Creative Nature

It’s a new year. If we’re honest, it will be a lot like the last year. Such is the cyclical nature of our lives. Plus, if you’re like me, you have your routines, and perhaps you’re glad they don’t have to change, that you can get up at the same time every morning with the same mug of coffee and sit at the same desk before a page and wait as you always do until something interesting comes. I like what I like, and the routines I’ve cultivated have grown around these pleasures.

Of course, what I like most is making things and talking to people about making things. It’s no fun making something you’ve made before. Sometimes it seems like it could be. I like having my hands in the clay, after all; what does it really matter what shape that clay takes? I make pizza every Sunday, the same as I made it the week before, and it’s delicious every time. I know because my tongue tells me so. Why is this so different? Why this relentless desire for something new?

It seems to be in our nature, though I think ours is different than what turns from winter to spring every year outside my window. That’s the world we lay our hands and eyes upon, and it’s reliably beautiful and terrible and boring and surprising. There’s a lot to be fascinated and afraid of out there. But it’s not really where I live. Writing has taught me I dwell within myself, in a realm known only to me. Like you, I am here to express what comes to me in that quiet and alive and gentle and electric place – and nothing is ever the same there from one moment to the next. Never. It is a river flowing.

I don’t so much want something new as wish to be in harmony with that river, since it’s what I am. There’s only tension in resisting it. Resist it I do, fearing what might come next, as if I could be swept to some lonely and terrible shore. Except the only loneliness I’ve known is when I’ve tried to create without the flow. What a relief to fall back into it, accepting the current’s direction, the same as I wake to wonder what the new year will bring.

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