What Feeds You

I’ve never taught a Fearless Writing class where the issue of time didn’t come up for at least one, and usually close to half the students. Everybody’s busy. Everyone has jobs, or children or aging parents to care for, or houses that need repairing, or guests that are coming to visit. It never ends. All that stuff that keeps us busy requires our time, and we seem to only have so much of that. Maybe we skip writing one day and free up a little of that precious commodity. There’s one less thing we have to do.

Except, unless you’re under contract, you never really have to write. Not for the standard, roof-over-the-head, food-in-the-cupboard reasons. Nothing really happens if you don’t. Maybe you’ll feel bad because you think it means you’re lazy or uncreative or undisciplined. Perhaps the threat of acquiring one of these unattractive labels is enough to get you back to the desk. It’s not. It might force you to return to your story for one or two days, but fear, in the end, is an unreliable motivator.

There’s only one real motivation. Once you’ve written with any regularity and enjoyed it, once you’ve experienced the mysterious bliss of falling down the creative rabbit hole, there’s no going back to a life without it. It doesn’t matter if you’re getting paid or not, whether anyone’s reading your stuff or not, there’s no relief to be had by denying yourself what you gain by sitting alone and focusing on what you care about most. Now you’re connected to what really feeds you, to what gives you a life worth living.

And when you’re being fed in this way, one of the first things that happens is you lose track of is time. How gloriously freeing to be rid of the relentless, tick-tock of adulthood, all of which is tied to a schedule, to what needs doing. To find the time in your busy life, you’ll have to accept that this feeling, this flow state, matters to you for reasons you can’t really explain to most people. It matters even though you don’t know where it’s going, or what it will bring you. All you know for sure is how you feel while you’re doing it, which, if you’re honest, is all that has ever mattered to you.

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