I Don't Know

I have a client, I’ll call him Bruce, who’s a very successful Australian comedian. He’s been working on a new show and is getting ready to go on tour with it. He told his manager that for this show he wants to handle the actual touring – the hotels and travel and such – differently. “Okay,” said his manager. “What do you want?”

Bruce shrugged. “I don’t know.”

His manager, who’s job, after all, is to manage things, was confused. “What do you mean, you don’t know? What do you want?”

Bruce shrugged again. “I don’t know. But it will be different. I’ll let you know when I do know.”

He laughed when he told me this story. “I’m always saying, ‘I don’t know.’ I probably say it more than anything else.”

“That’s because you’re an artist,” I said.

And he is. He came from extremely modest beginnings, and now he spends his days making people laugh or writing stories and poems and staring out of windows. He explained that staring out of windows with a cup of tea is his favorite creative method. Sounds good to me. Show up and wait until the idea comes. The showing up is very important; ideas come quicker that way. But you have to wait, and accept that you don’t yet know what you’ll write about.

Artists, and writers in particular, spend every day asking questions to which they don’t have an answer. What should happen next? What does my protagonist do for a living? What’s my story’s subtitle? Implicit in these questions is the immediate answer, “I don’t know.” If we knew, we wouldn’t be asking. Do this long enough, and you get comfortable not knowing. It becomes our natural state of being – until, that is, an answer arrives, and then we do know.

And of course, the answer always comes, it’s just a question of how long I’ll have to wait. Sometimes I wait five minutes, and sometimes, boys and girls, five years. The best way to speed up their arrival is to trust they’ll come, and the easiest way to trust is to remember what I do know: that I care about the question. I care about it for no reason other than it’s interesting to me, that I enjoy sitting with it even when it’s unanswered, like a friend who always arrives with something good to say.

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