Real Stories

I had reached a point in my writing life where I understood that my work was going to be pointing in a new direction. Not just the kind of story I’d be telling, but, most importantly, where I wished to leave my readers at the end of those stories. I had been trained in my early reading habits by Modernist literary writers like Ernest Hemingway and William Falkner and T. S. Eliot, writers who I felt were able, from sentence to sentence or stanza to stanza, to capture just what it felt like to be alive.

This was no small accomplishment, I thought, and one that spoke to more than just facility with language. So much of my lived experience went unexpressed, particularly the quiet suffering, the little disappointments, to say nothing of the looming shadow of death. I did not think life was all bad, but I did think to make peace with the whole of it I’d have to understand the parts I feared, and these writers more than others seemed willing and indeed eager to look at those aspects directly.

A funny thing can happen when you spend too much time marinating in what causes you pain. Eventually, pain becomes not a portal to meaning, not a road one must travel to understanding, but meaning itself, the only experience that actually matters. It’s as if the relief that follows the end of pain is merely a station where we grab a bite to eat while we wait to board the next train of suffering.

I was sick of trying to tell such stories. But before I could tell a new one, I spent several years literally reminding to myself, on the page or on long walks, that people wanted to be happy. I knew I wanted to be happy, but I had come to believe The Reader expected reality, and what was more real than the pain? Plenty, I decided. Over and over, I reminded myself that peace is not less real than war, joy is not less real than grief, love is not less real than loss. Strange that I should have to convince myself that what I actually wanted was real, and that I was not alone in this, but maybe that’s what all writers must do. A story, after all, is a reality I ask myself and my reader to believe. It’s in the telling, perhaps, that belief becomes knowing.

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