Two Stories

You know how it is when you’re in a conversation and the other person is telling you a story and you’re picturing the story in your mind as you’re listening to it. It’s as real in your mind as if you’re remembering something that happened to you, yet the image you’re building with your imagination is based only on the words you’re hearing. Those words are enough for you to animate your own private screening of your friend’s narrative.

Then something in the story reminds you of that thing you’d forgotten you needed to take care of. Shoot. How could you have forgotten to take care of that? It was so important, and it absolutely, no question needs to be done and finished by tomorrow. You simply can’t forget about it again. You won’t. No way you’ll forget it again. But that’s what you said the other day and look how you went and forgot about it anyway. Is that because you don’t actually want to do it? Are you lazy? You’re like an untrustworthy employee in a business with a staff of one.

Then you look up and realize your friend is still telling his story. The last you remember he was on a plane and now he’s sitting by a pool. You have no idea how he got to the pool, but you nod and picture him in his swim trunks with the margarita he just ordered and the story is alive again in your mind. You can still feel that thing you need to do tugging at you, but you’re going to ignore it for now, forget it on purpose – again, just for now – so you can hear the rest of the story.

Except it’s not completely true to say you didn’t hear the part you missed. Your ears were still working and your friend was still talking just as clearly. It wasn’t as if someone started running a leaf-blower nearby. All that had happened was you’d stopped picturing the story you were hearing in your mind and instead used that same mind to fret over the infuriating vagaries of memory. That fretting, it turns out, was as loud in your imagination as a leaf-blower.

This is why writing is really listening. I’m hearing a story in images and feelings and translating it into words. But all my worries about that story’s value, or all my concerns about my talent or what other people will think of my work, become a new story I’m listening to, occupying my imagination instead of what I’m writing. I cannot write two stories at once, any more than I can listen to a friend and make tomorrow’s shopping list. I must choose. No matter how compelling my worries, I must choose; no matter how real my fears seem, I must choose; no matter how dark the future can look, I must choose what I want in the present, for that is where all stories are told.

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