The Inner Connection

My favorite piece of concrete craft advice I share with students and clients is that your reader really doesn’t care what happens in your story, they only care what it feels like when something happens. I’ve always held this truth in mind as I write, but recently I’ve been thinking about it when I’m not working.

I’m a man or the world, after all. I must leave my desk and travel here and there, talking as I do to strangers and friends I meet. Sometimes we share troubling news of goings-on in near and distant places, or memories of happy times, or advice gathered from our separate journeys. We tell each other about our careers, our families, ambitions, disappointments and dreams, about the stuff we buy and sell, plant and grow, build and destroy. On and on. The world is a wide and infinitely varied place, and we’re all in it all the time.

There are times, however, when it seems my inner realm is the very thing that keeps me at an unknowable distance from another, existing as it does beyond the reach of the five senses. I feel alone with my suffering or joy, and I find myself noticing what this one writes or reads, what car that one drives, or how this other one votes. I fret over these differences, seeing them as barriers between me and every living soul. I become pessimistic and argumentative, and wonder why I should bother trying to share anything with anyone.

When I feel alone like this and as if no one understands me, it’s because my attention has drifted afield. What connects me to someone is the same thing that connects a reader to a story. Happiness and despair, excitement and boredom, curiosity and disinterest live equally and unendingly in everyone as the sun lights every day. I simply need to return to the sovereign, creative inner world from which my stories come. That’s who and what I am. Lose myself and it’s impossible find to anyone. Remember, and there is the portal through which we all pass to reach one another.

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