The Teacher

I was thirty, and hard at work on my second novel, which I’d rewritten eighteen times and submitted to every living literary agent before deciding it was time to move on. Both were literary novels because those were the only kinds of books I’d read since I was sixteen and discovered writers like Vladimir Nabokov and T. S. Eliot and William Kennedy. Bookstores may have sold all kinds of genres, may have offered historical romance, self-help, and true crime, but the tunnel vision of my narrow tastes blurred those titles into a soft background, as engaging to my imagination as wallpaper.

I was at a writer’s conference, sitting in on a lunchtime session where attendees could get to know one another and ask questions of a knowledgeable professional. An older gentleman beside me introduced himself. We shook hands and he said he was bit nervous as this was his first conference but that he was learning a lot. He asked me what I wrote.

“Oh, you know, literary fiction.”

He looked at my blankly. “What’s that?”

He might as well have asked what a book was. I stammered my way through an answer, floored by how difficult it was to describe the type story I told, but also that an explanation was needed in the first place. Wasn’t this guy a writer? I would think of that man years later when I interviewed Harlan Coban and Lee Child, both of whom sold millions of copies of their suspense novels, and neither of whom I had ever heard of until we chatted. This did not stop me from having lovely conversations with both men, but it did remind me how readers and writers often segregate themselves through the natural selection of preference.

In retrospect, I probably learned more from the man who’d never heard of literary fiction than from all the classes I attended that weekend. I assumed prior to then that everyone cared about what I cared about. I wasn’t wholly wrong about this – everyone wanted success, and everyone wanted to be entertained, and everyone wanted to love and be loved. What those universal desires looked like, however, could be very different from person to person. No one is right and no one is wrong as they choose their stories. This is what acceptance feels like: not an agent or editor saying “Yes,” but needing no one’s agreement but your own to live your life.

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