Learning to Listen

I tried writing my first novel when I was twenty-one, but it didn’t go so well. I’d quit college and recently broken up with my girlfriend and wasn’t doing anything. I got about four chapters in and then lost interest. I started another one a year or so later with the same result. Then one day I wrote a poem. It was only eight lines long, but it was something, and it was completed, and I liked it.

So, I wrote another one. And then another and another one. They were all short, and they usually rhymed, and I would hear them like songs in my head. I didn’t know what they were about, exactly, I just knew what they were supposed to sound like. This was enough. If I could capture accurately what I was hearing, I found that the poem would have both movement and meaning. I was having a lot of fun writing them. I didn’t write them on any kind of schedule. I’d wait until I’d hear one; fortunately, I heard them quite often.

This went on for about six months, until one evening I was walking along and realized I wanted to write another poem. It had been well over a week, and I was missing the experience. Except I wasn’t hearing one. “Okay,” I said to myself, or whatever it was that I was listening to, “I need a poem.” Nothing. I tried writing one on my own, so to speak. It was okay, but it wasn’t as much fun as the ones I’d heard. And that was the end of the poetry writing.

When I published Write Within Yourself – a collection of the earliest of the essays I’ve shared in this space – I told my wife I saw the book as a poetry collection. “But they’re not poems,” she reminded me. “I know that,” I said, “but I think of them as poems.” It was true. Unlike those first poems, however, I wrote these on a schedule: one a day for several years. To do so, I had to learn to listen on purpose, regardless of whether I was hearing something at the moment I sat down to write. I didn’t have the patience or faith to do that in my early twenties; if I didn’t hear it, maybe it didn’t exist.

This is what it means to become a grownup artist. In my heart, I am still very much a child who just wants to have fun doing whatever it is he’s doing. The difference is I have come to understand my role in that fun. You have to disbelieve the silence. It’s actually just static, the noise you hear when you care too much about what has already been made.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write With Confidence.
You can find William at: williamkenower.com