Joining The River

If you’re like me, you love getting into the Flow. There’s nothing better, really, and the truth is that the fact that that’s when you write your best stuff is just gravy. It’s really good gravy, and if you’re a writer you always want to write your best stuff – but that’s not why you actually love being in Flow. You love being in it because of how good it feels. It’s always good to feel good, and when you feel good you probably don’t bother wondering why. Leave that to the philosophers.

I’m one of those philosophers. For the last twenty years or so it’s been my goal to learn how to live the way I write. I’ve not known exactly what this means, other than when I’m writing, particularly when I go deep in Flow, I feel relaxed and alive and quite clear about who I am and why I’m here. I also feel at my most generous, compassionate, and humble. If I don’t get twisted up in needing praise or wondering if other people will like what I’m writing, I always feel as though I’m allowing something valuable to come through me.

And what is coming through me exactly, other than a story? I think it’s life itself. Life is a river of creation always flowing. Everything done and said, everything thought or imagined, every seed planted, every bird that lays an egg, is creative since it’s new and changes the world in some small way. It’s been happening forever and it will never stop. It can’t stop any more than a river being fed from a mountain can stop. And we’re in that river, are a part of that river, whether we know it or not.

I think most times we don’t really know it, which is why writing, and getting in what we call Flow, feels so good. In those moments we’re participating deliberately in what life is, we’re entering it fully, albeit through a poem or historical romance or memoir. Doesn’t matter. We’re creating on purpose, and thereby joining what’s stronger than all our little doubts and plans and fears, joining instead of fighting it and getting to learn where life is taking us.

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