Shows / Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Weekly inspiration and advice on writing and creativity from the author of Fearless Writing and Everyone Has What It Takes.
Episodes
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
What Writing Taught Me About Being With Other People
Send us Fan Mail Just as we can’t worry what people think of our stuff while we’re writing, so too the best way to be with others in social situations is to…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
The Best Writing Strategy
Send us Fan Mail Very simple: show up, be curious, be interested, be open, and the details necessary to tell your story will come to you. Do your job and let…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Embrace Your Uniqueness And Others Will Too
Send us Fan Mail It’s not anyone else job to accept what is unique about you or your work. That’s your job. Once you have, however, others will have to agree…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Give It Away
Send us Fan Mail Our readers' lives and preferences influence how they receive our story. We can’t control that. So, we must give it away, metaphorically, and…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Success As A Measure Of Interest
Send us Fan Mail If we’re not sincerely, authentically, personally interested in what we’re writing, we won’t succeed. As creative people, we must constantly…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Forgive Your Mistakes
Send us Fan Mail The only way to learn is from experience, and everyone has to experience something to learn not to do it. As creative people, we will make…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
The Meaning Is Always In You
Send us Fan Mail The page is blank. You may be writing about the world you’ve experienced, but the meaning you find for your stories always starts in you –…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Trust What Comes Easily
Send us Fan Mail Artists can start believing too much in struggle and in what they find difficult. However, what comes most easily to us is usually the…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Inviting Inspiration
Send us Fan Mail Writing requires inspired ideas. But we can’t demand them, can’t use our craft to manufacture them. But we can practice putting ourselves into…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Find Your Intellectual Family
Send us Fan Mail As Richard Bach pointed out: writers aren’t looking for an editor or a publisher, but a member of their intellectual family. They’re out…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Trust Your Reader
Send us Fan Mail 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…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Nothing Better Than Joy
Send us Fan Mail 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…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
The Real Value of Being an Author
Send us Fan Mail 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…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
When Our Pain Isn’t Real
Send us Fan Mail 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…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Writing As A Cure for Loneliness
Send us Fan Mail 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…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
When The Best Plan Is No Plan
Send us Fan Mail 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…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
You’re the Author of Your Life
Send us Fan Mail 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…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
The Intentional Arc
Send us Fan Mail Every story has three arcs: The Physical, The Emotional, and The Intentional. The last is the most important – why you’re telling the story…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Experience, Not Results
Send us Fan Mail It’s easy for writers to put all their attention on results – the finished book, the contract, the sales – and start believing that the…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Writing and Stage Fright
Send us Fan Mail 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…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Why Do We Write?
Send us Fan Mail It’s not for the money, though that’s always nice. And it’s not for the recognition or praise. No, it’s always so we can receive what we want…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
The Hard Part: Rewriting
Send us Fan Mail This one of the most common hard parts for writers is taking that messy first draft and turning into something we’d actually like to share…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Finding Your Voice
Send us Fan Mail Our voice is not an expression of some discovered style, or of talent, or intelligence, but rather our unique interest. Let your work express…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
The Importance Of Small Successes
Send us Fan Mail The big successes – the completed book, the published novel, the good sales – are always an accumulation of little successes. Yet writers…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Finding Your Readers
Send us Fan Mail Sometimes writers feel like beggars asking for handouts as they submit their work. But we’re not. We’re not asking for anything, we’re giving…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Getting Out of Your Own Way
Send us Fan Mail Whether you use this language or not, you know what it feels like when you get out of your own way. But how do we do that? The key is getting…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Failure And The Blank Page
Send us Fan Mail Sometimes sitting down and having no ideas, no inspiration, can feel like the kind of nothingness we picture when we imagine failure. Except…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Writing As Self-Acceptance
Send us Fan Mail All rejection starts at home. First, the writer rejects herself by worrying what someone will think of her work, then the public rejects the…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
How To Follow Your Story
Send us Fan Mail A listener wanted to know how to get her story to “settle down” so she could tell it. The real discipline of writing is learning how to tell…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
The Success Already Within You
Send us Fan Mail Just like your stories are within you as they’re being written, so too the success you so desire. Don’t look for it in the world around you…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Finding Time To Write
Send us Fan Mail Can’t find the time to write? Your life too busy, what with the job and the kids and just being tired at the end of the day? The question…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Focus on Success, Never on Failure
Send us Fan Mail In which I answer a question from a listener who wants to follow his muse but sees so much failure around him. Does it really work. What if it…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Writing As A Cure For Boredom
Send us Fan Mail If you’re ever feeling uninterested in life or yourself or your work, remember you’re just looking in the wrong place for what you want.
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
What Falling In Love Taught Me About Writing
Send us Fan Mail The story of how I reconnected with the woman is who is now my wife is also the story about how I learned where all stories come from…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Emotional Mastery
Send us Fan Mail It’s not enough to learn our craft, we also have to practice emotional mastery – finding our inherent confidence every single time we sit down…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Know Your Job
Send us Fan Mail The biggest difference between most beginning and more seasoned writers, is the experienced author understands how little they actually need…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Your Jealousy Is Dishonest
Send us Fan Mail You may see the success other people have had, and think you want it – but you don’t. You’ve only ever wanted your success, the same as you’ve…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Your Interest Is Enough
Send us Fan Mail You don’t really need to know how to do it, or where to go, or what should come next. All you really need to know is that you’re interested –…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
The Scary Power of the Imagination
Send us Fan Mail A true story of how my imagination invented a nightmare and just a quickly dispelled it. A reminder to only pay attention to what inspires and…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Your Passion is Practical
Send us Fan Mail Doing what love is always the most practical choice, even if you don’t know where you’re going or how you’ll succeed. Forcing anything is…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
That's Entertainment
Send us Fan Mail Entertaining our readers is not about spoon-feeding “what they want,” but offering them what we value, what we want to share, in a way that…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
No Excuses
Send us Fan Mail When we make an excuse for why we don’t have the time to write or why can’t get published, we’re describing a reality we don’t want to live…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Stay Humble
Send us Fan Mail Humility isn’t saying you’re not a good writer, or that someone is better than you. It’s about learning how to be grateful for what provides…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
How You Feel Is The Only Result That Matters
Send us Fan Mail Care about how you feel while you write. You always want to feel good and you never want to feel bad. Thinking some result out in the future…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
The Intentional Arc
Send us Fan Mail Every story has three arcs: the Physical Arc, the Emotional Arc, and the Intentional Arc. The Intentional, why the story is being told, is the…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Your Unique Aesthetic
Send us Fan Mail We spend our lives trying to satisfy it, in the books we read and the books we write. The only reason you don’t like something you’ve written…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Writing is Listening
Send us Fan Mail It’s not thinking. Our job is to have questions we’re interested in, ask them of our imagination, and then trust that the answer will come.
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Why Praise Is Addictive
Send us Fan Mail Writing and sharing our work can be as normal as breathing. Unless, that is, we hold breath as we wonder if other people will like it.
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
There Is Only One Right Answer.
Send us Fan Mail This isn’t school. This isn’t a math class. When you write fearlessly, there’s only one correct answer, and only you will ever know it.
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Why Words Matter.
Send us Fan Mail As writers we have to care as much about the words we use when we describe our own life and experiences, as we do when we describe a scene in…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Accepting Rejection
Send us Fan Mail Rejection, saying no to something, is a part of the creative process, not just what happens sometimes when people don’t like our stuff.
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Fearless Marketing Pt 1: Remember Why You Love Your Book
Send us Fan Mail You can’t read anyone’s mind, you can’t make anyone buy anything – and you don’t have to. Just share what is so awesome about your story.
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
The Only Two Questions a Writer Should Ask.
Send us Fan Mail Writing is all about questions. We ask them, and something else answers. Ask the wrong question, and we’ll only get into trouble.
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
End Procrastination Pt. 2: Getting in the mood.
Send us Fan Mail It’s rare to be in the mood when you start. Your first and most important job is to get into that relaxed, curious, receptive state of mind…
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
Ending Procrastination Pt. 1: The Inner Critic.
Send us Fan Mail The inner critic isn’t going to help you. He or she is only the voice of fear.
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
What Is Fear?
Send us Fan Mail When we can learn to see fear as guidance, we can use the experience to help us stay in the moment, where all stories are actually told.
- Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower
There's No Such Thing as Good Writing, Part 2.
Send us Fan Mail There’s no book or author you have to read. You find what you need to read just like you’ll find the story you’re meant to tell.
Fearless Writing with Bill KenowerThere's No Such Thing as Good Writing, Part 1.
Send us Fan Mail Bill debunks this very believable myth that actually interferes with us doing our best work.
Fearless Writing with Bill KenowerYou Don't Actually Care What Anyone Thinks of Your Stuff
Send us Fan Mail I know you think you do. We all think we do. But we don't.
Fearless Writing with Bill KenowerA Writer's Worst Fear
Send us Fan Mail Bill introduces the one fear that haunts writers of all experience levels. It’s not failure or bad reviews, but we face it every single time…