Enough

The first time I got paid a lot money to write was for an essay about eating an oyster. I was picky as a young man, you see, and so slipping that slimy, salty little mollusk over my tongue was a kind of leap of faith for me. Still, it was just a story about eating an oyster. My life wasn’t in jeopardy; I hadn’t won an award or watched the birth of my child. From a certain perspective, you might say nothing happened. But that wasn’t my perspective, and that’s why I wrote the piece.

It's not uncommon for a new writer to review their life and conclude that nothing they did was worthy of a story. Nothing was important enough or surprising enough or shocking enough. Sometimes it seems like stuff that could have happened to anyone more or less – the marriage, the children, the job, the divorce, the new job. They’re not wrong, of course. So many of our lives resemble one another. Why bother telling a story if it’s one the reader has already lived themselves?

Other writers feel that their story simply must be told. They feel that their marriage, or their experience raising children, or their divorce is a kind of warning bell for others of what life is really like. Strangely, these men and women have trouble seeing what is actually valuable about their story, having for forgotten, somehow, that they were not the first person to ever watch their children move away to college, or put a parent in memory care. They believe that what happened is the point.

What happens is never the point, which is why we can write about anything. For the artist, all that matters is how we see the world. After all, no one will ever be able to see the world through your eyes, just as no one has ever loved exactly who you’ve loved or lost what you’ve lost. If you can write about a divorce from your unique voice, the reader will feel something new in it because they will never have seen it from exactly that perspective. What a gift. In this way we remind ourselves and those with whom we share our stories that everything matters, everything is important, and everything is enough.

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