Real Experience

I will refer occasionally to the books I wrote before publishing Write Within Yourself and Fearless Writing as just The Novels That Didn’t Sell. This is a true enough description; I was not able to sell them. It wasn’t for lack of trying. Each novel went through many drafts (one a total fifteen), and when I felt I’d crafted a satisfying story, I queried agents over the transit and pitched the books at writers’ conferences. Sometimes I got an agent, sometimes I didn’t. All the agents I worked with sent the novels out to publishers. Sometimes we got close, sometimes we didn’t. Once I sent a novel straight to an editor at Penguin and heard from her a week later. She said she wanted to buy it if she could sell it to the editorial team. She couldn’t. 

I have a tendency not to tell the story of how those books were written and what I went through and discovered while writing them. This is in part because I have since learned I am more suited to creative non-fiction, and those novels have come to represent my attempts to forge success against the gravity of my own nature. Writing them was often hard in a way writing needn’t be, and I can still remember the days I accepted my fatigue and unhappiness as simply the expected consequence of a writer’s life.

But then there is the shame of the books’ failure. Because they didn’t sell, because I was never paid for them and they never appeared on anyone’s bookshelf, it was like they weren’t real. They might as well as have been journals I kept. Best not to speak of those books. The dark times are behind me now. Why revisit a road I have no desire to travel again?

I don’t think I could walk those paths again if I tried, but that does not mean the experience of writing those books, the suffering and rejection as well as the joy and discovery, was not real. It was as real as anything I experience today. It’s true they were written based on an illusion of how one finds success, but they were written by a real person, who was really doing the only thing he could think to do at the time. There is no shame in that. Moreover, shame blocks out of the light of learning, hoping to extinguish past experiences that were only trying, through the guidance of discomfort and grief, to guide me to exactly where I am headed now.

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