Somewhere Safe and Friendly

Most writers are readers first, which is not surprising if you think about what happens when you sit down with a book, particularly one you love. You quickly become absorbed in the world it’s portraying. Ideally that world becomes more real to you than the chair you’re sitting in while you read. It’s more real, for that time, than your troubles or your worries, more real than your bills and obligations. For that period, you – in the daily, domestic sense – cease to matter, as you’ve gone somewhere you don’t exist. And yet you are experiencing this other world as if it were not only real but as if you were there.

It's the kind of experience that might make you wonder what you really are. Are you that body sitting in the chair following the story as it runs word by word across the page, or are you the awareness that has entered a dimension only you can perceive? It’s a question people – people like me, to be honest – will spend entire books, maybe entire careers, trying answer. You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. You just have to know how much you value entering that other dimension, which is why you love to read and why you eventually decided to try your hand at writing.

The biggest problem writers have, I think, is making peace with the difference between the body sitting in the chair and the attention that travels as far and as freely as the imagination will take it. If you really want to write, you’d be well served to see yourself as that nameless, formless stream of thought, rather than the blood and bones and flesh we often refer to as ourselves. Mind you, I’m fond of my body. I like to use it, I take care of it, and I’ve learned to listen to it, as it will tell me when I’m somewhere physically or mentally I shouldn’t be.

But everyone else can see it and have an opinion about it. It’s always on display, whether I like it or not. To write, I must go somewhere devoid of anyone’s opinion except my own. How easy to begin seeing my work like my body, something on display, and to fear for that work’s well-being as I have feared for my safety from time to time. If the work is criticized, is harmed, so am I. But I am not the work or the body, and writing continues to remind me that I dwell somewhere safe and friendly beyond the reach of arrows or jibes.

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