The Real and the Imagined

I always start my Fearless Writing workshops by asking the students to describe a great day of writing. I stress that I don’t mean the result of a good day – how many pages you’ve written or how sparkling was your prose – but the actual lived, moment-to-moment experience. The answers vary somewhat in how they are phrased, but they are ultimately the same. The writers lose track of time and the world around them, they are surprised by what comes, and at times it feels as if the story is being told to them and that they are merely taking dictation.

If you like to write, you’ve had this experience. In fact, there’s no reason to write regularly if you haven’t. I have tried to write while not in the of mindset I have to enter to have a good day at the desk, and it’s absolute misery. Sit around with a bunch of writers and you will hear their war stories of the suffering they’ve endured when the story isn’t coming. It’s a war we’ve all fought, yet you will never see pictures of it in the paper, and its battles leave no visible scars. Still the stores are told, for they are as real to us as Waterloo and D-Day. Perhaps more real.

Remember, however, what it’s like when the story is coming, when there is no battle, no struggle, no resistance – just the effortless flow of one idea into the next. Nothing is really happening to me in the physical sense. I’m just sitting at my desk, staring, sipping coffee, and typing. Looks exactly like a miserable day, except, perhaps, for the expression on my face. No one can know what I went through unless, as if reporting back from a distant country, I tell them. Tell someone who’s never written, and you might sound as if you’re describing a hallucination.

It's just the opposite. The more I write, the more I have come to the conclusion that the only thing real in my life is that flow I find when I’ve dropped all resistance and let the story come. I can find that same flow elsewhere – everywhere, to be exact – but I find it most often and most deliberately while writing. It’s the only true and absolutely reliable source of pleasure, peace, and safety. Yes, I find it in a realm I alone can visit, but if writing and sharing what I’ve written has taught me anything, it’s that this stream of creation flows across and between all the imaginary the borders between us.

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