Agreement

When I get into an argument with a friend, which I never enjoy and which I always remind myself afterward I must never do again, I sometimes articulate for them what I believe to be their point of view. If I do so without judgment, the result is always the same. My friend says, “Yes. That’s exactly it!” and the argument is over even though I still don’t agree with the very point of view I just shared. The key is imagination. I picture my friend like a character in a story and speak as that character.

This requires a kind of agreement. When I wrote fiction, this is how I would approach portraying my villains. After all, the villain doesn’t think he’s the bad guy. In his mind, he’s the hero. Often, it was more fun to enter the mind of the antagonist. There was a strange freedom to it. I had to drop my notions of right and wrong, of good and bad. If I clung to them, then these characters would just be monsters, something less than human for which we need never fear having any sympathy. Let them all rot in the same hell they would turn this world into if they had their way.

How nice for a moment to let everyone be right. This includes me. Recently, I’ve been the villain in all my stories. That is, I write about a time when I thought a little differently than I do now and about all the trouble this thinking caused me. To do so, I must treat this younger Bill as a kind of character, speaking from his point of view, from his pain and anger and frustration, even though I don’t share it as I’m writing. It’s easy enough to summon. The world can be a scary and unfriendly place if you tilt your camera slightly. All I need to do is report what I see when I look through this skewed lens.

There’s great in relief showing my struggles and grief when I know how things will really turn out. It’s also nice to remember that I really was unhappy then. My reasons for being miserable may have been illusory, may have been the consequence of so much worry, but that doesn’t mean the pain itself wasn’t real. I felt it the same as I would the pinch of poorly fitting shoes. Yet that discomfort doesn’t mean my feet are broken, or that I’ll never find another pair of loafers. Change is as natural breathing, as normal deleting one sentence and finding a better one.

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