Unending Story

I had the pleasure of recording the audio version of my book Everyone Has What It Takes last week. I drove down to Bad Animals Studios in Seattle and sat in a booth from which I could see Will, the engineer, behind his wall of monitors. Joseph, the producer in Los Angeles, spoke soothingly to me in my headphones – which, thanks to the miracle of technology, sounded as clear as if he were in the room with us. When we were done with our first day of taping, Will sent the recording off to New York where someone else listened to it for every misspoken word, stomach growl, or mic rattle.

As we were getting ready for our third day of taping, I learned we had already received a list of “pick-ups” from New York, the passages we needed to re-record because of the aforementioned hiccups. One such problem was my pronunciation of the word “query,” which I had pronounced “kwer-ee” and the New Yorker believed I should have pronounced “kwee-ree.” Turns out, both are correct, which Joseph learned after doing a little research in the Oxford English Dictionary. I was glad for Joseph’s research since, being a book ostensibly for writers, I said query a lot.

But I was glad for the New Yorker as well. There was a moment, sitting in the sound-proof booth, listening to Will and Joseph in my headphones, that I marveled at the number of people involved in this project. In addition to Will and Joseph and the New Yorker, there was Wendi who ran Bad Animals and who ordered our lunch for us every day, as well as Sarah and Ian from Penguin. Somewhere there was also an editor who would cut the thing together once our work was done.

And then, of course, there was me, the guy who thought to himself one day that he’d like to write a book about how everyone has what it takes to do what they love to do. The idea came to me in the same fashion all ideas arrive, in the still, quiet privacy of my mind, the very place I returned to write it every morning. It’s the same place I’ve gone since I was a boy, since I first recognized I enjoy telling stories at the page, sitting alone at a desk in my boyhood bedroom with an electric typewriter.

I know that as a writer you sometimes feel supremely alone, that you may wonder if what you’re doing is even real, if it’s anything but a lot of pipe-dreaming make believe, for anyone, even an adolescent, can sit alone at a desk and tell their story to an empty page. I have wondered so myself, especially in those long days when nothing I wrote was being read by anyone but me. In those years I simply misunderstood the true source of what we call reality. I was grateful, as I looked up from my script in the recording booth, to have such a clear view just then, seeing both source and product as flowing continually from the same unending story.

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