Feel First

You sit at your desk – the same desk you sat at yesterday and the same desk you will sit at again today – facing the same wall or window, surrounded by the same furniture, with the same lamp lighting your room, and in this same spot can imagine absolutely anything at all. And as you see the ocean, or a darkened cave, or your childhood home, you also feel within yourself the calm or fear or longing associated with the scene you are rendering on the page. As the scenes you imagine change, so changes your felt experience of those scenes. The physical world you inhabit, your workroom, remains unchanged, while you travel an ever-changing world within your mind.

I have a tendency to over-value the visualization necessary to create. After all, the images moving in my mind resemble the physical world I inhabit every day. Those images seem like the proto-reality from which actual reality of the story are born. And yet it’s the felt experience of those images and memories that actually provides the bridge between the unseen and the seen. The feeling is alive and active in the body of the creator, and in this way is the first actual expression of the story. The story is present in the world already, albeit in a realm perceivable only to the author.

When I teach Fearless Writing, I always find myself reminding the students they must care about how they feel. It’s a strange thing to remind someone, since no one on earth ever wants to feel bad and always wants to feel good. You would think how we feel would be the only thing we care about. Yet we ignore it all the time. We tell ourselves our discomfort and frustration are just the normal price we pay for being alive, and our calm and or joy are the happy consequence of good fortune. Such is life.

Yet as a writer I must sit at my desk and choose what I picture and what I feel. I don’t wait for the room to tell me what to feel, what to picture, what to create. My room has nothing to say on the subject. My room is my creation too. I assembled it for my own comfort and could change it if I so chose. If I like how I feel when I enter the room, I will leave it as it is. If I notice there is a pile of books in one corner, and if I notice how I feel looking at them, the discomfort of clutter and smallness and disorder, I will remove them. They are like a sentence in my story I delete. I am the author, and the world as I know it flows forever from within, forever felt before it is touched or seen.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com