Something New

I’ve started playing Wordle recently, which, if you’re unfamiliar, is a little game where you have six tries to guess a five-letter word, gaining clues from all your wrong answers. I was feeling a bit like a savant, having gotten the answer in two tries on consecutive days. My wife plays also, and was annoyed by my success. “Two again! How?”

“It just comes to me, Jen,” I answered. “The word just comes to me.”

Until it doesn’t. The other day I was three guesses in with three out of the five letters but all in the wrong place. I’d used up most of the alphabet, and was trying to think if there was something with a Z, or Q and no U, or an X. Nothing. The more I stared at the letters, the more I rearranged them, the less it seemed possible a solution to this puzzle existed in the English language. What’s more maddening is that the answer is never something obscure like Pawky or Heeze. It’s always common, something you read or use regularly.

Finally, having stared and stared, I gave up. Which is to say, put it aside for later. The moment I did so, I was reminded of when I’d spend thirty minutes with a half-finished paragraph, trying one and then another and then another sentence, none of them natural, none of them moving the story forward the way I want it to move. I’ve learned to recognize when my vision has become stuck, locked onto a few ideas, the swath my attention unable to shift somewhere new. Best to step away when I feel that. It’s not failure. The mind needs to be engaged elsewhere, in music or conversation or even taxes, anything but the question it can’t answer.

An hour later, I picked up my phone, opened Wordle, and thought, “Local.” There it was. So obvious. It’s always obvious. It’s hard to remember what it was like when I couldn’t see it. It’s as if that Bill was blind. I suppose it is a form of blindness when the thing you want is right there but for some reason you won’t or can’t look at it. Life is so frustrating when what you want isn’t coming. You can’t make it happen, can’t demand it. Something small in me always has to change, has to be let go of, and then the new thing isn’t scary, isn’t out of reach, is simply there waiting for me.

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