Rule One

When I started Author fifteen years ago, I knew our readers would be other writers. I also knew I didn’t want to remind anyone that this profession has many challenges baked into it. I told myself and anyone who wrote for the magazine that we would not waste any virtual ink going back over the supposed odds of getting published, or how hard it is to make a living, or how only the talented need apply for this job. They could find that anywhere. Since our readers wanted to write, we would encourage them, never discourage them. The was Rule One.

What I didn’t know is how this would change me. It wasn’t long before this column began including some writing-adjacent stories from my life. Many of these involved disappointments of one kind or another. How to tell them? My natural impulse was to complain. Who wants disappointment? This, however, wouldn’t do, contradicting as it would Author’s first rule. So, I learned to tell them differently from how I often remembered them. The events were the same; my perception of them was not. The shame or despair or confusion I felt at the time was always a form of misunderstanding, a clarity more easily available in hindsight.

Tell enough of these kinds of stories and you can start mistrusting the shame, despair, and confusion you experience when you get up from the desk. Oh, it seems very real when you’re in it. This, I think, isn’t some kind of misperception. No, it’s reality! Except the memory of the stories I’d written remained, and none of those felt true until the pain of their conflict had resolved. Just as I had learned to recognize a clunky sentence while rereading a first draft rather than a note from my editor, so too I began to quickly rewrite, you might say, the miserable story I was telling myself as I moped around my house.

Time can be a friend to the storyteller. How easy it is to look back and know that you wouldn’t be stuck in that job forever, that you would be with the woman you loved, that you would find a publisher. You had nothing to worry about. Harder in the moment, when you don’t know the future. Except all discouragement and despair are an expression of erroneous fortunetelling. We think we know how this will end, but we don’t. We never do. But if writing has taught me anything, it’s that no story ends in pain, and if we think it has, we are merely caught in the drama of its middle.

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