Inner Reality

Before your story is a book, before it’s a draft on your laptop, before it’s even a few hastily scrawled notes on the back of cocktail napkin, it’s an idea residing within you where no one else can possibly see it or know it. Your story remains there even as its shape grows from outline to first draft to final draft. It’s there even as you write query letters to agents, as you find your editor, and when you see it on the bookshelf for the first time. And it’s there as you go to bookstores to meet readers and on podcasts to answer questions. It’s always there and it always will be.

Everything the story will be grows from that seed planted by whatever means in the fertile soil of your imagination. It’s easy to remember this while you’re writing it. The story has no real shape outside of your mind and so you simply must refer to its shape within you to give it a form others can see. Like most writers, you are probably so practiced at this translation from your mind to the page that you do not always appreciate how your attention flows from the inner to the outer and back again, how everything out there must absolutely begin in here. You’re just writing. It’s what you do.

Then you go to share the story with other people. It’s not always so easy to remember where the story really lives when other people are reading it. Those other people are busy forming their own ideas about it, after all. Yet every pitch you write about the story, every post you make, every question you answer comes from the same place, from that same seed. It never moves, no matter how many people read it and tell you what they think of it.

As writers, we get lost when we forget where to look for our stories. We get lost sometimes when we’re writing them, and we get lost all the time when we want other people to read them. Oh, how I want to see something I’m dreaming in the world, in the actual world, the world I share with other people – I want to see out there so badly I forget where it is first. I look for it where it isn’t and I think it doesn’t exist, as if nothing within me is real, as if a blank page could tell me what to write.

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