You've Got It

There may be no greater pleasure a writer can know than getting it. The middle that was a tangled mess finally unwinds and flows straight from beginning to end. What a relief; how gratifying. Or maybe the ending wasn’t working, but after the seventh swing at it you find the perfect note and your story’s got a clean, satisfying landing. Stick it, and get out. Or maybe it’s just a description of what it was like to stand in your father-in-law’s house the day he died. Your first efforts caught none of the fullness and nuance of that moment, but with patience and a little humility, the language comes and what you write surprises even you who lived it.

Really getting it feels like success. It is success. This is what you’re trying to do. You don’t write to feel unsatisfied and disinterested. Plus, getting it is certainly better than not getting it. How frustrating that can be. The scene that sounds like two instruments playing in different keys, the sentence that has no energy or movement, the character who walks and talks like a paper cut-out of a person. All that failure can grate on you. You try to tell yourself it’s okay, that, sure, it’s not perfect, but it’ll do – while somewhere in your writer’s heart you know the truth. You didn’t get it. On dark days, you wonder if you’ll ever get it.

It's vital, while you’re trying to find the scene or the sentence or the word, that you trust it will come. Doubt shuts the door on inspiration. More importantly, however, is to pay attention to what it’s actually like to find what you’re looking for. Something in you knows you’ll get it, knows that what you want will show up. It’s very much like the best gift in that you don’t know what it will be but you know you’ll like it. Isn’t that itself satisfying? Isn’t anticipating the gift as much fun sometimes as getting it?

It has to be. The whole reason we write is to find that satisfaction of a story that works, but once it’s found, there’s nothing more to do. The truth is, most of our time as writers is spent not knowing, waiting, choosing and then discarding, and then waiting again. It’s only doubt that makes the waiting painful. Without it, you can be aware of the pleasure of the unfinished story fully within you. It’s all there. It just needs the right details to be completed outside of you, on the page. Love the story as it is from first word to last and you’ll know that you always have it and everything.

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