Good Friends

Finding a good book is like making a new friend. You want to spend time with them even though you don’t know exactly what will be said next or where your time together will you take you. You just trust it will be somewhere you enjoy being. The story you’re reading is a kind of conversation after all, even though the author is doing all the talking. You, the reader, are listening in your way, but also imagining, allowing that story to come alive in your mind – where, if you’re honest, everything good and bad in your life has ever happened.

This is why you must trust your friend the author. The imagination works fast, building whole rooms and scenes and worlds as quickly as thoughts arrive. You can, by contrast, spend a lifetime undoing what has been made there. I have chosen stories cavalierly sometimes, and the nightmares into which they led me can, with just a little attention, be summoned years later as vividly as the day I first beheld them. I admit I have held resentment toward the authors responsible for these dreams, as if they lured me to a dark alley and inflicted these images upon me, as if I did not choose their story myself.

I trust the people I call friends. We have told plenty of good stories together, and I look forward to meeting and discovering what new ones we’ll find. But everyone has been told or has told themselves stories they wish they could forget, and sometimes they can’t but share these with those closest to them. They mean no harm. Friends are where we turn for comfort, the people whose company can soothe our boredom or loneliness as the sun melts frost.

These nightmares are always filled with problems, and how tempting it is to try to solve them. It never works, for the solutions are as unreal as the dreams they are trying to fix. The best I can offer is to tell a better story, one where my friend and I are safe, where all fear and pain is a consequence of misunderstanding. I’ll tell the story and trust my friend will favor it over their own, knowing everyone’s attention is drawn toward love, as a flower bends toward the sun.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com