Trustworthy Mystery

Recently, my father he told me how he had been having coffee with a friend a few years ago who explained that she had started writing a novel but that she was having trouble finishing it. My dad ran home, grabbed a copy of Fearless Writing, hustled back to the coffee shop, and gave it to her. I have to admit, if someone gave me a copy of a book their son had written, I doubt I’d read it. But this woman did, and apparently it helped, and she told him recently she’d just gotten a contract for that novel.

As an author, I love hearing stories like this, though whenever I do, I am reminded that if it had not involved someone I knew – in this case my father – I probably never would have learned of it. At the same time, I for sure never hear about those people who start reading my book but lose interest halfway through, or who pull it from a bookstore shelf, thumb through it, and put it back. It is probably for the best that the readers’ experience of our work remains largely unknown to us.

In fact, I don’t truly know what my father’s friend’s experience was in full. Saying we like or don’t like a book only begins to describe what happens when we read a story. It’s such an intimate experience, one that occurs within the complex context of who we are at the moment we read it. What would I tell those authors whose books I loved when I was fifteen, but which I would set aside after few pages today?

Actually, I know what I’d say: I’d tell them how much their book meant to me at that time. This is what I told the fantasy author Terry Brooks when I interviewed him a couple years ago. I believe stories find the people who need them when they need them. How or why remains mysterious, but find each other they do, in much the same way the author finds the story in the first place. Do not try to solve that mystery, except to believe, to trust, to know it is working equally for all of us, an unseen engine of creativity and friendship alike.

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