Just What You Want

I made a point shortly after Fearless Writing was published to look for it in my local Barnes & Noble. Somewhat to my chagrin, it was shelved in “Reference.” To be clear, that’s where all the other books on writing – like Bird by Bird and On Writing and Writing Down the Bones – were also shelved, but I still found the very fact that someone might mistake my book for a reference manual, which seemed mechanical and dry and informational, bothersome. A person shouldn’t refer to my book, they should read it and enjoy it.

Halfway through writing Everyone Has What It Takes I noticed it was coming out a little differently than Fearless. The chapters were each like individual essays, and were more narrative and less instructional than my previous book. I liked this new approach. Though I wasn’t writing fiction any longer, I still enjoyed the artistry necessary to tell a good story. “These are personal essays,” I told my wife. “Which makes sense because that’s most of what I write anyway.”

I found myself musing over this shift quite a bit as the publication day approached. Writers are often asked to categorize their work. and I had found it difficult to do so since I’d switched off of fiction. I wasn’t writing memoir and I wasn’t writing self-help exactly either. It’s personal essays, I thought. I’m an essayist, if someone asks. I was okay with that. Admittedly, the old artist in me liked this better than my other options. But it was also accurate.

The other day, I went to my local Barnes & Noble again for the first time in a very long time. I wandered up to the Reference section to have a look at my new book on the shelf. It wasn’t there. I asked a bookseller if they had a copy. “Yes, we do,” she said. “Let’s see . . . It’s in literary criticism.”

“Literary Criticism? That’s weird.”

“Let’s go have a look,” she said, and we hustled across the store to that section. We began scanning through the titles, but we couldn’t find it there either.

“You do have it, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes. But it doesn’t seem to be here. Let’s try one other place.”

We went around the corner to the entire wall dedicated to “Fiction.” I thought about how long I’d spent writing novels, how for years all I’d wanted was to see something I’d written shelved right here.

The bookseller stopped and began searching through the shelf.

“It’s not going to be here,” I said.

“There it is!”

I looked. There it was. “What?” I said. “In fiction?”

“Not exactly,” she explained, and pointed to small sign midway up the shelf. It read: Essays. “The essays get shelved with fiction.”

For a moment I enjoyed this development. I liked seeing my book beside Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace. Well, I thought, you got exactly what you wanted.

And then I thought: Now how do I get them to move it to the reference section with all the other writing books?

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