The Path Ahead

I was hanging around the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference a few years ago when Bob Dugoni came up to me holding a hardcover copy of his latest book. “A woman just gave me this,” he began. “She said she’d read it and made some edits. Thought I might appreciate it.” He flipped through and showed where she’d crossed out some words and made notes in the margins. He started laughing. “What the hell?”

It was a first, though understandable in a way, occurring as it did at a writer’s conference where so many people are toting around unpublished manuscripts. A stack of pages that hasn’t been bound with a front and back cover or transformed into a glossy, digital product cries out for commentary. It’s unfinished, after all. Or, I should say, having not been published, there’s still time to change it, the clay of that story having not yet hardened.

The more I write and publish, the more I understand the clay never really hardens. I’m currently eleven chapters into my next book. If I’m honest, they could have been next eleven chapters in my last book. Technically this new one’s a different book, with a different focus, a different title, but it’s still the exploring the same idea I’ve been writing about since I started this magazine, the same idea I’ve explored in Fearless Writing and all the essays in this column. I suppose I’ve been exploring it my whole life, though it’s only in the last ten years that I did so deliberately.

I can appreciate the would-be editor who marked up Bob’s book. She was perhaps attuned in her own way to the unfinished nature of creativity. The nice thing, however, about publishing a book is I can’t rewrite it anymore. I must abandon the unattainable dream of the perfect story, and instead turn my attention to the path ahead. I’m still exploring this path, which winds and winds through the perfection of life. That perfection is simple to name, but harder to see. On a good day I can feel it, a thing that cannot be improved but only expanded, as a tree grows new branches, or as a new story is shared with strangers.

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