A Very Different Place

I like where I go when I write, though it’s an unusual place. It’s not like the park or a city or a beach. Those places are easier to describe because they’re different from each other in specific ways. The park has its open fields and trees and paths, the city has its buildings and streets crowded with people and cars waiting at traffic lights, and the beach has its quiet sand and salt-smelling wind and ceaseless ocean.

Where I go when I write lacks such specificity. Everything could be there, but to begin with nothing is there. First, I go to an empty room, except it’s not even a room, there are no walls or windows, just waiting emptiness. As a writer, as someone who enjoys describing things, I feel as though I’ve spent my life trying to describe that space where writing begins, for without it, no story would ever be told, no song ever composed. Without it, there would be no life at all, the very thing I’m supposedly writing about.

Then I look out at the park and the city and the beach, and think, “There’s life. There’s something. Describe something, not a nothing that feels like everything.” So, I do, because it’s easier and I like easier. But sometimes I’m walking along the beach, feeling the damp sand under my toes and smelling the steady wind and listening the soothing hush of surf, and the more I feel the sand and smell the wind and hear the surf the more still I become. And the more still I become, the sooner I find myself back in a familiar place that is not the beach or the park or the city.

It’s a place where everything begins and everything returns. I have wanted to describe it so I could hold it in my mind as I have held memories of other places, hold it so I will never forget it, especially when I look out at the world filled with people and buildings and oceans and to my despair see nothing at all. How can you see everything but feel nothing? I have looked in the wrong place for what I have always wanted, and must return to what I can never hold, but which holds me as a story holds my attention.

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