Archive for the ‘Fear’ Category

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A Writer’s Inspiration

Tuesday, 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.

9781935961994-Perfect_CS.inddWrite 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
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Posted in Fear, Love, Voice, Writing | No Comments »

As You Live

Friday, 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.

9781935961994-Perfect_CS.inddWrite 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
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Posted in Fear, Imagination, Love, Writing | No Comments »

A Single Idea

Friday, May 31st, 2013

One upon a time you were nothing but an idea. Perhaps your mother turned to your father and said, “Honey, I have an idea, and I think you’re going to like it!” You might say it was an inspired idea, being a mixture of love and desire and curiosity of how these two might combine. When your mother had this idea she did not know that you would be conceived, of if you would be a boy or a girl, or if you would be tall or short, quiet or talkative, artistic or analytical. All she had was one single idea that was of interest to her at that moment, and she acted on it.

Every single book ever written begins in such a fashion. The seed of an idea arrives one day in your mind and you say to yourself, “I like it.” This idea gestates in your subconscious for a time, then grows in your imagination, is formed gradually with thought upon thought upon thought, until a book is born. That book will now go wherever it must, meet its own friends, make its own way in the world. You can no more predict nor control its future than could a parent a child.

In fact, your only hope to truly influence this child called a book, your only power over the course of its destiny, is the love with which it was created. That love will be invisible to the human eye. No reader will be able to point directly to it on the page the way they could its title or your name upon the cover. No literature professor will dissect it, analyze it or critique it. And yet love is both the glue that holds these collection of sentences together into something called a story, and the energy that moves it forward into the world the same as it moved you forward toward the idea of a book.

For all of its acknowledged power, for all the songs and books and sermons we have written about it, love remains easily taken for granted. It is easier sometimes to treasure what we can hold. But you cannot hold your published book as you once held the love that bore it, the same as you cannot hold your child as you hold your love for that child. Everything will leave us someday but love, which is never further from us than a single thought.

9781935961994-Perfect_CS.inddWrite 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
Follow wdbk on Twitter

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Posted in Choice, Failure, Fear, Writing | No Comments »

Nobody Cares

Friday, May 24th, 2013

A few years ago I had the pleasure to interview Dennis Lehane, who told the story of how, in his early years of writing, he posted a note to himself above his desk where he worked that read, “Nobody Cares.” This meant both the hard-boiled truth that the world was largely indifferent to his little joys and struggles, but also the emancipating understanding that whether he failed or succeeded would not actually affect anyone else. Since nobody cared, he needn’t waste any energy worrying about what anyone thought about what he was doing.

I thought of this when my creative work began to draw exclusively from my own life, whether in memoir or in this space. I could be a slippery and uncooperative protagonist, stiffening suddenly as the Bill on the page seemed to become aware the literary camera. Ironically, this only made Protagonist Bill less sympathetic, an outcome that only further heightened his awareness of my narrative eye.

Until, that is, I remembered that nobody cared – or more specifically, nobody cared about me. If I have done my job as a writer correctly, the reader will care about my story’s protagonist – me, in this case – but not the me I am so often trying to protect. This is the me to whom I was referring when, as a young man, I sometimes complained, “Nobody cares about me.” Meaning, nobody cared that I was sad; nobody cared that I was frightened. And it was true. To care about my sadness in the way I believed others should would be to ask another to care about an illusion I had believed. To care about this illusion would only strengthen my belief in it, which in turn would only strengthen my sadness.

The opposite of an illusion is the truth, and this is what readers really care about. Stories, at their best, are dreams through which a reader can awaken from an illusion into the truth. Nothing matters but that awakening. The moment I believe that I matter more than the awakening, I begin protecting myself, and the story disappears into the nightmare I have spent my life trying to disbelieve.

9781935961994-Perfect_CS.inddWrite 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
Follow wdbk on Twitter

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Posted in Fantasy, Fear, Perception, Writing | No Comments »

Writing My Way Home

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013

Some days I sit down to write filled with enthusiasm and certainty. I have observed the fruits of my labor hanging from the Tree of Life, and I am enjoying the harvest and want nothing more than to share this pleasure with everyone I know or don’t know. To write from such a place is to report back on a truth I have already learned; I am a journalist with only good news to share.

More often, however, I find myself at the desk with two thoughts competing in my mind. One is a hopeful thought. Perhaps I remember my last harvest, or can see the fruits beginning to bud. Such thoughts are all optimism and generosity and compassion. Within such thoughts I have nothing to prove, and the world is filled with only friends, and not a single enemy.

Yet there also dwells in me a hopeless thought. I have named the growing of all fruit pointless or impossible. I have endowed myself with premonitory powers, and believe that if any fruit comes it will be bitter and unsatisfying or somehow stolen by one of my many enemies. Here I create only architectural nothingness, hoping to draw comfort from the knowledge I alone can name the void.

On such days I write myself into the truth of hopefulness, following a path of thought laid out for me again as it was the day before until I am home where the lie of hopelessness is dispelled. Though I would not ask for hopelessness, I must acknowledge its value in my work. A thing is always seen more clearly against its opposite. Perhaps someday the hopeless thoughts will no longer hold the power to attract my attention, and they will wither to death like a garden untended. Strange that it is so hard for us to let such a thing die, even when the whole of creation blooms in its extinction.

9781935961994-Perfect_CS.inddWrite 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
Follow wdbk on Twitter

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Posted in Despair, Fear, Trust, Writing | No Comments »

A Dragon In The Garden

Tuesday, May 14th, 2013

I sometimes wonder if the worst misfortune that could befall a writer is to be cursed with a life of excitement and adventure. How easy, even with your own life, to become transfixed by the glitter and drama of events and lose sight of the heart that beats steadily and hopefully beneath every moment. Life may dress itself in a tuxedo, but within that coat and tie is the same naked truth to which we are all beholden.

It is the only truth toward which anyone would write, and the only truth toward which anyone would live. And yet how tempting it is to discard life like one of our own aborted ideas. Not all of life, of course – only the dull bits, the hours spent waiting, the idle hours in front of the TV, the after-dinner conversations with a spouse, the drive to work.

I have felt at times as if I am drowning in life’s dull bits. How the dirty daily business of not-dying consumes my attention. If the dull bits are discardable, why then so am I, for hasn’t my life seemed to have descended into little else? Now I look out and see nothing but empty survival, now I look out and would crave a killer at my door, if only to make that same survival worthy of a movie or at least a mention on the evening news.

How the dull bits summon the specter of meaninglessness. Now a dragon has appeared in my garden, and I am running for my life. Slay me if you can, he’ll whisper, but death has always been my friend, filling your quiet hours as he does with the haunted fantasy of an end as meaningless as the beginning and middle.

I write this column for anyone who has ever felt the pain of his own discarded life. Perhaps you did not even recognize the dragon as you looked at him. Perhaps you called him boredom, loneliness, poverty, loss, bad luck, or abuse. The dragon has many names. To live as a saint, you needn’t renounce your earthly ways, tend the children in Calcutta, or hang yourself on a cross. To live as a saint you need only see what a saint sees, to look out at the garden where the dragon breathes and know that serpent has come to save you.

9781935961994-Perfect_CS.inddWrite 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
Follow wdbk on Twitter

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Posted in Despair, Fear, Meaning, Perception, Writing | No Comments »

Day After Day

Thursday, May 2nd, 2013

Once upon a time I was rarely busy. In those days, I could hold everything I had to do in my head, a mobile calendar of sorts that I would consult throughout my day. And by consult I mean stare at with my ceaseless mind’s eye, as if that thing I had to do might have moved its time and place since I had looked at it thirty minutes before. Though I had little to do, I was frequently exhausted, and I would find myself napping in chairs at eleven in the morning.

By and by there was more to do. There were places I needed to go and people I needed to talk to. Now there was not just the one thing I needed to do but two or three or even sometimes four things. Still, I could hold all these in my head, every email I had to answer and every appointment I needed to keep because that is the kind of head I possess. Such a head is useful at times, not so useful at others. Instead of napping in a chair, I would be wide-awake in my bed, the calendar bright and alive and threatening.

Then the day came where there was much to do I was forced to move my calendar from my mind to my computer. There was so much to do I hadn’t the time to rehearse what would be said to every audience, asked in every interview. I was forced to assume that I would know what to say or do when I did what my actual calendar told me I must do. Now my mind was free to attend to other matters. Now my mind was free to remember other things that lay far beneath the noise of a useless calendar. Though I had many places to go and many people to talk to, I was peaceful, and I slept only at night.

Sometimes, as I descend from my day into sleep, I will jerk back to the surface of consciousness where all my worries swim frantically, certain their next stroke will be their last. I am like a parent, who has forgotten his children and must find them before they wander into traffic. Yet it is only a dream in fact, and I see that the calendar of my mind remains pristine, a perfectly empty string of day after day after day.

9781935961994-Perfect_CS.inddWrite 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
Follow wdbk on Twitter

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Posted in Attention, Fear, Writing | No Comments »

A Strange Fear

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

I was getting ready to give a lecture. All the chairs were filled and the nice woman from the local writer’s organization was beginning her introduction. As I paced in the darkness by the edge of the stage, a small panic began to build in me. Though I’d done this lecture before, I preferred to leave the first third of it to inspiration. Standing there minutes before I was to speak, I thought, “I don’t know what to say. I haven’t got one thing to say to these people.”

Oddly, this stage fright reminded me almost exactly of my days in the theater when, standing in the wings waiting for my entrance, I would feel as if the door to my memory, where all my lines and stage directions resided, had become locked in fear. What a nightmare of naked humiliation, as the whole play collapses around my frailty. Then I would step on stage, and there are the magic lights, and there are the other actors, and everything is alive and happening and I am a part of it and I know everything I must say and do.

That was how it felt that night before I was to speak, even though I had memorized nothing. But on this evening, as the panic began to build, a voice in me whispered, “You will know what to say once you are behind the podium.” And then the nice woman was saying my name, and the nice people were applauding politely, and there were the lights, and there were their faces, and I needed only to speak to them.

Stage fright is not unlike the panic I can sometimes feel when away from a book project. While cooking dinner or mowing the lawn I will think, “I don’t understand this book at all. It is completely inscrutable.” Which it is at that moment. And then I will meet the page again and I will see what I could not in my kitchen or my backyard.

Just as there is a part of me that knew my lines when I was in a play, so too there is a part of me that knows what to say or write what has not yet been said or written. Yet that part of me belongs to the moment for which it is summoned, not that meager daily fear that all will crumble if I cannot know my entire life like a play that has already been written. If I am honest I will see that I belong to that moment too, and the strange fear that distrusts all creation belongs to all the ideas that are never born.

9781935961994-Perfect_CS.inddWrite 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
Follow wdbk on Twitter

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Posted in Fear, Listening, Trust, Writing | No Comments »

Confidence

Tuesday, April 30th, 2013

The worst thing that could happen to writer is not a bad review, poor sales, or a rejection letter, but to lose his confidence. Without his confidence, he cannot actually write. Instead, he will chase his own confidence across the page in words and sentences, but he will not catch it. It cannot be caught. To think that it can be caught is to lose sight of it again.

I sometimes coach individual writers. Always the first thing these writers want me to do is read their work. They will say this is a practical thing to do, that I might fix their sentences as a tennis coach fixes his student’s swing. But this is usually not what they want. They are hoping my reading their work will give them confidence. Unfortunately, having someone read your work is the last thing that will bring you confidence.

From time to time someone will read something I have written and they will let me know how much they liked it. This is lovely, of course, but then a time will come when I am not feeling my confidence, and I might make the mistake of turning in my memory to those kind words. In that moment I have only traveled further from what I seek. And if my work has been criticized, and if I am not feeling my confidence, I might use that criticism like a whip to punish me back to where I belong.

Where I belong is a place where even the memory of whips does not exist. Here, praise has no meaning either. Within my confidence there is only the gem of love, a thing of value that offers itself for the price of my attention. Nothing else exists there. To see anything else is to fabricate what will only crumble under the weight of time and be called worthless, as all the gifts we give one another must some day. Our confidence was never anyone’s to give; it was only ours to be remembered.

9781935961994-Perfect_CS.inddWrite 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
Follow wdbk on Twitter

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Posted in Criticism, Fear, Love, Trust, Writing | No Comments »

Necessary Shadows

Thursday, April 25th, 2013

When an artist renders the world on canvas, she is as much concerned with shadow – the negative space, what cannot be seen – as with light, what can be seen. In this way, shadows define the visible world, providing clear contrast for what we wish to focus upon.

This is a friendly relationship to shadows. It also is easy to forget. As I go about my day, my own world can fall into shadow as quickly as a cloud covers the sun. Here nothing but moss and mold will grow; here nothing can bloom. And sometimes I meet a friend or stranger and I feel the shadow across their eyes, and I can hate them for it. In those moments, I fear shadows as I fear any terminal contagion. Only the strong of will survive and prosper in a world where shadows abound.

But if I were able to live on the surface of the sun there would be only light, light, and more light. Within that ceaseless brightness there would be no definition, no this and that. Not a terrible arrangement, but I like this and that. In this way, the world of form is a world of shadow by necessity. It is shadow that allows us to see. Shadow separates everything and allows everything to be what it is.

Still, the artist must remember she is not rendering the shadows themselves. They do not exist, so there is nothing to render. Much of human life is spent talking about shadows as if they were real. Newspapers and television and the Internet are full of heated debate about the quantity and meaning of shadows. Where did they come from? How long will they be here? Should we convene a panel or begin a case study on them?

Enough of this worry leaves me longing to live on the sun. Yet such a flight might only cast its own shadow on the world I’m departing. A pointless solution given that I will always cast a shadow wherever I stand. Better to continue learning to tell light from shadow, to see the bright and blooming world the sun has illuminated.

9781935961994-Perfect_CS.inddWrite 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
Follow wdbk on Twitter

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Posted in Fear, Love, Writing | No Comments »

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