 | Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write with Confidence is an exceptional guide to working with common writing fears. “If you want to write fearlessly,” Kenower says, “you must write what you love. You must write the story you are most interested in, most curious about, and most excited by. You will never write better, not with more authority and originality and power, then when you are writing what you most want to write, in the way you most want to write it.” The author boils most writing fears down to one misbelief: “What other people think of what I write is more important than what I think of what I think of what I write.” |
Kenower promises this: “You will find your confidence and begin to write fearlessly the moment you stop caring about what anyone else thinks.”
(The book includes a four-page guide on incorporating feedback from critique groups in chapter 6).
(The book includes a four-page guide on incorporating feedback from critique groups in chapter 6).
 | Releasing the inner critic constantly asking What will people think? frees us to indulge what Kenower calls our creative Flow. This Flow is that ecstatic state where the ideas and words flow freely and we lose track of time, fully immersed in the story. Kenower devotes an entire chapter to entering this state of Flow and references it throughout the book. Staying in the moment and trusting the process were the key take-aways for me. He says, “The Flow is available to you every time you sit down to write. It is waiting for you.” He advises writers to consider our writing sessions as “practice for getting in the Flow, using as your target your writer’s memory of what it feels like to be in that state.” |
Fearless Writing also contains insightful craft tips:
- By showing, we allow readers to use their powerful imaginations to bring the story to life
- The key to showing is detail.
- Writing…is a search for the effortless path.
- The only two questions a writer should ask are: “What do I want to say?” and “have I said it?”
- Writers write about how it feels to be human.
- Learning to listen to your curiosity and your imagination…takes practice.
- Writers must make peace with the fact that we cannot control who will like our work.
- You must define success for yourself.
I can’t recommend Fearless Writing enough. Encouraging, practical, and inspiring, it has profoundly reshaped my relationship to fear.
“The moment you surrender to the Flow, the moment you are lost in the story you’re telling, you’re trusting in the creative impulse of love, which knows no fear. The only question now is how much of your day you will devote to the thing you have spent your life looking for.”
“The moment you surrender to the Flow, the moment you are lost in the story you’re telling, you’re trusting in the creative impulse of love, which knows no fear. The only question now is how much of your day you will devote to the thing you have spent your life looking for.”
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