Kind Stories

There may be no more important quality for a writer to cultivate every day than kindness. Kindness to others, yes, but most importantly kindness to oneself. If you’re unkind to yourself, not only will you be unhappy regularly for reasons you can never explain, but even your writing will suffer. The words won’t come as easily, and when they do come it will be hard to know if you should keep them or cut them. Unkindness becomes a warped lens through which we see the world, particularly the worlds we’re trying to create in our work.

The lens of unkindness can frequently be mistaken for our necessary, evolutionary critical eye, the eye that asks, “Is there a better, faster way to say this?” or, “Do I want the next story I tell to be very different than the others I’ve told?” Everything we write changes us in some small way, and if we want to be happy and satisfied with our work, we have to keep up with those changes, both in style and content. If we don’t, we’ll become grumpy and irritable and begin blaming the world and others for our unhappiness.

These are just the moments when kindness is most necessary, but many writers practice a persistent unkindness that compounds the discomfort we all experience as we’re breaking from our newest shell. This unkindness is rarely expressed overtly. Rather, it lives within us as the thought, “I’ll know I’m good enough when I’ve sold my first story, or gotten my first big contract, or hit the bestseller list, or am supporting myself from my work.” It can be anything, which is precisely the problem with these bogus measurements. They’re as invented as the stories we tell, except that we treat them as reality, as a mortgage that must be paid before the house of confidence is ours.

I know these goals and their reward can seem necessary. If you knew you were just fine as you were, would you still get up before the kids to write every morning? Would you still sit with a draft of a manuscript until you’d shaved it down to its essence? Yes, you would. If you can do this under the unforgiving conditions of proving your worth, you could easily do so when you’ve allowed that your worth has always been unprovable. This is the ultimate kindness. Nothing of you is required, you need no explaining, no justification, no permission. All you need is a blank page, a clean field that accepts every story.

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