No Escape

I started reading and writing in earnest when I was thirteen, which was the same time I discovered fantasy literature. I loved the adventure of fantasy, I loved the swords and armor and monsters and magic, and I loved that heroes went on important quests to save the world from evil. I would have liked to have gone on an important quest myself, but I was just a kid, and so instead I went to school and played Whiffle Ball and ate Captain Crunch and read these books and began writing my own stories.

At this time, I had absolutely no interest in stories about what was referred to as reality. In fact, I didn’t even understand how a person could find a story to tell about reality. Nothing ever seemed to happen in it. People just got up and did stuff and then went to sleep. Sometimes they got very upset about something that happened, and other times they were very happy about something else that happened, but before long they’d settled down again and they were neither happy nor sad, and they kept doing stuff and getting up and then going to sleep. Why would you tell a story about that?

I did not, however, consider my hours spent reading these novels about fantastic imagined worlds an act of escapism. Quite the opposite. When I disappeared into a story, I felt excited and curious and worried and relieved, and if it was a very good story, at the end of it I felt like an important question had been answered. In short, I felt alive. Feeling alive from the inside out was as real as life could get. When you felt it, everything else you’d known seemed like a dull dream from which you’d finally awakened.

By and by my interest shifted to stories without wizards and warriors. Now, decades later, the stories I tell are about things that actually happened to me, about the stuff I do between getting up and going to sleep. Yet they are not so very different than the first story I wrote when I was thirteen about a hero on a journey. They are not more important or more worthy of being read. After all, readers forget nearly everything about the stories we tell other than how those stories left them feeling. The sorcerers or young lovers or walks through the park are just vehicles by which we can travel to the only reality any of us has ever actually known.

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