A Good Enough Reason

Much of the work I do with clients and students revolves in one way or another around procrastination. All these men and women like to write. For many of them, when it’s going well, there’s nothing they love more. And yet they avoid it. They do the laundry or make shopping lists or play video games – anything that isn’t that isn’t what they love to do. Strange, I know, but if you write, you’re probably familiar with this. We all are.

What’s stranger still, I think, is that most writing instruction focuses exclusively on craft. This make sense, of course, since we aren’t born knowing how to write. As Flannery O’Connor noted – everyone knows what a story is until they try to tell one. So, yes, we must all learn how to write sentences and create compelling characters and render the physical world vividly. I’m a lover of craft myself, but all the mastery I’ve acquired is useless to me if I don’t actually write. What’s more, that mastery can’t grant me the confidence and enthusiasm necessary to compel me to the desk. That’s a choice made from somewhere else.

I won’t choose to write if I think it’s a waste of time, or if I think it’s going to be hard, or boring, or if nothing’s going to come to me. I won’t choose to if I think I’ll fail in some way, or if someone somewhere is always doing it better than I am. I have to choose it simply because I want to do it, and that choice can feel existential at its core. Why do anything ever? I’m just going to die, and then so what?

One of the nice parts of writing is not knowing. We don’t know how our stories will end. Often, we don’t know how a sentence will end. And yet I write those sentences and stories anyway. I would say I write to find out where my story is going, and that’s true, but only part of why I choose to do this day after day. Mostly it’s because of how I feel when I do it. That is such a non-reason to my intellect, and to my worried mind, and to my ego, but it’s the truth. It’s a good enough reason if you don’t think about it or try to understand it. It’s like stories themselves, which have only made sense to me while I’m actually telling them.

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