These wounds, it seems, are always at the hands of other people. The alcoholic mother, the cheating spouse, the abusive boy friend, the violent neighborhood. Even my well-adjusted friend suffered the creative blight of parents who nurtured him selflessly. If only his father had walked out on his mother, maybe he’d have something to write about!

As writers we are drawn naturally to write toward these wounds. The heat of that which has not healed burns so strong it can drive a story on its fire alone. Oh, the power of injustice! We will march in the streets of our imagination so the world will know the truth. Yet even as we are driven to right the wrongs of our past on the page, we may find ourselves complaining of other people, the agents who won’t respond, the moronic readership that does not recognize our talent, the narrow-minded contest judges. Our life would be just fine, if only other people would change their ways.

Now is when we must look again at those old wounds. What has ever been done to us that we could not undo? What was severed that we wish to rejoin? The creative spark that drives all writing, all painting, all music and industry and invention—if this spark could speak it would say, “You have never needed anything but me.” If this spark could speak it would say, “There is nothing, no word or knife, that can come between you and me.” If it could speak, it would say, “We are one and the same, and the wound you wish to heal is the belief that we are not.”

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“It’s right there,” I said, and pointed.

Max had only been on the planet about two years, but I could already glean in him the beginnings of a literalist. Glad that his daddy had found his beloved truck, he looked where he believed I was telling him he could find it: at my hand.

“No,” I repeated. “There.” This time I thrust my finger in the direction of the truck, but again, Max continued to stare at my hand, hoping, I suppose, the truck would soon appear in it. I then found myself in the unpredictable position of having to explain how to follow the invisible string from the tip of my finger to that which he desired.

I did not know it at the time, but this was probably my first lesson in the unique challenge of doing what it is I now love to do. If you ask a mathematician what 2 + 2 is, he will give you the answer “4” from his hand to yours. If you ask an engineer to build you a bridge, he will open his hand and from it you may take the blueprints.

My job, as both a writer and a teacher, is to point. That is all I can do. If I wrote a poem about the moon, you could stare at that poem your whole life and the moon would never emerge from between its words. But if the poem’s trajectory is accurate, you might follow it and discover the moon in the night sky of your imagination.

Likewise, the answers to the questions I am asked when I teach lie beyond my reach. Yet I can see them just the same. Some days I point more accurately than others, but no matter. Max, after all, would have eventually found the truck on his own. In this way writing has taught me that words, in fact, are nothing, and yet have the power to collapse the distance from a hand to the moon.

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A writer too must find her story. Whether her story is culled from her own life or is entirely fictional, she must find those core events that suggest the entirety of the world she wishes to share. Always, this finding of the story occurs before the story is complete. She might say she has found her story when she at last understands that her heroine does not actually love the man she claims to love, or when she realizes the victim committed suicide and was not murdered. At such moments, we declare with relief, “I’ve got it! I’ve found the story.”

Or have we? I had one such moment with my last book. I told my wife I had found the story when I understood my memoir was about what my son taught me, not what I taught my son. That understanding brought the entire book into focus, it informed every chapter and scene. And yet unlike an equation, or a lost checkbook that has been recovered, every time I sat down to write my book I had to find the story again.

The story, after all, is not merely a series of events. The story is a flow of language, and, ideally, each word I choose – I find – exists within that story’s flow. In this way, I am continually realigning my attention to my story, finding it and finding it and finding it every moment I spend at my desk, as a tightrope walker must find and find and find his balance from one end of his rope to the other.

And even when I am done with my story, I am not entirely clear on what it is I have found. I can hold a published book in my hand, but that book has no more to do with what I sought than does a marriage license my wife. It is as if the experience of finding the story, of translating what is inside me into words outside of me, has simply brought the story back into me where it is reabsorbed into what I have become in the telling. How strange to feel complete even as another story brews, another story I must tell to find what I already am.

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This was not quite Donald’s opinion of assignments. For him they were a comfortable starting place. He had toyed with writing simply his own work, but in the end this approach did not appeal to him. He enjoyed the perimeters of ghost writing, which allowed him to focus in a way working from his wide open imagination could not.

As a young man I would have dismissed Donald as “uncreative.” To me, this would not have been an insult so much as a statement of fact: if he were creative, he wouldn’t need an assignment. But it did not take long to recognize in Donald something it would take me years to learn. One of the advantages of an assignment is there is no pressure to “come up with an idea.” Donald’s only job is to execute to the best of his ability what he has been asked to produce. If he does this, he is successful, regardless of sales and so on.

The pressure to “come up with ideas” often haunted me. How does one know which is worth pursuing? Such was my thinking before I understood that I too must work on assignment. The only difference between Donald and me is the source of that assignment. For Donald, it comes from other people. It is not so clear where my assignments come from, but they don’t come from me, the little me who actually writes the books and essays and makes the videos and so on.

I am much happier now that I have accepted that I am on assignment. It is the most honest view of my creative relationship with life, and also the least stressful. Donald often publishes under pseudonyms (Jessica Fletcher, for instance), and while my name appears on book jackets, I too must – in my heart – relinquish full authorial credit. Until I do so, the assignments are withheld, though not from vengeance. If I say I can do it all myself, Life believes me. Accepting that I cannot creates the space where stories are born.

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There was a time I might have flinched at the use of such a word, as one might when surprised by a powerfully bright light. When an artist describes his work this way, I believed, the fall that follows hubris is likely close behind. This was before I understood the humility necessary to see the transcendent, before I understood that transcendence is in fact the ultimate expression of humility.

No artist truly chooses his or her art. The art form calls to the artist, and the artist chooses to follow or not. The calling speaks in the artist’s capacity to recognize the potential to translate the divine into words or pictures or dance or song. The clarity of the translation determines the ease with which this divinity can be perceived by and shared with others. This is the artist’s job.

Do not think, however, that divinity is such a rare thing. Do not mistake it for some buried treasure you alone have unearthed. Divinity is the most common substance, if you will, in life. It is everywhere all the time. What’s more, you, the artist, cannot create the divine for it already exists. Humility allows you to see what is already there, what exists without you, and then to do the job you were meant to do, which is to translate it for yourself and for others.

Sendak’s work is done now, but yours continues. You may make art or you may not; it really doesn’t matter. As Sendak observed, “Your life is your work.” Because what calls to be translated is with you at all times, the opportunity and means to do so are everlasting and infinitely varied. You can translate it at the bank, in the bedroom, at the dinner table, or even where the wild things are.

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How can you discuss this without simply sounding like a prude? Because, of course, performers in pornographic movies are having sex, with this the filmmakers leave no ambiguity whatsoever. Plus, there is an appeal to pornography that goes beyond mere lust and voyeurism, an appeal that can insinuate itself into any corner of our lives, that will probably follow us, limping, all the way to our graves.

“Here’s the thing,” I finally said. “The lie of porn is that you can have sex without a relationship and enjoy it. Whether you like or not, the whole person is there. You may only want their body, but they still have a heart and soul, and the only way to ignore their heart and soul is to ignore your own, which is where all our pain begins.”

I don’t know if my boys heard me, but I was glad to have said it. I am always teaching myself, after all. How much simpler and ordered life can appear without this independently beating heart pulling me from the straight course I’ve drawn in the sand. Oh, to be the king of my world, my great and mighty mind following life to its logical and satisfying conclusion. Emperor Bill will decide his life from his Throne of Reason, a throne where porn is the truth, for the pleasure of sex is there to compel us to make babies and nothing else.

My heart has been my most stubborn and loyal companion. That he returns to me again and again after how I have ignored him, after how I have mocked and laughed at him as any good intellectual must, is the miracle of his compassion and patience. The greatest lie Emperor Bill ever told was that life was simpler from his throne. Just the opposite, in fact. Ruling the world is infinitely complicated, everything always changing and everyone different. Simpler, instead, to learn to say Yes to Love which knows what you cannot yet see.

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The first half of the paragraph came very quickly. I knew we had driven to the parking lot, I knew we had seen the girls laughing and smoking, and I knew that I had been drawn to such girls as a teenager. What I did not know was why I had been drawn to them. Because the first three sentences had come so quickly, I continued to write at the same pace, assuming the first answer to come would be the right one. The result made me sound lascivious, which I knew I was not. The second try sounded flip.

It was at this point that I understood that the true answer to why these girls had interested me lay deeper beneath the surface than I had first anticipated. That is, I could still feel why they had interested me, but I had to admit that I could not see why they had interested me, and until I could see the answer to this question, I could not write it. This is the point, in the past, where panic might have set in. I might have attributed my failed attempts to lack of skill, or shallowness. I might have forgotten that sometimes the writer’s job is not to entertain or enlighten but to learn.

It is odd to think we are learning what we already know. That is, feeling why I had been interested in these girls is a kind of knowledge, but it is not the same knowledge as seeing. In this way, all writing, and all learning too, is articulated remembering. The feelings point the way for our consciousness, and in following we are guided to what we have both feared and desired—ourselves before our story was told.

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And yet, when I sat down to write that novel, when I said to myself, “Experimentation is over. I must now succeed at this and make money at this,” my relationship to my writing changed. Everything about it became immediately harder. I felt as if I had forgotten how to tell a story, something I had been doing effortlessly my entire life. My writer’s voice, which I had been working deliberately to loosen since I was thirteen, constricted. Even my sentence-to-sentence craft devolved. I wrote everyday with determination and dedication, but very little joy.

The problem, I thought, were all those words on the page. If I could find the right words and put them in the right order then I would have the success I absolutely required. Yet this idea of finding the right words and putting them in the right order felt increasingly like trying to hit a moving target: what seemed like the right words one day did not the next. Writing had become a descent into a hall of mirrors, which instead of leaving I was merely building and building and building.

I suppose this is why I am so skittish when it comes to talk of craft. Though my work did not always reflect it, when I sat down to write my first novel I had all the technical ability a writer would need to tell a story he wanted to tell. All that time spent staring at words would have been far better spent waiting for a story I wanted to tell to arrive.

In this way I have learned that a writer needs patience more than intelligence, wit, or craft. A writer must have the patience to do nothing, to quiet himself and release the noise of the day so he might hear what is already speaking within him. Tricky that, since this is a voice no one else can hear – unless, of course, we choose to speak it.

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So we went, driving past the music store and down into a vast, chain-link fenced wasteland of a parking lot surrounding the Gene Juarez Hair Salon Academy. We parked by a crowd of young women smoking cigarettes and laughing. When I was a teenager I was drawn to girls with black, black hair who wore a bit too much makeup and very tight pants. There was no subtlety in their fashion sense, and I appreciated this. Life seemed to be accelerating in its capacity for complication, and I hoped their company could slow this down. When I would see one, I was frequently overcome with urgency. “Go to her now, Bill,” I would hear. “What if she is the answer?”

As Sawyer and I left the car and began our search for the Japanese hobby store, it seemed as if we had stumbled upon a beehive of girls with midnight black hair, too much makeup, and tight pants. Winding our way out of the parking lot and then up the street toward the mini-mall behind the Academy, another and then another and another emerged from a car or appeared from a doorway.

Sawyer did not notice the swarm of future-beauticians. He was looking for the hobby store, and with every step he took desperation that he would not find it began to grow in him. Arriving at the mini-mall he became frantic. “It used to be here! I know it was here!”

Then we passed a small urban clothing store and Sawyer stopped. “I think it used to be there.” His voice choked. “I remember that counter.” I ducked inside and the clerk confirmed what Sawyer feared. I stepped outside and broke the news.

“No!” Sawyer howled. I led him to a bench and sat next to him while he wept. “It’s ruined,” he cried. “Everything’s ruined. All my happiness is gone!”

All the things I thought to say at that moment I had the good sense not to. I waited and he eventually wiped his face dry and suggested we visit a different store. We walked together back to our car, all his desperation drained out of him now, weaving our way through beautician after beautician. Always the writer, I was still thinking about what I might have said on that bench, wondering if I could ever answer my son’s questions as articulately as life just had.

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I obeyed. I am not such a humble guy that self-promotion is anathema to my everyday thinking, but if you had asked me what I thought about marketing before I formally took on this task of own-trumpet-blowing, I would have said I am writer, not a salesman. That’s why I have an agent. If you had asked me about platforms and, God help me, branding I would have pointed out that I am writer, not a ketchup company.

But something began to emerge as I bullet-pointed my way through Author and this column and now Author2Author. I did not start Author, nor this blog, because I wanted a platform. I started Author because I wanted something do, and I wrote this column because almost accidentally I discovered it was the perfect means to share what interested me most with other people. Likewise public speaking and Author2Author: they seemed like natural outlets for what I enjoy doing.

And yet it appears I have created what amounts to a platform. Stranger still, a brand. Yes, a brand. Well, it’s a motto really: Do what you love and fear nothing. I didn’t mean for that to be my motto, my brand, but I seem to keep saying it. Plus, I like this brand. You could etch it on my tombstone.

But it’s a simple brand, isn’t it? Not terribly original, either. So many have said it before me. Yet why couldn’t I remember hearing it so much until now? Why did it seem that the world offered me echoes when I wanted a symphony? How strange to be greeted by silence from a world of noise, as if I had managed to find the one space in life in need of my voice.

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