A Little Understanding

When I was fifteen, I was chosen to intern at PM Magazine, a Providence TV show that featured light, local interest stories. They didn’t quite know what to do with me, so I was asked to read and, if need be, answer viewer mail. I sat with a modest pile of envelopes, all of which were addressed by hand, most in pen, a few in pencil, and began.

I didn’t know anything about the authors of these letters except that they were adults living somewhere in Rhode Island. As I read the first, and then the second, and then the third, I noticed a surprising trend: none of these people could write. Well, to be fair, they obviously could write, but it seemed to my young eyes, only just barely. There were sentence fragments aplenty, and odd grammar, and misspellings, and a clunkiness that required me to intuit the letter’s meaning. If you hadn’t told me otherwise, I would have thought these complaints and notes of gratitude had come from elementary school students.

It took me the rest of that first day to make sense of what I’d just experienced. I was still a kid. The people who wrote those letters were adults, the ones supposedly in charge of the world I lived in. They probably had jobs and families and mortgages and drove cars and voted. Apparently, you could survive perfectly fine in this world without this skill I took for granted. To me, writing was like talking, only on paper.

Except it really isn’t. When you talk, you’re communicating with more than just your words. You have your voice and face and body, all of which help express what you’re wanting to share. You can also adjust what you’re saying to how your audience is responding. Then you’re confronted with this page, and are limited to bare, still, silent sentences, and there is no audience, except the one in your mind. It can feel uncomfortable, and like you’re being asked to play tennis with one hand and one leg tied behind your back.

I realized going home that day that I liked the limits writing put on me. I was also reminded how different we all are in certain ways. For instance, it would never have occurred to me, a budding author, to write a letter to a television show. Yet here these people did just that, despite having no apparent love of writing. What a strangely brave choice. It was just the kind of unexpected, interesting experience that made we want to tell stories in the first place. It was hard for me sometimes to understand why you wouldn’t want to be a professional storyteller – though understanding someone else, someone who seems to have so little in common with you, is perhaps job one for any author.

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
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