Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower

We need our readers to fill in what we leave out; it’s what really finishes a story. This means we have to trust them, even though sometimes they don’t make the connections we hope.

As Beethoven no doubt knew – there’s nothing better than joy, and creativity teaches us again and again it’s always inside of us, never outside of us.

The time I learned why being an author is so valuable, and how we can use this authority to allow people to believe the stories they actually want to believe.

A true story about how physical pain and suffering taught me a lot about all suffering. If I’m honest, most of it wasn’t real, wasn’t necessary.

If you’re like me, you prefer to be alone while you write. But you’re also never lonely, at least not when it’s going well. That’s because loneliness is feeling disconnected from that to which you always want connection. Writing is one way to practice that connection.

Just like you can’t know every sentence in a paragraph before you write it, so too you can’t know how your career or life will unfold. As creative people, we must be more interested in what interests us most, and less on how we will sell it, publish it, or monetize it.

Sometimes editing is hard because all those passages we reread and don’t like remind us of the parts of our life that seem to have happened to us but we know on some level we created ourselves. Writing is a chance to practice making choices on purpose, to choose what we actually want, to always be the author of our lives.

Every story has three arcs: The Physical, The Emotional, and The Intentional. The last is the most important – why you’re telling the story, the gift you’re giving the reader. Until you know it, you don’t know what the story is really about.

It’s easy for writers to put all their attention on results – the finished book, the contract, the sales – and start believing that the experience of writing, what we’re actually doing, doesn’t really matter. Not only does your experience matter, it’s the only thing that matters.

Writing can be like a performance since we never really know what’s going to happen when sit down at the desk. We must trust we’ll know what to write when our attention meets the story, when we’re actually present with our creative desire.