A New Day

I was asked to teach an online Fearless Writing class for Writer’s Digest about six months after I published a book of the same name with that publisher. I happily agreed, and soon received my instructions for the course preparation. I discovered my primary job was to compose a dozen essays about how to write fearlessly, which would serve as the students’ required reading.

Upon learning this, a wave of anticipatory fatigue swept over me. Hadn’t I just written an entire book about how to write fearlessly? Hadn’t they published it? And couldn’t they just pull from that text? It wasn’t that I didn’t want to write a dozen essays, it was that I felt I had said all I had to say on the subject. I don’t like repeating myself, if for no other reason than I start getting bored once I’m doing so.

Still, I’m a good soldier when I need to be, so I buckled up my writing chinstrap and set to work. Maybe I could find something new to say, and maybe I could do it a dozen times. I faced the first blank page of the first essay. It had been over a year since I’d written the book. I was not exactly the same man I was when we pitched the idea; I was not thinking about the same things in the same way I thought about them then. I couldn’t go back and be the man who wrote that book if I wanted to.

I was happy when I found something new to say in the first essay, though not truly surprised. Once I was into it, I remembered – again – that writing, and all creativity itself, is the product of the intersection of my imagination and the moment I sit down to work. It doesn’t matter that it’s the same desk and the same computer and even the same subject, it’s not the same moment – it’s a new, original, never-lived-before moment, and so the work can be original as well if I let myself look around at what’s actually available that day.

Even writers, who so depend on originality, can be strangely resistant to this reality. No matter how glad I am when that new idea arrives at my door, no matter how interested I become when I see a familiar subject from an unfamiliar perspective, I remain vaguely uneasy about tomorrow and its unwritten story. I am uneasy that it will be different and that it might not be different. In fact, I am uneasy with absolutely everything except what I am actually doing at that very moment, which, fortunately, is where all the ideas can always be found.

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