Freedom

I don’t have many rules of writing, though I always try to follow this one: feel first, write second. Stories and essays and poems are about the felt experience of life. Humans, after all, always want to feel good and we never want to feel bad. So that is what I explore in all the writing I do; what it feels like at any given moment to be a person. For this reason, I don’t like to start writing until I understand at least the general mood of a scene or a passage. It may change and evolve, but it will remain the foundation, the organizing impulse, around which all my choices are made.

What’s interesting about the stories we tell is that they can be about anything at all – grief, frustration, desire, elation, boredom. Sometimes a single story will cover a broad spectrum of experiences. As the author, I will experience them all. To write love, I must feel love; to write greed, I must feel greed. Yet all this emotion rolls through me even as the physical world I inhabit remains more or less unchanging. I am alone in a room with my thoughts. All that is changing is the focus of my attention, and that is enough to take me on a journey with highs and lows.

It has been my goal for some time to learn how to apply this same rule to life. That is, feel first, act second. The single greatest obstacle to applying this is the belief that the external conditions either determine how I feel, or that I can somehow extract pleasure from a given experience. It’s backwards. If I can sit alone in a room and focus in such a way that I can feel anything at all, then I can do the same out and about in the world. And indeed, I have. When I do, the whole day feels like writing.

That’s as good as it gets. That’s freedom. It’s what I have always wanted from writing. I thought it would come with success, that once I got it, I would be free at last from doing something I didn’t want to do, and that what I was doing always determined how I felt. In this way, the world could imprison me. There’s only one way out of that jail. As many times as I’ve escaped, I’ve found myself back in it again. That’s okay. It’s a daily practice, whose rewards are my whole life.

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