Certainty

I was on a panel at a writer’s conference this weekend where an author told a story of showing her second book to her agent. At the time, she was a TV executive whose first book had been about female leadership. This one was about family trauma. It was part memoir, part self-help, but apparently too much memoir for the agent. “Who’s going to care about you?” she wanted to know. The author found another agent who was happy to take it on and sell it.

As someone who writes memoir, I had a lot of thoughts about the agent’s take on my genre of choice. For instance, I rarely know anything about the authors whose memoirs I enjoy. That’s not why I read them, nor why anyone else would. But the agent didn’t know that. She probably thought you had to be a celebrity of some kind for anyone to be interested in your story. It’s an understandable perspective. I pass a lot of books at Barnes & Noble with a familiar face on the cover. That face is a big reason someone might buy it. Unless, of course, you just want a great story. Fame cannot guarantee that, and so, if you’re like me and a lot of other readers, you look elsewhere.

Publishing professionals are like anyone else. They know what they know, and some of them know it really well. When I’m around them, I like to pick their brains. But I must do so selectively. I have been told a lot of things that have turned out to not be one hundred percent true. Usually, the person who shared such wisdom did so with a tenor of absolute certainty. I’ve definitely been certain about things that turned out to be wrong. The first time I held a Kindle in my hand, I thought, “This is going nowhere.” If you had asked me, I would have told you just that.

But I didn’t know the future. Sometimes I’m right about the future, but often I’m wrong. Then again, I also don’t know how most of the stories I start will end. I didn’t know how this essay would end when I started it. The only thing I can be really certain about is what I like right now, and even that requires some focus. I can worry that the sentence or scene or story I like won’t take me anywhere I want to be. When I do so, I feel like I don’t know anything. Such is the fog of doubt, which clears the instant I accept I don’t need to know more than the sentence I’m in right now.

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Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
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