The Gift

I was talking to a writer friend recently who asked what I was working on, as we do. “I finished a memoir and am in the middle of another one,” I explained. “They’re a little different than the self-help stuff I’ve been doing, but I love them.”

“Well,” she said, “memoir is hard to sell.”

To which I replied, “Blah, blah, blah, I don’t care. It’s what I’m writing, and what I want to write, so I can’t think about any of that.”

She laughed and told me that was a good perspective. She’d been through the publishing wringer plenty and had the scars to prove it and had developed an understandably pragmatic relationship to what we call “the market.” I am increasingly skeptical that such a thing even exists. I was reminded of an interview I’d seen with a man who’d been a record executive in the 80’s and 90’s. He recalled being absolutely baffled by the popularity of bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, what would come to be called Grunge.

“I didn’t get it,” he said. “Everyone was listening to the metal bands, with the big hair and power chords and crazy outfits. That’s what was selling. Suddenly they were loving this stuff. It didn’t make any sense.”

It never does, at least not in any predictable, mathematical way. It occurred to me a few days after talking to my friend that I’d misspoken slightly. I don’t want to sell a memoir; I want to sell a feeling for which a memoir is the best vehicle. In a way, I don’t care about the stories or what happened to me or even what I learned; I care about how I felt while I wrote them and how the audience will feel when they read them. Everything else is just an attractive box for the real gift.

I get becoming distracted by the packaging. It’s what we all see, what’s on the cover, where the book is shelved, how it’s described in blurbs. Yet it’s weirdly insubstantial. Whether I’m reading or writing, everything about a story quickly fades except the feeling conveyed by it. That lives on and, I think, continues to evolve in me, growing and blooming with seeds for new stories.

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