Believing is Seeing

If you don’t consider yourself the gullible type, you might like to say that, “Seeing is believing.” Or maybe you were gullible once, and now you’ve learned your lesson. Either way, you’re not going to believe it until you see it. Other people predict and promise all kinds of things, and you’re tired of the hope you invested in these wishes and theories only to be disappointed. Until you’ve held it in your hands, until you’ve seen it with your own eyes, what could be is nothing but a lot of talk. You only care about what actually is.

I don’t blame anyone for feeling this way. After all, people can believe all kinds of things – that the earth is flat, that the moon landing was faked, that the election was rigged. They’ve got all the evidence in their head, and if you ask them, you’ll get to hear about it. Then again, people also believe things like only the lucky succeed, or life isn’t fair, or people will always let you down. In these cases, believing is seeing, because if you think, for instance, that the world is an unjust place, you’ll see injustice everywhere you look. You’re not making it up. There it is, and there it is, and there it is again. You don’t like it, but apparently that’s reality.

Of course, if you’re an artist, you’re in the business of inventing realities. Everything you make didn’t exist until you believed in it long enough to write or draw or compose it. No one else could hold it in their hand or hear it with their own ears. The story or song was real to exactly one person – you – and sometimes not even that. Sometimes you doubted it would ever come to be, that it was nothing but a moon landing of a dream, another thing to disappoint you. It was just in your head, after all. Were you just being gullible once again?

This is the real discipline of writing. The world will never get to see anything you dream until you’ve believed in it day after day, believed in it even though your only evidence that it was really interesting or really cool or really funny was how you felt when you were writing it. Don’t tell yourself that your joy and excitement and interest are all make believe. In fact, once you’ve finally made something and shared it, and other people can see it and hold it, and some of them even said, “Wow, this great!” you may start believing that the only thing real is what you love.

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