught in that same stupid, frenetic whirlpool.

The real problem with our fears is that they’re always readily available. You know where they are in your mind. If you’re like me, you might even pick one up just because you’re a little bored. A new thought, meanwhile, requires something else of us, though they are just as available. They’re all around, I’d say, but I must look for them and leave room for them. How friendly is my world when I live in it creatively, when the night is a time for dreams and fears are reduced to harmless ash.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

If you don’t consider yourself the gullible type, you might like to say that, “Seeing is believing.” Or maybe you were gullible once, and now you’ve learned your lesson. Either way, you’re not going to believe it until you see it. Other people predict and promise all kinds of things, and you’re tired of the hope you invested in these wishes and theories only to be disappointed. Until you’ve held it in your hands, until you’ve seen it with your own eyes, what could be is nothing but a lot of talk. You only care about what actually is.

I don’t blame anyone for feeling this way. After all, people can believe all kinds of things – that the earth is flat, that the moon landing was faked, that the election was rigged. They’ve got all the evidence in their head, and if you ask them, you’ll get to hear about it. Then again, people also believe things like only the lucky succeed, or life isn’t fair, or people will always let you down. In these cases, believing is seeing, because if you think, for instance, that the world is an unjust place, you’ll see injustice everywhere you look. You’re not making it up. There it is, and there it is, and there it is again. You don’t like it, but apparently that’s reality.

Of course, if you’re an artist, you’re in the business of inventing realities. Everything you make didn’t exist until you believed in it long enough to write or draw or compose it. No one else could hold it in their hand or hear it with their own ears. The story or song was real to exactly one person – you – and sometimes not even that. Sometimes you doubted it would ever come to be, that it was nothing but a moon landing of a dream, another thing to disappoint you. It was just in your head, after all. Were you just being gullible once again?

This is the real discipline of writing. The world will never get to see anything you dream until you’ve believed in it day after day, believed in it even though your only evidence that it was really interesting or really cool or really funny was how you felt when you were writing it. Don’t tell yourself that your joy and excitement and interest are all make believe. In fact, once you’ve finally made something and shared it, and other people can see it and hold it, and some of them even said, “Wow, this great!” you may start believing that the only thing real is what you love.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

My worst addiction hasn’t been drugs or alcohol, but the future. That’s where I’d go to soothe myself, certain that I knew its contents. The future, after all, was where all success and failure appeared to wait, where the results of what I created in the here and now would be learned. It seemed too important to leave to what in my darkest times felt like chance, as if there was some indifferent force that would determine what would become of me when the calendar turned again.

And so, I’d dream the long path ahead of me. What I saw seemed real enough, as if I were actually planning something, outlining my life. I knew there was power in visualization. Wasn’t that what I was doing? It wasn’t, actually. True visualization is still rooted in the present, the way you can picture the flowers blooming in your garden the day you planted them. My habit was just hope decorated by my imagination. It was better than actively worrying, but it never felt real. No matter. It seemed like my only antidote to the endless problem that was tomorrow.

Unfortunately, fear disguised by make-believe is still fear. What’s more, it meant that today didn’t really matter as much as what was coming. Of course, in all my dreams I’d imagine a time where the future didn’t concern me at all, where all I needed to do was create with what was in front of me. What a relief that would be. At their best, these fantasies seemed quite real. Surely such an experience was possible.

In fact, it is. Writing teaches me and anyone interested in learning this very lesson every day I sit down at my desk. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing about the past, which I often do; all my attention is in the present. It’s the only place creation can occur. It’s where everything always is. And it is a relief when I sink into it, when all I’m concerned with is the next sentence and the next sentence. It’s how I slowly broke that addiction, giving myself daily the very reward I’ve hoped I’ll some day claim.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

I’ve never taught a Fearless Writing class where the issue of time didn’t come up for at least one, and usually close to half the students. Everybody’s busy. Everyone has jobs, or children or aging parents to care for, or houses that need repairing, or guests that are coming to visit. It never ends. All that stuff that keeps us busy requires our time, and we seem to only have so much of that. Maybe we skip writing one day and free up a little of that precious commodity. There’s one less thing we have to do.

Except, unless you’re under contract, you never really have to write. Not for the standard, roof-over-the-head, food-in-the-cupboard reasons. Nothing really happens if you don’t. Maybe you’ll feel bad because you think it means you’re lazy or uncreative or undisciplined. Perhaps the threat of acquiring one of these unattractive labels is enough to get you back to the desk. It’s not. It might force you to return to your story for one or two days, but fear, in the end, is an unreliable motivator.

There’s only one real motivation. Once you’ve written with any regularity and enjoyed it, once you’ve experienced the mysterious bliss of falling down the creative rabbit hole, there’s no going back to a life without it. It doesn’t matter if you’re getting paid or not, whether anyone’s reading your stuff or not, there’s no relief to be had by denying yourself what you gain by sitting alone and focusing on what you care about most. Now you’re connected to what really feeds you, to what gives you a life worth living.

And when you’re being fed in this way, one of the first things that happens is you lose track of is time. How gloriously freeing to be rid of the relentless, tick-tock of adulthood, all of which is tied to a schedule, to what needs doing. To find the time in your busy life, you’ll have to accept that this feeling, this flow state, matters to you for reasons you can’t really explain to most people. It matters even though you don’t know where it’s going, or what it will bring you. All you know for sure is how you feel while you’re doing it, which, if you’re honest, is all that has ever mattered to you.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

You can’t really fake it. You can try. You can tell yourself you’re interested in a certain kind of story because that’s what’s selling, that’s what women between the ages of 35 and 55 are reading now. You can tell yourself it doesn’t really matter because you love to write and you love stories and what’s the difference really? You definitely want to sell something and it’s a lot easier to sell what people want to read, so that’s what you’ll write.

You tell yourself not to be precious about your writing. Don’t be a snob. That’s a luxury you can’t afford. Maybe when you’re rich and successful you’ll be able to be picky, but that’s not where you are right now. You’re just trying to be practical, to be a grownup. You had a lot of dreams when you started out, but they were born in childhood, before you understood how the world really worked. Now you know – or, you think you know. You’ve certainly heard a lot about how it works. People will definitely tell you if you ask them. They’ll say, “I hate to tell you, but . . .” and then the hard truth comes. They’re being helpful, these people. They had dreams once also.

So, you try to write the kind of story you’re told people will read. It doesn’t go well. You tell yourself this is because you’re learning. That’s normal. Except it doesn’t get any easier. In fact, it just gets harder and harder. What misery. You wonder if you’re not cut out for this. You wonder why you didn’t just go to law school or get your teaching certificate. You don’t need to wonder. You didn’t want to do those things because they didn’t excite you the way telling a story did, and so you thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to spend my life doing this?”

Indeed, it would. Eventually, you give up. Give up faking it. It’s impossible. You sit at your desk, surrounded by the unfinished stories you never really wanted to tell. Now you finally ask, “What’s something I’d love to write? What’s cool? What have I been avoiding because I thought someone else wouldn’t like it?” The answer is always waiting for you. In fact, it was pecking at your imagination while you tried to please other people, distracting you, making it harder and harder to be someone you’re not.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

Imagine a life drawing class. A model poses in the middle of a classroom surrounded on all sides by artists. In this class, every artist is equally skilled at rendering the model. Yet every artist also sees the model from a slightly different perspective. For this reason, every finished drawing will be accurate, yet necessarily incomplete. The artist can render only what he or she sees and hope that what is left out is implied to the viewer.

This is how I see storytelling. A story is life seen and then translated from one perspective. However, unlike in that classroom where each student is positioned in one place, with the stories I tell, I can turn events in my imagination until I see them from the perspective that serves me best. In fact, when I’m writing, this is most of what I do when I’m not typing: I’m turning and turning what I want to describe until I see it from the most transformative, or inspiring, or entertaining perspective.

It occurred to me recently that when I “teach” writing, most of what I do is offer my students a new story about the writing experience. There are certain experiences that are universal to all writers – acceptance and rejection; praise and criticism; days where the writing comes easily, and days where it does not; loving what we wrote one day and then hating it the next; being surprised by what we write and becoming lost in the flow of writing. If you decide to write, it is more or less a fact that you will experience some, or more likely, all of these things.

The question, then, is not what you will experience, but the story you will tell yourself about those experiences. There is one story in particular floating around the writing world that gets told a lot, and it goes like this: Some have it, and some don’t. If I believe this particular story, every good day and bad day, every acceptance and rejection, gets translated as proof that I have it or don’t have it. This is an anxious way to write and live. There’s no sure way to know if I have it; no award, contract, or good review can ensure that tomorrow I won’t wake up and feel that I have nothing worthy to share with the reading world.

The story I prefer to tell goes like this: Everyone is born with everything they need to write whatever they want to write. If you’re curious and have an imagination, you’re good to go. If you’re curious and have an imagination then you’re talented enough, smart enough, and original enough. The only question is how much you trust your imagination and your curiosity. The more you trust them, the “better” you write.

This story is far more practical. With this story, I don’t have to concern myself with having something or not having something. I already have everything I need; I just need to use it as it was meant to be used. Now, every experience – whether acceptance or rejection, praise or criticism, good day or bad day – teaches me how to use it. If I believe this story, I can write without the threat of inevitable failure that must befall the creatively unlucky.

As friendly and useful as this story is, it is not always so easy to believe. To believe it, I can’t compare myself, or worry, or complain. These are all expressions of belief in a different story, a story I told inadvertently in my impatience and doubt. My mind, you see, can’t stop telling stories. It’s all you and I know how to do. The question isn’t whether we tell a story, but whether we will live our lives in service to a story we would never tell, or tell a story that serves our life.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

I collect stories of artists who’ve been told by industry professionals that their novel, or their play, or their song just isn’t what people are looking for. Every editor in New York except for one couldn’t imagine a book about a seagull wanting to perfect flying having an audience, yet Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull eventually sold 44 million copies. Garth Stein’s agent said she couldn’t possibly sell a novel from the point of view of a dog, but The Art of Racing in the Rain spent 3 years on the New York Times bestseller list. An NBC executive told Charles Nelson Riley no one would want to watch a gay man on TV, and by the mid-seventies his appearances were so ubiquitous he wondered, “who do I have to sleep with to get off of television?”

The list goes on. These tales always give me a little lift, and serve as great reminders that industry types know a lot, but they don’t know everything. They certainly don’t know the future. Nor do I, sadly. There are days I wish I did. This is part of why I love these stories. I enjoy picturing that moment when the artist is being told they have no chance, all the while aware of the success that is coming their way. Oh, how those doubters will rue their decision.

Of course, Garth Stein and Richard Back and Charles Nelson Riley didn’t know what was coming. All they knew was that they liked and believed in what they had to offer. Stein fired his agent and Riley sat in the NBC lobby and told himself, “That man’s perception is inaccurate.” These are literally moments of truth. Which one will you believe? Someone else’s, or yours? As a writer, you have no doubt spent a fair amount of time seeking the feedback and reassurance of teachers and editors and agents. What do you do when these people, well intentioned though they may be, cannot see the value of your work?

If you cry, or throw a chair across the room, or have another drink, or complain to your best friend, that’s okay. Most of us start there. But we can’t end there. It’s not actually hard to believe in your own work. It’s quite natural. All it takes is a moment to remember why you wrote what you wrote, why it moved or thrilled you. That knowing is enough. I know it doesn’t always seem like much, just a little flame flickering in your imagination, but it is in fact sufficient, with your continued attention, to light a fire in a likeminded soul when you find them.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

I was driving my 87-year-old mother-in-law back to the memory care facility where she currently lives, and we were talking about selling her house, which is sitting empty but on which she is still paying taxes. She agreed it was probably time to sell it, though it was a hard decision for her. She loved the house.

“I feel like I’m giving up a part of myself,” she said. “You live your whole life, you do all these things, and then you have nothing to show for it.”

I understood why she would feel that way, but I also knew it was inaccurate. I told her that while she wouldn’t have a statue built in her honor or a wing of a hospital named after her, she affected more people than she could even imagine. She’d never know how she touched all the children she met while she worked at the high school, the co-workers she delighted, to say nothing of her daughters and how their lives and their children’s lives were branches off a tree she had planted. Her impact on the world goes on and on, and yet from where she sat in my car on the way to Ida Culver House in Greenwood in Seattle, it was very hard to see.

I don’t know if it helped, but I was glad I said it. I was speaking from experience, of course. You publish a book, which seems like the sort of thing you can point to and say, “There, I did that.” Yet, what you point to is hardly anything. As an object, it’s not much more than a paperweight. Its value, its effect, is largely unseen and unheard, residing as it does in the hearts of readers you will likely never meet or hear from.

But that value resides in your heart as well. When you’re feeling as if all this writing is for nothing, when it seems like everything sent out to the world disappears like smoke in an empty forest, go back to the source. What you experienced writing a story is a reflection of what a reader experienced reading it. You may not be able to see or hear that connection, but it’s there just the same, the tree you planted both for yourself and for the world you love.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

It wasn’t long after I started taking guitar lessons from Mitch, a young musician and producer, that we wound up recording songs I’d written in his home studio. This was a kind of dream come true for me, as I had been producing them myself with rudimentary tools and zero know-how about the finer points of what makes a song sound its best. Now, if I wanted, say, a mandolin in the bridge, Mitch just plucked the instrument off his wall and played it bing-bang in one take. He could also make sure my vocals were on key and that my piano was in time with the drums.

Mitch has an excellent ear, and he often notices small problems in a song that I don’t. After we’ve laid down all the tracks, after we’ve added whatever strings or horns or glockenspiels we think it needs, he’ll go through it slowly, adjusting levels, adding reverb or echo, tweaking and tweaking until the whole thing sounds just right. He was doing this the other day with a tune I’d written recently. It was a pretty simple song at its core, but we’d layered in this and that and it had filled out nicely. Mitch was noodling away while I sat by, when he turned to me and said, “It’s done, really. I just want to keep working on it.”

Oh, how I understood. There are plenty of times when I’m writing a song or story where I feel stuck with the thing. I have half of it, but I can’t find the rest, as if I’ve followed my GPS to a dark dead-end. At some point, however, I breakthrough and I see the other side. Once I’ve followed what I’ve found all the way to the end, once I fully grasp what it is, I get to go back and play with what I’ve already written, knitting all the pieces together, making sure they are a part of the whole. It’s great fun, that part. It’s a bit like a victory lap, as I already love what I’ve got but am looking for any way I can to love it a little more.

Eventually, I have to accept it’s done, and that I can squeeze no more delicious juice from it. Now, I have to look for something brand new. Sometimes, I have an idea in my mind’s pocket and I’m ready to pull it out and have good look, but just as often I don’t. Now, I just have the blank page. Though it’s sometimes daunting, I think that empty space is not actually so different from a piece I’ve written and am refining. Creativity remains a search for the new thing, which might not be so different from the last thing, but just new enough that it helps you love life a little more.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

A year ago, our cat Birdie, while keeping us company in the bathroom as we completed our evening ablutions, noticed a single silver fish slithering along the grout between the floor tiles by the bathtub. Her little hunter’s mind instantly locked in, and she followed its path with laser focus until, in one deft stab, she pinned it with her paw and lapped it up. A few nights later it happened again, and then once more a week after that.

Fortunately – at least for those of us who use and clean the bathroom – that was last time. Birdie, however, continues to return every night and sniff and crouch by the bathtub’s corner. She’s not hungry, of course. There’s often food still piled in her dish. It’s the thrill of the hunt, I think, that draws her there every evening, where she waits and waits for a quarry that has never returned. Sometimes I wonder if she even remembers what she’s waiting for, as if all she knows is that once this was a time and place where she had some fun.

I’m perhaps projecting. Seeing her, I’m reminded of all the old subjects I’ll return to in my mind in the small moments when life feels flat. Once upon a time I’d thought about my favorite football team, or that song I was writing, or a political development, and it had provided some brief stimulation and maybe, if worry had begun gathering round my mind, the welcome relief of hope. So back I’ll go, even though now the subject has become as dull as gum chewed past flavor. Like those silverfish, whatever stimulation or relief the thoughts once provided is not coming back.

Writing, in this way, is like hunting in new grounds. Admittedly, there is something easy about summoning an old thought. You know what it is, you don’t have to wait for it, you can just pluck it out of the laundry hamper of your mind where you dropped it. I know this is why we call writing hard, this waiting, this not knowing. But, if you’re like me, you come to the page for the hunt – for the fun of it, yes, but also to remember that you prefer what is new, for that’s the direction your life is always heading.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

I can feel equally alone in a crowd as a silent hotel room. It’s the same sort of disquiet, that loneliness. It’s empty and frightens me a little, as when I’m walking in a strange city and get turned around and for a moment can’t remember the way back. There may be nothing worse than feeling lost. I prefer grief; though its pain is sharp, the suffering calls my attention back when it has wandered into a wasteland of distraction and fear.

Of course, one December my mom had flown in from Rhode Island for Christmas and she and I were watching football in the living room. Jen, my wife, didn’t care for the sport, and so went out to her writing studio to wrap presents. I was glad to share the game with Mom, but I was feeling a little guilty knowing Jen had to exile herself, and so as soon as the final whistle blew, I hustled out to see how she was doing. She stood surrounded paper and tape and ribbons looking forlorn.

“Oh, Jen, I’m sorry. I just never get to watch with her.”

“It’s okay. I didn’t mind that. I just got so lonely out here.”

She paused then and looked around the studio, at her writing desk and half-edited manuscript and the sketches laid out on her drawing table. “You know what’s weird though? When I’m working, I can be here for hours by myself and never feel lonely.”

I understood completely. I’ve known no better company than myself when I’m at peace. I’ll tell people it’s a happy consequence of working, the alive, creative solitude every writer enjoys. It’s not a lie, but I usually leave something out, feeling a familiar shyness thinking of those moments when nothing’s coming and I’m just staring at the wall, quite content just the same. Writing was merely an easy means to find my way to that quiet kingdom. I worry if I try to describe the pleasure of it, others might feel rejected, as no one could possibly join me there. Except there is perhaps nothing less unique than that holy place. That we travel alone to a destination we all share is how we know peace is end of every true story ever told. 

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

There’s a small online kerfuffle involving the director Quentin Tarantino who was on a podcast recently where he opined that the film There Will Be Blood would have been really special if it weren’t for the performance of Paul Dano, whose acting he referred to as “weak sauce.” Dano’s actor brethren have rushed to his defense, posting here and there about how great they think he is and how Tarantino is just a big dummy. No word yet from Dano, or, to my pretty limited knowledge, Tarantino.

I saw the film in question and thought it was really good, including the aforementioned performance. In fact, I’ve liked Dano in everything I’ve seen him in – but that’s me. I have a theory that there would be no scandal, if it can even be called that, had Tarantino used the words, “In my opinion.” I understand why someone wouldn’t. Your experience of a movie or book doesn’t feel like preference any more than stepping barefoot into the snow is chilling.

Though, come to think of it, without fail, every winter I’ll see some guy wandering to the grocery store in the middle of a cold Seattle rain wearing a wool hat, fleece jacket, and shorts and flipflops. Apparently, he and I have differing opinions about cold. A part of me is always irritated by these fellows, is even tempted to interrogate them about their choice in trousers and footwear. What are they trying to prove? Then again, I did have one friend, also a Seattleite, who would only wear these tropical sandals when not at work. He claimed they helped him relax. He was a good friend, and I simply couldn’t hold the whole flipflops thing against him.

Shoes and stories and acting styles are all aesthetics of one sort or another. Word choices too. When you you’ve been stuck on a sentence for a few minutes or a few hours or a few years, it’s a such a relief when the right ones finally come to you. How maddening to think you could show the finished passage to someone and they could shrug and tell you how they’d have done it differently. It’s hard sometimes to live in a world without right and wrong, where cold isn’t cold and hot isn’t hot, where there’s no such thing as good stories or performances, just whatever this one or that one prefers. Until, of course, you consider the alternative – a land of one right answer to every question, as if we were all stuck forever in elementary school, studying for a test some authority dreamed for us, with nothing to discover but how we scored.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

My wife reminded me yesterday of the strange path by which the actress Carol Burnett found her way onto Broadway and eventually television. It involved one acting class in college, a gift from a mysterious benefactor, and a single, helpful friend in New York. There wasn’t much of what you would call planning. Things seemed to just fall into place for her. You might say she was lucky, if you believe in such things. I don’t. I have no use for the concept of luck. It takes me out of the equation that is my own life, as if somewhere a magical die is cast and either my number comes up or it doesn’t.

However, writing relies on something that resembles luck. Someone asked me the other day how one writes song lyrics. At first, I thought she meant rhyming or matching the words to the rhythm and melody, but I soon understood she wanted to know how you thought of something to write about. A little harder to teach, that. Songs come from waiting, wondering, listening, drifting. The ideas come to you, after all. You can’t go get them. You can’t demand them or manufacture them.

You also can’t believe some people get good ideas and some people just don’t. Maybe you’re one of the “unlucky” ones to whom inspiration is doled out in meager doses. What’s to be done then but complain and envy others? It’s a wholly uncreative point of view. I understand how frustrating it is when you can’t find the way forward in your novel, or you’d like to write something but all your ideas seem stale and uninteresting. I understand how tempting it can be to feel your Muse is capricious or has abandoned you altogether.

But I’ve also come to understand that ideas and inspiration are always flowing to me whether I’m aware of them or not. There are dozens of things I do that prevent me from receiving what I need. I doubt, I worry, I become impatient, and I argue with people I’ll never meet. Meanwhile, the good stuff is out there waiting for me to settle down, to stop trying so hard, stop fretting and get quiet so I can hear what I actually want to hear. When I do, I might be tempted to call it good fortune, though it would be like calling a river lucky for finding the ocean.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

I was taking questions at the end of a class years ago when a gloomy fellow at the back of the room raised his hand. “My problem with writing,” he said, “is the selling and marketing of my stories. I don’t do this to prostitute myself.” It was a strong take, to be sure, but I understood his reservations. I waited tables for many, many years, and if you had asked me at the time, I would have told you that the only reason I did so was for the money. During that same period, I wrote stories for which I was not paid. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but the difference between what I was willing to do for free and what I wasn’t seemed significant to me.

Though maybe not as much as I originally thought. I’ve never visited a prostitute. Whenever I encountered one, I found their hunger and desperation a little frightening. Everything about them seemed sad and unsafe - a natural consequence of bringing money into what ought to be one of the purer human expressions of love and desire. Yet one evening as I stood at a street corner waiting for the light to change, and a young woman sidled up next to me, sizing me up with her jittery, feral glances, I could still feel beneath all the weird, unnatural, transactional intent, her normal, unending humanity – what always exists in us whether we acknowledge it or not.

It was there too when I was counting my tips at the end of a shift, there when I hoped my new tables were twenty percenters and not those tight, fifteen percent misers. All that thinking about money, money, money still couldn’t cloud completely when someone thanked me for taking care of them and I realized that meant as much as the cash they’d slip into the check folder. There was the kindness between us, as common as touch, and our only real currency. It’s hard to keep track of when you’re bent on survival, but it’s there just the same, the only means by which we can share what actually matters to us.

Perhaps you don’t see your stories as acts of kindness. Maybe you just want to write something cool, or funny, or sexy. That’s fine, but in entertaining your readers, you’re reminding them what they care about most – and it’s never money. Love, creative desire, and compassion sustains us, feeds us, gets us up in the morning and promises us rest at night. It makes little sense, but it’s true just the same, just as stories can only fully be understood as you’re telling them.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

My old friend Chris finally wrote a novel. It seemed inevitable to me, though he spent most of his life acting and writing plays and then screenplays. We were roommates for a time when I was in Los Angeles, and we’d often sit around drinking wine at the end of the day, telling each other stories. He’d always been a great storyteller. He knew how to take his time, to pick the one vivid detail. He’d just discovered James Joyce and would periodically emerge from his bedroom and read me a passage he’d fallen in love with. I’d never read anything by J. D. Salinger, nor had he, but he found Raise High the Roofbeams Carpenters, and read the whole thing aloud to me one night.

He left Los Angeles after living there thirty years, and headed back to our native Rhode Island. He was halfway through his novel at that point, and feeling more or less done with Hollywood. I told him I had nothing but confidence in him, but that he had to make sure to write like Chris, and not to try to write like Salinger or Joyce or Hemingway. That should be easy for a natural storyteller like him, but I knew how people could get in their own way.

He sent me the novel last week. I was to be his last reader before he began looking for a publisher. I loved it, and I was so glad to see that he hadn’t, in fact, tried to tell it like anyone but himself. Perhaps he had experimented with that kind of imitation in some earlier drafts without realizing what he was doing. You do so, and then reread it and can’t figure out why it’s not working. Maybe the middle needs more tension? Maybe the protagonist’s motivation isn’t clear enough?

Or maybe you can’t quite believe people would really want to hear your story, and since you’ve read and enjoyed these other writers, and since so many people have also read an enjoyed these same writers, maybe you’ll try to slip into their clothes and not risk the everyday rejection of some stranger picking up your book and then putting it down because it’s not for them. Maybe you want some guarantee. Maybe you’re just afraid that everything you want actually comes from you and you alone and has always been so and all you have to do is listen to what’s been whispering to you all your life.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

I’m not a big fan of AI, though it’s clearly here to stay. Also, admittedly, when I need, say, an image of an anthropomorphized duck with a monocle writing in an ancient journal – which, because of my enduring love of roleplaying games, I occasionally do – it’s pretty handy. It’s handy because I don’t have the skill necessary nor the interest required to create that image. I just want that picture, and, after typing in a few instructions, I have it – or something close enough to it. I’m not that fussy when it comes to images of literary ducks.

However, in another life, I would have had the skill necessary to create such a picture myself. I used to draw when I was young. For a time, I even thought I would be a cartoonist; I’d go to art stores and buy special inking pens and found a book on how to draw perspective. But then, somewhere in my teens, my creative interest shifted entirely to writing, and that was that. I’d stood at a crossroads, apparently, and made a choice. You start down a path, and the intersection you left behind grows more and more distant. You could go back, but this path is too interesting not to find out what comes next.

I can’t imagine using AI to write a story, though I know people who do. If it works somehow for them, great, but it would seem to circumnavigate the entire reason I do what I do. AI gives you an immediate result; the pleasurable part of storytelling for me is the step-by-step, word-by-word journey. It’s making choices and discovering over and over and over. Eventually, I reach something I call an end, I get that result, which is nice, but then it’s on to the next journey.

That’s writing, and that’s life. It never ends, and we don’t want it to. What do we really ever have but experiences? All the results we point to, the published books, the homes and children and businesses, all of them are a consequence of a long stream of choices and experiences, a stream that still flows past inert creations that we finished and moved on from. You may have loved making them, but they aren’t you, you are that stream, running and running forever down to an ocean we all eventually rejoin.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

When I decided as a young man that I wanted to write books professionally, my life, unbeknownst to me at the time, quickly became an ongoing lesson in acceptance and rejection. I largely perceived this only in the most obvious and practical expression – the letters from agents and editors responding to my queries. I hated those letters, hated how desperate I felt as I checked the mail each day, hated the mixture of dread and hope in my heart as I opened them, and then hated, of course, the predictable reply. I yearned for ongoing, endless acceptance, without any drama or dread.

I was reminded of those letters recently after I’d finished teaching a class at a conference. It so happened the class was about success and failure, though that isn’t what reminded me of the dread and drama. As I was flying home, I thought again of how calm and engaged and at home I felt as I was teaching. Now that’s the way I want to relate to people, I thought. That’s the conversation I want to have with other writers.

The plane roared on and I looked down at the clouds beneath us. I glanced at the strangers beside me on my row, at the flight attendants passing out pretzels, listened to hum of the engine carrying us home. It wasn’t just writers, I thought, it was everyone; and it wasn’t just everyone, it was everything. That is how I wanted to feel as I thought and focused and went about my day. That’s the conversation I want to have with life.

As I landed, I thought about the difference between how I always felt while teaching and writing, and how I often felt otherwise, particularly when I was a young man. I saw that I had been rejecting myself on a regular basis in the smallest of ways for most of my life. I was used to it. It was normal. And I hated it. Every time I thought results mattered more than my experience, I rejected myself. Every time I worried what other people would think of my stories, I rejected myself. Every time I sought someone’s approval, I rejected myself.

I remembered also how I used to dream of my life as a successful author. When that happened, I believed, I would finally be able to relate to everyone and everything the way I really wanted to. I would only talk about the things I cared about, that I knew actually mattered. What a fine time that would be, I used to think. I could see it so clearly it was like it was right in front of me, which, of course, it always was.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com

The first time I got paid a lot money to write was for an essay about eating an oyster. I was picky as a young man, you see, and so slipping that slimy, salty little mollusk over my tongue was a kind of leap of faith for me. Still, it was just a story about eating an oyster. My life wasn’t in jeopardy; I hadn’t won an award or watched the birth of my child. From a certain perspective, you might say nothing happened. But that wasn’t my perspective, and that’s why I wrote the piece.

It's not uncommon for a new writer to review their life and conclude that nothing they did was worthy of a story. Nothing was important enough or surprising enough or shocking enough. Sometimes it seems like stuff that could have happened to anyone more or less – the marriage, the children, the job, the divorce, the new job. They’re not wrong, of course. So many of our lives resemble one another. Why bother telling a story if it’s one the reader has already lived themselves?

Other writers feel that their story simply must be told. They feel that their marriage, or their experience raising children, or their divorce is a kind of warning bell for others of what life is really like. Strangely, these men and women have trouble seeing what is actually valuable about their story, having for forgotten, somehow, that they were not the first person to ever watch their children move away to college, or put a parent in memory care. They believe that what happened is the point.

What happens is never the point, which is why we can write about anything. For the artist, all that matters is how we see the world. After all, no one will ever be able to see the world through your eyes, just as no one has ever loved exactly who you’ve loved or lost what you’ve lost. If you can write about a divorce from your unique voice, the reader will feel something new in it because they will never have seen it from exactly that perspective. What a gift. In this way we remind ourselves and those with whom we share our stories that everything matters, everything is important, and everything is enough.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com