The Best Guide

In my most recent podcast, the novelist Maribeth Fischer talked about the reasons for the sixteen year gap between her last novel and A Season of Perfect Happiness, which was published this week. She was very honest about it, saying on the one hand there had been a lot going on her life – starting a writing conference, teaching, her mother’s illness – but the truth was she’d stopped writing from her heart. As she described it, she started thinking too much about publication and that caused all the trouble.

It's an honest mistake. If you’re like me, you don’t just want to write in your diary. It is natural and, I think, ultimately necessary to share what we create with other people. To do otherwise is like not letting your children leave your house and start their own family. There’s also the idea of a career, of writing and publishing one and then another book, making a living at this the way you might if you started selling insurance or opened a clothing boutique. How can you not think about how well this next novel will be received and is there a market for it and will it stand out from similar titles? These are practical questions. You’re a grownup, and grownups must think practically now that they’re not just making up cool and interesting stories because it’s fun to do so. There are bills to pay.

Except Maribeth and I have both learned how profoundly impractical it can be to think about our stories in this way. All the grownup questions we ask about our work are focused in one way or another on the future, trying to game out how this current project will fare in the wide-open world where things succeed and fail, sometimes without any perceivable reason. Publishers are often as surprised authors by which books become bestsellers and which do not. As William Goldman famously wrote in Adventures in the Screen Trade about whether a movie will be a hit: Nobody knows.

However, if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s what I love. I have to know it because no one else can. Admittedly, I sometimes have to discover what I love most. I don’t always know what it looks like or sounds like, how it begins or how it will end, but when I meet it, if I’m honest, if I don’t judge it or ask it where will take me when I follow it, I’ll know immediately. On most days, I feel like it’s the only thing I know. Everything else is conjecture, whereas love is always right here with me, the best guide through an uncertain future.

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