June 19th, 2013
Stories about human beings are never about what happens to those human beings but what it feels like when something happens to those human beings. The fact that your hero has a gun in his face means less to other human beings than what it feels like to have a gun in his face. If he were happy to have a gun in his face, for instance, that would be very different than if he were terrified to have that gun in his face. In this way, stories are not so much a series of events but a movement of feeling.
I have found this to be so in my life as well. I have been guided through my life by feeling, and rarely by evidence or reason. In fact, I don’t really know how to be guided by reason or evidence. All I want is to feel good, and what felt good yesterday – or ten minutes ago – may not feel good at this moment. A life is like a story in this way also. You job as a writer is to write the scene that belongs in that moment in that story. You cannot use a scene from another story.
So too with your life. Your job, if you can even call it that, is to know what a given moment asks of you. Because a moment is too big to know intellectually, because life happens too fast for our turtle brains, the only way to know what is best for that moment and for you is to feel what is best – the very same as you feel what is best for a moment in a story.
The past is in fact over and cannot repeat itself precisely. But it has certainly taught me. It has taught me that if I feel what a moment requires and ignore that feeling, I suffer; if I surrender to that feeling, life becomes effortless. Why would I ever not surrender to that feeling? Because what if this time Life, that which is guiding me, is wrong? What if the final answer life always provides is not Yes? And in that very moment I create the void I most fear, open a hole into which I will inevitably fall, only to be caught once again by Life and its only answer.
Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion.
“A book to keep nearby whenever your writer’s spirit needs feeding.” Deb Caletti.
Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com
Tags: Bill Kenower, Evidence, Feeling, Inspiration, Writing
Posted in Love, Trust, Writing | No Comments »
June 18th, 2013
What is a writer’s inspiration? Here is what all creative people value: to find oneself fueled as if by command from within to put into the world that which can only be seen by the imagination’s vivid eye. We value that fuel as it propels us past logic and doubt, past reason and comparison. The writer’s inspiration does not share the writer’s fear of failure and judgment. The writer’s inspiration says simply, Create this, and you will know in the creating why you must.
The writer’s inspiration asks only that the writer does not doubt its reality. Doubt its reality and you have lost all sight of it, and so you say, “Look! It was never real. Doubt has shown me the truth. I have cast the light of skepticism upon this thing I could never see, and now it is gone. I am alone, as I have always suspected.” Do not make doubt your friend. It is crafty in its insidious logic. It asks of the writer’s inspiration what it cannot possibly produce: proof of the value of what has not yet been made so that it knows it is worth making.
Doubt is no friend to creation. Love is creation’s only companion. The writer knows his inspiration’s value only has he knows what he loves. Nowhere can your love be proven. In no court could your love stand the withering eye of reason. All that we can say of love is that we know it.
You love your inspiration as you love your friends. You trust your inspiration as you trust your friends. You may believe on some dark night that you trust a friend because he has proven himself through deeds to be worth trusting – but you know this is not so. You know that only in trusting does a friend become a friend; only in trusting do you allow a person to reveal himself to you. So too is it with the writer’s inspiration. Your trust is inspiration’s invitation, the open door of your heart through which love seeks its voice.
Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion.
“A book to keep nearby whenever your writer’s spirit needs feeding.” Deb Caletti.
Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com
Tags: Bill Kenower, Doubt, Inspiration, Love, Trust, Writing
Posted in Fear, Love, Voice, Writing | No Comments »
June 17th, 2013
Every time I write it is a journey home. It is easy to leave home without trying. It is easy to look at what other people are doing and follow the lights of their homes only to find their door locked to my envy and my own house lost in shadows. It is also easy to call my own home unsatisfactory, having come to believe that dissatisfaction is the only inspiration for growth, as if the flower blooms because it is weary of its seed. But to be dissatisfied with this house is to leave it, and I soon find myself in search of what I have left.
Fortunately, my home is always in precisely the same place. My address remains the same no matter how far I wander. Sometimes I can walk home, other times I must drive, still others only a plane can carry me across the oceans I have put between me and my front door. It does not matter. I am never lost because I have travelled too far but only because I have forgotten where I live.
I love to return home, but it is easy to see it as a sanctuary from the rest of the world in which I have felt lost. Tempting to close up the shutters and dim the lights lest the chaos I perceived come knocking on my door. Yet to close my door is to lose my home once again. It ceases to be mine when I call it mine alone.
The light that is home was lit for me, it shown where only I could see it, and yet to touch it is to know instantly that it belongs to everyone. How could this be? How could that which was made for me not be mine alone? Because to possess something is to become tied to the frailty of its passing, and in this home I call The End I give back to the world what was given to me, having found again that point where all our doors meet.
Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion.
“A book to keep nearby whenever your writer’s spirit needs feeding.” Deb Caletti.
Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com
Tags: Bill Kenower, Home, Inspiration, Writing
Posted in Trust, Writing | No Comments »
June 14th, 2013
As we write our books, so we can live our lives. As we deliberately create what we desire to see on the page, so we can create deliberately what we desire to see in the world. As we learn to see with the eyes of our imagination in the stillness and meditation of our desk, so we can learn to see with the eyes of our imagination in the movement and noisiness of the world. It is always better to see with the eyes of the imagination for only it can see with clarity what is not immediately before you. Do you only sit down and write about a desk and a computer and some coffee?
But it is easier said than done. It is easier because to say only requires a single thought while to live requires thought after thought after thought. To live requires a discipline of thought, because to live is to be surrounded in death. Our imagination may have invented death and the stories about it with which we routinely scare ourselves, but death remains but a single thought upon which we continue to train our imagination.
It is an odd and impractical use for the imagination, this thing designed to see past what is and into what might be. Only with the eyes of your imagination will you ever see love. You will never actually hold love in your arms or kiss it, it is impossible, and yet through your imagination you can follow love to its depths where you are held and kissed within it. Love is always what might be; love is always the unseen waiting to be born.
There is absolutely nothing else that can be born. You cannot actually give birth to fear because fear is the desire for something to end whereas love is the desire for something to begin. So you write what you love, and in so doing train your imagination upon that which you would be surrounded in if you had the thought discipline of a saint. It is all right if we don’t have such discipline yet. We have each other in the meantime, all of us constant reminders that we already live surrounded in love.
Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion.
“A book to keep nearby whenever your writer’s spirit needs feeding.” Deb Caletti.
Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com
Tags: Bill Kenower, Death, Fear, Imagination, Inspiration, Love, Writing
Posted in Fear, Imagination, Love, Writing | No Comments »
June 13th, 2013
Ninety percent of what you need to tell the story you most want to tell you already have. It does not matter if you are eight or eighty, you already have everything you need except that other ten percent, which we have come to call craft. Many writers are taught the exact opposite – that they are born with ten percent and learn the ninety. This is not surprising; humans are forever teaching each other that we have nothing until we acquire it.
Your imagination will provide you with every idea you will ever need. It is a ceaseless and loyal servant. Your desire to communicate summons this imagination and focuses it. The clearer your desire, the more useful the ideas your imagination provides. Nothing is required of you other than to train your attention steadily on what you desire to share with other people.
Nothing, that is, except trust. This is what most writers are really learning – not character development or strong verbs or showing and not telling. Do not underestimate how quickly you can halt the flow of ideas from your imagination. Trust is the open channel through which these ideas flow. To clamp this hose is to cut ourselves off from creation, from life’s source, and the pain that accumulates from this one choice grows commensurately acute.
Until released. There is a kind of ecstasy that accompanies the return to trust. It can be addictive in its own way, and the artist must resist the temptation to recreate this artificial pleasure. The artist must accept his pleasure as the constant flow of focused thought as he must also accept himself. You were not born a blank slate. You are not clay to be molded by time and circumstance and the sharp edges of experience. You are a conduit for creation itself, ninety percent light, and ten percent shadow so the world will have some form.
Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion.
“A book to keep nearby whenever your writer’s spirit needs feeding.” Deb Caletti.
Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com
Tags: Bill Kenower, Craft, Imagination, Inspiration, Trust, Writing
Posted in Craft, Trust, Writing | No Comments »
June 12th, 2013
My wife’s uncle is an inventor and a very successful businessman with hardly an artistic bone in his very fit body. You might think he and I have very little in common, but in fact he has always recognized the connection between the artist and the entrepreneur, and enjoys talking about the vagaries of writing and publishing. Once we landed on a subject where there was considerable professional crossover: writing technology. My uncle-in-law observed that there were now numerous software options for the writer. I agreed that there were.
“But does the technology actually make the writing any better?” he asked dubiously.
It was such an unexpected question that I nearly didn’t understand it. It took me a moment to understand that as an inventor he viewed a given technology’s value by its evolutionary expansion of human potential. The argument could be made that computers and writing software are doing just that, but Shakespeare wrote with a quill. There isn’t a piece of technology in the world that will tell you what word should come next, which is the biggest challenge facing every writer since writing was invented.
And I happen to believe that language remains humanity’s single greatest invention. That these noises coming out of our mouth actually mean enough to cause another human being to weep or laugh or unclench a fist is miraculous if you pause to think about it.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t spend my days wading through words; sometimes I think my life would be purer if I had been a composer. More often, however, I return willingly to these meaningful sounds. Words are the lens through which I understand life. I do not know what it is I know until I have put that abstract knowledge into words.
For there, in language, knowledge becomes something outside of me and knowable to another human being. No matter how often I do this, I still find this sharing of thought through words beautiful and mysterious. It shouldn’t work, and yet it does. I’m sure the first words invented were “Fire” or “Run!” but this couldn’t have satisfied for long. Even squatting in a cave, one of us must have thought, “Wooly mammoth. Yum.” And one of us must have looked across the cave at the other cave squatters and found a prehistoric word for “delicious.”
But why? Because it would help us live longer? Because it would keep us warm in the winter? No, one of us would have said this only because it was true, which always has been and always will be reason enough to say anything.
Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion.
“A book to keep nearby whenever your writer’s spirit needs feeding.” Deb Caletti.
Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com
Tags: Bill Kenower, Language, Technology, Writing
Posted in Writing | No Comments »
June 11th, 2013
Writing teaches me every day, but if it teaches me nothing else it teaches me to trust. Specifically, trust that the truth will always be enough. The truth will always be funny enough, interesting enough, exciting enough, or compelling enough for the story I want to tell. The truth needs no exaggeration; it needs no help.
I cannot, however, manufacture the truth, anymore than I can manufacture the sky or an elm tree. The best I can do is to report it, translate it. I have tried to manufacture a more interesting truth when I worried that the truth itself would not suffice, but this ersatz reality, no matter how dramatic, always felt a little thin against what I rejected.
What’s more, the truth resists evidence. It will never be proven, only perceived. And to perceive it, I must keep my attention upon it. The moment I move my attention in search of some proof of what I have perceived, I lose sight of the truth and doubt moves in to take its place. If I feel betrayed by the truth for not following my attention, I call myself a skeptic. Mostly, however, writing has taught me to return my attention to what I had known to be the truth when I had perceived it.
The beautiful thing about the truth is that I can see it in everything if I look at the world correctly. You cannot perceive it if you don’t believe it’s there, but the moment you do, the truth reveals itself. It reveals itself in the sky and in elm trees, in friends and strangers, and from time to time, if I am very still, even in the mirror.
Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion.
“A book to keep nearby whenever your writer’s spirit needs feeding.” Deb Caletti.
Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com
Posted in Beauty, Perception, Trust, Writing | No Comments »
June 10th, 2013
When I am nervous I find that my mind is preoccupied with old thoughts. These thoughts have served their purpose, have, like the coals in a steamship’s belly, burned and moved me forward through time. If a particular thought burned very hot and took me very far it can be difficult to see it as an old thought. I feel an allegiance to it, wishing to enshrine this thought against evolution, viewing it through the fearful lens of my own mortality where I pity all things that must one day pass away.
But it is uncomfortable to sit idle in the ocean when you can feel life calling you forward. I descend into the furnace room and fan those old thoughts, enamored for a moment with the brute usefulness of action, as if I had succumbed through distraction to laziness. When my efforts yield no movement, I despair. What use is my knowledge of the seas and my skill behind the wheel? The ocean is my new master, and I am its slave.
I had forgotten in my discomfort that idleness is invention’s friend. So much easier to scan the horizon when I am not busy being enthralled by my own speed. And there it is, some spot out beyond the waves that looks interesting. Do you see it? I ask a friend. No, he does not. How strange. Still, there it is again. But how, I wonder, might I get there?
Now my boat is moving once again. I do not even notice its advancement, as my eyes are still trained on what I see. Until at last I feel the movement, and now I am behind the wheel, and I have forgotten my despair as one would a dream, and I love the ocean for all its possibilities. And in the ship’s belly, these new thoughts have caught their fire from the old, their heat requiring no fan but the wind of my curiosity.
Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion.
“A book to keep nearby whenever your writer’s spirit needs feeding.” Deb Caletti.
Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com
Tags: Bill Kenower, Creativity, Curiosity, Inspiration, Thought, Writing
Posted in Choice, Despair, Trust, Writing | No Comments »
June 7th, 2013
My youngest son has recently discovered the illusory satisfaction of complaint. Actually, the illusory part is still awaiting his acknowledgment, and in the meantime he is happy to explore the limitations of this free and legal drug. “Why so much complaining,” I asked him. “Because it releases the anger,” he explained. Yes, for a moment, and then the anger returns and, like any drug, you must do more to maintain its effect.
I too complain, of course. My most frequent complaint is, “What the hell!” There is no appropriate punctuation mark in the English language with which to end this short burst. It is a question that is not a question, for it expects no answer. Rather, I am registering my dissatisfaction – but with whom? At best, the children scatter and my wife disappears behind a book, leaving me alone to seek a solution to a problem that does not exist.
Sometimes I will take my complaints to the page. This is a wholly unsatisfying experience. Because the questions have no answers, I put them on the page for some unfortunate reader, of whom I am asking, “Can you believe this crap?” Hopefully they do not, and they put aside what I have scratched out in my impatience and disbelief.
Writing needs to be the opposite of complaint, if something that is actually nothing can even have an opposite. Only questions that can be answered are of any use to a writer. Here, my mind holds the questions and the page receives the answers. I ask, What is right that I have called wrong? What is whole that I have called broken? It is a humbling process sometimes, as yesterday’s complaints still echo in my mind. Fortunately, to forgive the past is no different than forgiving a dream, and in that forgiveness I awaken to a world needing no correction.
Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion.
“A book to keep nearby whenever your writer’s spirit needs feeding.” Deb Caletti.
Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com
Tags: Bill Kenower, Complaint, Inspiration, Writing
Posted in Voice, Writing | No Comments »
June 6th, 2013
One day I was sitting bored and restless in my high school English class when Marge Casey, our earnest and frequently disappointed teacher, began reciting a soliloquy from Macbeth. I believe she was trying to make a point about what she perceived as our stubborn indifference to books like Return of the Native and Red Badge of Courage. So she summoned Shakespeare to club us with his holy authority.
I was vaguely familiar with the piece. I knew the Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow part, and I’d certainly heard Out, out brief candle. If I’d ever heard the end, however, I’d never paid attention until that afternoon.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
A writer will sometimes be asked what other writers influenced him. I have never been able to answer that question until recently when I recalled that day in English class. Something lit up in me that afternoon that has burned ever since. In many ways everything I write in this space, and everything I will ever write, is influenced and inspired by that one soliloquy.
Here was a writer rendering not what could be seen but what could not be seen, rendering it as though it was as real as the chair I was sitting in. I still cannot imagine something I would rather offer the world. Moreover, Shakespeare showed me not just how to do it, but encapsulated exactly what I would forever be writing in response to, those two terrible words: signifying nothing.
That life has a meaning is a question I will be answering until I am done living. That meaning will never be seen, will never be measured or tasted or heard. Enter the artist, who must hold in his imagination what the hand cannot. You hold it long enough to share and then you lose it, having become momentarily distracted as you watch what you made travel out into the world you cannot understand.
Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion.
“A book to keep nearby whenever your writer’s spirit needs feeding.” Deb Caletti.
Remember to catch Bill every Tuesday at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 EST on his live Blogtalk Radio program Author2Author!
You can find Bill at: williamkenower.com
Tags: Bill Kenower, Inspiration, Meaning, Shakespeare, Writing
Posted in Despair, Meaning, Writing | No Comments »