Hallelujah

When I started doing the New York Times crossword, I was aware that the puzzles got harder as the week progressed. I found I could manage Monday and Tuesday and, with a little help now and again from Google (it’s cheating, I know, but no one’s keeping score), maybe Wednesday, but that was it. Thursday’s was hopeless, the clues so spare and oblique I didn’t know where to begin. As for the rest of the week, I couldn’t even imagine; those were for wizards and savants only.

Until, of course, I was bored one Thursday and found a handful of answers for that day’s puzzle, and reasoned, “If I can get those, maybe I can get a few more.” Indeed, I could. Yesterday, I took a swing at Friday’s. You get one or two right and suddenly it’s a little less intimidating. When I finished it, I was reminded of all the things I’ve thought I couldn’t do. Believing you can’t is a locked door. On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes. Until that day, few in the track and field world had thought such a thing was possible. A little over a month later, Australia’s John Landy bettered Bannister’s time by a second. The current record stands at 3:43.13.

Bannister unlocked that door and one runner after another went through it. Writing is all about believing you can. You have to believe you can finish the book, believe you can find an agent, believe the agent can find a publisher. For that matter, you have to believe you can finish a single, harry scene, or find that one elusive description. You have no evidence you can other than maybe some past success – but, really, the story you’re is different than those you’ve already finished. You know that. If you decide those were easy and this one is hard, maybe impossible, so it shall be.

The first time I finished a Monday crossword, it seemed positively miraculous to me. Perhaps it was. I had lived my whole life, after all, thinking I was not a Crossword Guy, and now I was. Hallelujah. What is the “miracle of creation” other than inviting through us something that hadn’t been before? Every next sentence is a creation. It may seem like superstition that merely believing something is possible allows it to be so, that we are ignoring some immutable fact, that fish can’t climb trees and dogs can’t fly, and yet that is how it works. Let the fish swim and the dogs bark; we are here to make things that haven’t been made whether we believe we can or not.

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