Life Unchanging

Success and failure are shadowy twin companions that often follow writers through their careers. It’s their apparent difference, their obvious, binary, black and white contrast that can draw our attention, linked as they are to acceptance and rejection, a writer’s first experience of their work in the public sphere. Life can begin to divide itself. There is the time before you were published, and the time after you were published. I’ve known several writers who wrote a book that went global, who have literally said, “My life was never the same afterward. It changed everything.”

Then again, I’ve met writers looking to publish their first book who are filled with all the familiar angst and doubt. I meet them again in a year or two, and if they’ve sold a book, no matter how modest the contract, I often sense something has settled in them. Even with these debut authors there is a before and after.

I can’t help but notice differences. As a writer, I rely on them. I have to know the difference between the word that belongs in a sentence and the word that doesn’t, and to do so I must know the difference between when I am being honest and dishonest. The right word is always the honest word. It always feels better to be truthful, but I tell little lies anyway because it seems like the safest choice. You get used to what it feels like to tell these lies, reasoning it’s not so bad. Until it is.

As I look around at the world of writers—all the writers, the published and the unpublished, the romance and the literary, the bestseller and the mid-lister—I see plenty of differences. In fact, there are so many smaller and smaller contrasting categories into which I can put these writers beyond genre and sales rankings, that I am soon left with the understanding that each occupies a category unto themselves.

At this point, the differences become meaningless. I meet someone, and if I am honest, our differences are not interesting or useful to me. I am always most interested in how we are the same. Where we are the same is what I actually am, what I have always been as I’ve gone from failure to success, unpublished to published, fiction to non-fiction—life unchanging in a world of changing forms.

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 available for pre-order now!
You can find William at: williamkenower.com