Hard to Believe

I was at a writer’s conference last week where I had the pleasure often listening to a lot of great Key Note speakers, including Jacquelyn Mitchard. The bestselling author of The Deep End of the Ocean and eleven other novels was funny and wise and also adamant on this point: if you think writing isn’t hard, she doesn’t want to hear from you. She said writing is always hard for her, even on a sentence level. Always has been. She’s suspicious of and irritated by people who claim otherwise.

I’m one of those people, but I honestly don’t know if she and I would actually disagree about writing’s inherent challenge. For instance, I’m working on a collection of stories at the moment, some of which I’d written while contributing weekly to a website called The Good Men Project. These were composed quickly, so there was some tidying up to be done – especially the endings. I like them to land a certain way, and one of them in particular just wasn’t. The body of the story itself was fine, but I rewrote that final paragraph four times and still, I had to admit, it wasn’t right.

I understand why someone would call this hard. Something easy comes quickly and requires no effort. When a puzzle is easy, you solve it without thinking, without doubting, without staring at it and wondering if there even is an answer. It’s uncomfortable, this not knowing. It’s like you’ve arrived for a test for which you’re unprepared. In this way, by this definition, yes, writing is hard. There’s just an awful lot of not knowing – even, as Mitchard insisted, on a sentence level.

Except this is also what I signed up for when I chose writing. Not something hard; I don’t like hard. But not knowing, and then, eventually, discovering. By and by, I found the ending to that story. As is always the case when it takes a while, I felt relieved. I finally let myself look at it differently, from an angle to which I’d been resistant – and there it was. So obvious. So clean and simple. Just what I wanted. It’s nice when things come quickly, as if I’m taking the proverbial dictation, but those moments of earned discovery are immensely gratifying. Not because I feel like I’ve overcome something, or proved something, but as a reminder that something in me always knows everything that means anything. Yes, this is sometimes hard to believe, but it’s true just the same.

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