KN Magazine: Articles

Shane McKnight 6/19/26 Shane McKnight 6/19/26

Define What is Sacred to the Characters

One of the most powerful ways to deepen anthropological realism in literature is to determine what your characters consider sacred. If you think about it, the answer to this question is what rules our lives; why should it not guide the characters you write?

When I say sacred, I don’t mean it in the stereotypical religious sense. That may be true, but I’m looking deeper. I’m looking at writers who want to write more deeply into the broader core of an individual, what cannot be casually discarded, what must be protected, and, in the end, what defines each character’s identity.

In anthropology, what a culture considers sacred reveals much: its values, its fears, its loyalties, its memory. In literature, the same holds true for our characters. If you understand what your character protects above all else, you’ll grasp the emotional architecture beneath their choices. You’ll understand what they fight for, what they are willing to sacrifice, and what they refuse to surrender, even in the face of death. Defining what is sacred to a character transforms them from individuals moving through plot points and recognizes them as people shaped by history, place, and belonging.

To me, writing is sacred. When many people, including writers, hear the word sacred, they immediately think of religion. But in anthropological literature, sacredness takes many forms. It may be spiritual, yes, but also cultural, familial, or deeply personal. Some characters might find sacredness in the land, in soil passed down through generations, in farmland that carries memory, or in a mountain range tied to ancestral identity. For others, it may be language, tradition, family recipes, music, rituals, or stories told with friends and family around kitchen tables. Consider the character whose grandfather carved tools by hand and taught that skill to each generation. The tools themselves become sacred, not because of their function or even if they still work, but because of their lineage. They may cease to be used and become wall hangings. No matter, though. Losing them would feel like losing history. Sacredness emerges from such meaning, not doctrine. In spirituality, meaning matters more than the thing itself. If you want to write anthropologically rich literature, start by asking what your characters believe should never be taken lightly, what treasures or traditions, no matter how insignificant, they hold next to their hearts.

Anthropologists study rituals, customs, and artifacts because these elements reveal what people believe matters most. Writers do the same by identifying the sacred structures within a character’s world. In many American communities, independence is sacred. The ability to work one’s own land, run a business, or stand without relying on others becomes more than a choice; it is an identity. In other communities, loyalty to family may be sacred. Decisions are made not for individual advancement but for collective stability. When you define sacred elements, you create cultural depth. Take the two I just mentioned and give them to the same family. That begins to create richness and a wealth of plot possibilities for the characters. By applying these filters, your story begins to reflect not only individual lives but also shared histories. Without sacred values, characters often feel temporary. They are functional. They lack the humanity that drives us all. With sacred values, characters become rooted. That’s when we, as readers, begin to identify with the character.

Once you identify what is sacred to each character, watch how it shapes their behavior. Sacred beliefs do not sit quietly in the background, even when buried in a character’s mind. They direct their actions. A character, like me, holds land as sacred and will resist selling it, even when financial hardship demands it. A character who believes in group honor, as I do, may protect a relative or friend at personal cost. A character, like me, who sees education as sacred might endure humiliation, exhaustion, or poverty to remain in school, perhaps to become the first college graduate in a family’s history. A writer who believes writing is as holy as anything found in any spiritual text, as I do, will write every day and champion writers at every moment. Look at these four things and see what drives me on multiple levels. These drivers are what you need for each of your characters. They will influence everything they do; the choices they make will not be random but predictable, because they emerge from deeply held values that, no matter how one might try to suppress or override them, will never go away. This predictability creates authenticity; it also creates a potential liability that can work against the character or, if someone wishes to take advantage, be used against the character by others. Readers recognize when decisions grow naturally from belief systems rather than from convenience. Sacred beliefs provide the emotional logic that makes characters’ behavior believable. No character is too small for this kind of diagnosis. By concentrating on what is valuable, you create a real world, not simply one of fiction.

One of the most powerful outcomes of sacred belief in storytelling is conflict. Conflict intensifies when the outside world threatens those core values. Imagine a character whose family land is sacred, but a corporation comes along and wants to buy it for a ridiculous amount of money. The conflict is no longer purely financial. It becomes cultural, emotional, and even generational. Or imagine a character whose sacred tradition, perhaps a Native American perspective, rejects what an older generation has protected for decades. Suddenly, the conflict becomes ideological rather than physical. When sacred elements are challenged, the stakes naturally rise. If you portray these characteristics realistically and honestly, you do not need to resort to exaggerated danger. You only need a threat to the value.

Anthropological literature often relies on objects that carry symbolic weight, and you will gain by including them in your story. These objects serve as physical manifestations of belief. They might include a well-worn Bible passed down through generations, a rusted automobile still maintained out of respect, a family photograph preserved through relocation, a handmade quilt stitched from fragments of past clothing that is halfway falling apart, or a set of military medals that might be a hundred and fifty years old, kept in a wooden box. These items are rarely expensive; in fact, they might be considered junk by others. Their value, though, lies in what they represent, which is why they are kept. When objects become sacred to a character, they give the reader something tangible to hold onto and identify with. They become anchors of memory and identity. The beautiful thing about these items is that they tell stories without dialogue or finger-pointing; their existence signifies what is important.

In anthropology, geography shapes identity. The same holds true in stories. Sacred places often define a character’s emotional center: a hometown church, a riverbank where generations have fished, a mountain trail walked since childhood, a family farm or storefront, a neighborhood block preserved in memory. When characters return to sacred places, readers feel the weight of continuity. When those places disappear, readers feel a sense of loss. For these characters, setting becomes more than scenery; it becomes an inheritance, more than the object itself. If you want to write powerful anthropological fiction, don’t ask where your character lives, but what place they consider irreplaceable.

Traditions serve as living bridges between past and present. They remind characters who they are and where they came from, and they give us, as readers, insight into those values. Holiday rituals, family meals prepared in a certain way, community gatherings, songs sung, and repeated stories all set the stage. Traditions create rhythm in storytelling by introducing repetition that reinforces the characters’ identities. When these traditions are broken, narrative tension naturally grows, which is great for the writer. Continuing traditions builds emotional continuity; breaking them creates conflict.

Sacred beliefs are never inserted into character-building haphazardly. They do not appear without explanation. They are learned, inherited, or earned through experience. Every sacred element should have a story behind it. Who taught the character this value? When did the character first recognize its importance? What event or events have reinforced its meaning? Perhaps a grandmother protected the family land during hardship. Perhaps a parent sacrificed their own education so their child could pursue it. Perhaps a historical event shaped a communal identity. Origins of sacredness provide emotional credibility. Without an origin, sacredness feels decorative, calculated. With an origin, grounded in something solid, it feels earned by the reader.

We shouldn’t let characters settle easily into their sacred beliefs. Sacred values that are never challenged remain theoretical and expository. A sacred value that is tested, which is what we want to do within a story, becomes meaningful. That is where anthropological storytelling reaches its fullest potential. As you write, introduce moments when the sacred must be reconsidered. Present situations in which holding on to a belief carries consequences. A character who values independence may face a moment when accepting help becomes necessary for survival, as happened to me once when a truck ran over me and I was paralyzed on my entire right side before rehab. Other characters who value tradition might confront evidence that the tradition is not as pure as they had believed and has instead caused extensive harm that must be addressed. These tests create character transformation. Characters evolve not by abandoning sacred beliefs but by redefining them.

Too many writers believe that high stakes require physical danger, but in honest writing, as in life, it is the little things that count. In life, emotional stakes often prove the greater threat. Threatening what a character holds sacred creates tension in relationships and within the character’s world. No physical confrontation is necessary, only ideological. Think of the weight a character might feel in losing their family home, a cultural practice, a generational legacy, or even the character’s personal identity. These losses carry consequences that resonate deeply with readers. Sacredness beautifully intensifies meaning without requiring spectacle and fireworks. It requires only the twist of emotions.

At the heart of anthropological storytelling is legacy. What characters choose to preserve becomes their contribution to the future. When characters protect what they consider sacred, they participate in cultural continuity. They carry something forward. They pass land to children, teach language to younger generations, preserve stories from the past, and maintain cultural rituals. These acts create narrative depth because they extend beyond a character’s individual lifespan, carrying the past into the future. Legacy transforms characters into stewards of a special generational gift, rather than mere participants, as exemplified by a character trait.

To apply this to your current work-in-progress, choose one character and ask yourself several questions. What does this character refuse to abandon, even under pressure? What would devastate them if it were lost? Who taught them its value? How might this belief or value be challenged during the story? How might it change by the end? Write a short character bio describing the sacred element from the character’s perspective. Don’t focus on the explanation, the why, but rather on the character’s feelings. It’s the feelings that push the character forward, not any logic. Once you define the sacred, you’ll likely discover new directions in your story for conflict, decision-making, and growth, not only in the character holding the value but also in the characters surrounding them.

Writing the sacred creates cultural and storytelling truth. Anthropology in literature is not about presenting facts. It is about conveying meaning and feeling. What people protect reveals who they are. What they mourn shows what mattered to them. What they refuse to surrender shows what shaped them. When you define what is sacred to your characters, your stories gain substance. Characters stop feeling temporary. They stop filling roles and functions. They begin to feel, much like their sacred values, as inherited. When readers recognize the sacred within your story, they often recognize something sacred within themselves. This recognition is what will make your story memorable long after the reader has left your work.

Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.

Shane McKnight 6/12/26 Shane McKnight 6/12/26

The Dream and Its Price

By Clay Stafford

Americana literature is storytelling that captures America’s character through its people, landscapes, struggles, traditions, and shifting dreams. The genre reveals America’s identity through lived experience rather than abstract or academic philosophy. One of the defining threads in Americana literature, as I see it, is the characters’ pursuit of something better. It could be a better life, a better future, or even something internal, a better version of oneself. It seems that, as Americans, we are not easily satisfied, and our desires are forever on the move.

History has cast the pursuit of the American Dream as a measure of success, but that falls short. It’s about a restless spirit. It’s about motion, movement, change, and constant reinvention. It is the belief that tomorrow, and each of us, can be different and better than who or what we are today. It is a belief, ingrained in us as a nation, that our efforts can and will reshape destiny. Yet the success of this does not always follow.

Great American literature does not celebrate the American Dream blindly. Some stories and books have done so, but in its finest sense, literature should portray reality truthfully. I think of The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck), and Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller) as three of my favorites. In order, they examine the Dream as an illusion, the Dream as survival, and the Dream as pressure, by exploring social aspiration, economic hardship, and psychological expectation. The American Dream is not static; it is about motion, movement, change, and reinvention. In its truest literary form, the American Dream contains three inseparable elements: hope, struggle, and disillusionment. These must be portrayed with compassion and truth. If an author writes only of success (which many have), the story feels shallow. If they write only of struggle (which many books do), the story begins to feel hopeless. If they are constructed around disillusionment (which is just depressing), the story feels bitter. The goal is not to avoid these three subjects, but to combine them. When you write about all three (success, struggle, and disillusionment), you provide balance, as hope meets hardship and expectation meets reality. It is then that an author captures something authentically American in words.

Let’s view desire as the embryo of the American Dream. For great characters, it is never vague ambition or passive wishing, but a clear desire, something the character wants badly enough not only to pursue but to fight for. That passion usually centers on the ambition to transform: owning land, starting a business, leaving a hometown, being the first to go to college, rebuilding after loss, achieving recognition, finding dignity, and more. In all cases, the dream must feel personal to the character(s). Each is specific, and each trait is earned. Satisfied readers must understand not only what the character wants but also why it matters. Without meaningful desire, the American Dream becomes an idea rather than an active pursuit. With meaningful desire, the author produces a story that lives on long after the book is closed or the audience has left the theater.

We, as a species, love happy endings, but success alone is not the story. In Americana literature, success is rarely the answer. It may look like the endgame, but in reality, it is only a turning point. It deepens not when it becomes a payoff, but when it asks essential human questions such as what success costs, what was sacrificed, and who was left behind. Success, when written honestly and with emotion, reveals not success but the complexity of the journey. The tale is not in a story’s end but in the becoming. A character builds a successful farm but loses her family relationships along the way. Another character achieves financial stability but discovers emotional emptiness as a byproduct of his reward. A character leaves a world of poverty but, as a result, feels permanently and emptily disconnected from their past. Success in great Americana literature is never about the happy ending; it is about possible success on the character’s terms, with continued conflict stemming from the price the character had to pay to get it. Success does not eliminate conflict; it may even expand it. It is this tension that gives Americana literature its depth.

Conflict runs throughout. It is a constant struggle that defines the American story because getting what one wants is never enough. We are defined not by our achievements but by our struggles and hardships. We live through hard labor, uncertainty, failure, and sometimes misdirected persistence. Whether physical, emotional, financial, or social, struggle grounds our dreams in harsh reality. Some of it is standard craft technique. Without struggle, success in any story feels unearned. Without struggle, without aspiration within it, or even making a big deal of it when it doesn’t seem that difficult to attain, feels hollow. You’ll see this appear in Americana literature as basic American traits: working long hours, facing economic hardship, navigating geographic isolation, encountering prejudice or limitation, starting over after loss. These are not abstract hardships. They are lived experiences that bring authenticity to the writing. They are never romanticized or simplified. They are honest portrayals.

One of the most powerful moments in Americana storytelling happens when the dream clashes with reality. The disillusionment the characters feel is not out of cynicism but a result of clarity. It is the recognition that the dream was either misunderstood or incomplete. A character may achieve what they want but discovers that the achievement of this dream doesn’t bring peace. A family moves in search of opportunity but instead finds loneliness, even if they do gain traction. These moments are transformational because the disillusionment forces the characters to reflect, and that’s the essence of depth. It is the reflection that forces inner growth, the substance of Americana, and it is the growth that creates meaning. Without disillusionment, the American Dream, a concoction of romantic writers and speakers, remains mythology. With disillusionment, the story becomes human. We will never have everything we want. Something will always suffer. The question for the characters is: what is the most important thing to save?

In Americana literature, place matters as much as plot. It is a genre firmly rooted in setting. Most of the time, it is the land itself that carries the narrative weight: fields, roads, factories, towns, mountains, railroads, riverbanks, deserts. I have used all of these places in my own writing. The locations are never mere decoration; they are symbols of identity, of characters shaped by their geography: climate, industry, isolation, hopelessness, but also opportunity. If you want to explore the American Dream effectively, you have to understand how place shapes the possibilities of what the future might hold. Americana is not limited to one region, though. It is America. This is what makes it dynamic. A dream in Appalachia (where my roots are) looks very different from a dream in Chicago, Kansas, or Los Angeles. The point of setting is that geography influences struggle, and those struggles are unique to each area of America. The opportunities afforded by a specific location influence the expectations of those indigenous characters. Landscape will influence the tone. Location is so important because when place becomes part of the narrative, the American Dream is grounded in reality, the reality of those unique characters.

America is a land of contradiction, and Americana literature reflects that, which is why I love it so much. In this land we proclaim as the ultimate location of freedom, we find, in reality, hope and hardship, freedom, yes, but also limitation, opportunity and inequality, tradition and reinvention. Great Americana literature does not resolve these contradictions but rather explores them. Rather than touting a pat slogan, characters realize they are caught between competing truths of pride, regret, belief, doubt, ambition, and belonging. It is these contradictions that create tension, from which the story’s movement arises.

As I’ve alluded to, every dream has its price. This may come in the form of time, energy, relationships, health, or identity, but there is always a price to pay. One of the most powerful ways to deepen Americana storytelling is to explore what characters lose while pursuing what they hoped to gain, whether they achieve it or not. Cost makes achievement meaningful. Without us, as writers, highlighting that cost, the success feels accidental, unearned.

There is no single American Dream. There are immigrant dreams, rural dreams, urban dreams, generational dreams, artistic dreams, economic dreams, family dreams, and personal dreams. You can include several characters in a story, each with their own view of the American Dream. Recognizing this diversity among characters’ dreams creates more complex storylines, richer thematic illustrations, and strengthens the authenticity of family and social dynamics. The main point is that recognizing this diversity among characters’ dreams is what strengthens the story’s realism.

We are a nation still trying to find ourselves and to experiment with life and governance. In many American stories, the past shapes the present. For me, that includes family history, inherited land, generational hardship, and cultural memory. These elements influence how characters (and my family) have understood opportunity and limitation. Real incidents from my life include a farm passed down through generations that now carries more emotional meaning than its market value, a business built by my grandparents is not viewed as a source of income but as a concrete legacy, and the town I grew up in is remembered differently by older and younger generations, creating tension not only between the past and the future but also between the stories my family tells each other as memories. We don’t all see the American Dream, or its absence, in the same way.

One of the most powerful narrative tools in Americana literature is allowing characters to redefine what success means. At the beginning of the story, success might mean wealth, escape, or recognition, but by the end it may mean stability, community, peace, belonging, or acceptance. The goal the character starts with might be replaced by a goal achieved that the character never expected, yet it is what the character needed all along. This transformation creates emotional resonance, and readers will recognize that this kind of growth matters more than achievement itself. This type of character arc reflects the deeper truth of the American Dream, that success is not always what we thought it would be, but if we move toward what we think we want, we find instead what success really means.

To put this into practice, take a character from your work-in-progress. Write two short descriptions. The first describes what your character believes success will look like at the beginning. The second describes what success actually becomes for them at the end. Now compare them. You’ll see the arc, and this will make a much more fascinating story.

Never romanticize the American Dream as so many are ought to do. Romanticizing weakens authenticity because it is built on a lie. It turns struggle into sentiment and softens hardship, turning it into decorative writing. True Americana literature respects difficulty. It acknowledges injustice. It honors persistence without ignoring reality. Write honestly and with empathy, without exaggeration. And remember: the American Dream is not defined by victory alone. More, it is defined by pursuit, effort, uncertainty, and tenacity. Great Americana literature captures this tension, this space between aspiration and reality, between promise and the actual experience. Readers, if portrayed honestly, will see themselves in the characters’ dreams because the American Dream is not a single achievement. It is a journey shaped by hope, struggle, and disillusionment. When you write these things honestly, without simplifying them, you capture something essential not only to America but to the human experience itself.

Shane McKnight 6/5/26 Shane McKnight 6/5/26

Foreshadowing That Pays Off: How to Plant What Matters Without Giving It Away

By Clay Stafford

One of the tell-tale signs of a master storyteller, as opposed to a competent one, is not what is revealed in a story, but when it is revealed—the icing on the cake. Advanced writers understand something newer writers usually do not: the most powerful moments in a story—fiction, nonfiction, play, screenplay, short story, essay—are rarely spontaneous or accidental. They are prepared, positioned, and orchestrated quietly, subtly, maybe invisibly, long before the reader realizes they are coming. This is the art of burying the setup. This isn’t to be confused with unfairly hiding information or withholding facts to confuse, but rather placing something important or meaningful into the story early enough that it feels natural, yet subtle enough that the reader doesn’t recognize its importance until later. Foreshadowing, when done correctly, makes revelations feel inevitable when they come. When poorly done, revelations feel convenient. The difference is always in the setup.

Setting up an upcoming major event or revelation is not an explanation. One of the most common misunderstandings about setup is that it requires explanation. It does not. It simply is. Foreshadowing is not about telling the reader something important or shouting “look here!” It is about showing something ordinary that will later become meaningful. Skilled writers rarely announce significance. They embed it. They certainly don’t call attention to it except in passing: a ring casually placed on a table as action, a name mentioned only once in passing as dialogue, a locked door that nobody questions in suspense, a scar briefly noticed but never discussed in characterization. These are not explanations. They are seeds. And seeds only matter if they later sprout and grow. Looking at it this way, setup and foreshadowing are inevitable; they all lead somewhere. If your setup feels obvious, it probably isn’t buried deep enough. If it feels invisible and passing, you’re probably doing it correctly. Foreshadowing should never attract attention to itself. Only in hindsight will the reader or viewer appreciate that it was there, though they never saw what was coming. Setup is always about playing fair within a calculated structure.

The best setups disguise their importance. From an early age, readers are trained to notice what feels emphasized. In lower school, it’s so they’ll do well on a test. Later in life, it’s because the habit is set. In foreshadowing, if you spotlight something too brightly, readers will recognize it as important immediately. That recognition weakens the power and impact of the later revelation because surprise depends on delayed awareness. The strongest setups are disguised as normal behavior. They look routine, part of the background, an element of storytelling texture. They never come across as plot. For example, a character may always note the time before he leaves wherever he is; a secondary character is locked out of the house and needs to get in; or a child refuses to go into a particular room, not dramatically but as a matter of fact. None of these moments really needs explanation. They are part of the fabric of a story. But later, when time matters, when a lock matters, when a room matters, the earlier setup transforms the revelation and connects the story’s fabric. When this happens, readers experience satisfaction. Looking back, they see that this was coming, that it was inevitable. There is no confusion, no disbelief, no cries that the writer played unfairly; only satisfaction. Why? Because the reader should have seen it coming, and the reader knows it. That’s part of the writer-reader game.

Proper use of foreshadowing requires as much confidence from the writer as attention to structure. Beginning writers fear that readers will miss important information. In foreshadowing, though, that’s the point. Advanced writers trust readers to remember what happens, no matter how insignificant, especially when it feels real and is embedded naturally within the story. You don’t intentionally bury setup by shrinking it, but you do bury it by integrating it naturally into the world of the story. It’s not highlighted, but it is not isolated. It is integrated. A setup should feel like a natural part of the scene, a natural part of fictional life, not part of a structure. If the reader feels manipulated, the foreshadowing failed. It dulls the payoff and satisfaction. If readers feel rewarded, the setup succeeded.

The most believable foreshadowing occurs in moments that already feel natural and necessary. Never insert a setup into a scene that exists only to convey information. Instead, attach the setup to an existing action, character, or environment. For example, instead of writing, “He noticed the gun hidden under the couch,” place the moment within action, such as “He kicked the ball under the couch and crouched to retrieve it. His hand brushed cold metal.” It’s the same information, but the delivery is different. One is direct. The other is the result of a previous setup. One announces; the other embeds. For the seasoned writer, embedding is the goal.

When revelations happen, they should feel like recognition. A powerful revelation does not feel like new information. It feels like a remembered reader experience. That’s a big difference. Readers should experience the moment of revelation not as discovery but as realization. It shouldn’t be “I didn’t know that,” but rather “I should have seen that.” This is part of the writer-reader game. That reaction signals mastery and ties the reader to you (as the author) and the story. What you’ve done signals mastery, and, subconsciously, the reader appreciates it. This creates trust in the reader that they are in the hands of a competent storyteller. Trust creates loyalty, and readers who trust you follow you deeper into your story’s complexity and, maybe just as important, or more, into your next work. You build a base of loyal readers simply by knowing how to set things up.

Use time to your advantage. The longer the distance between the setup and the revelation, the greater the impact, provided the setup holds. Time creates forgetting. Something happens; nothing significant seems to come of it. Later, when the reader has forgotten the foreshadowing, the sudden relevance or reminder creates surprise and satisfaction. Allowing the reader to forget is part of the game. Trust readers. They may consciously forget details, but subconsciously they retain them. That’s why buried setups must feel natural, not forced or isolated. Foreshadowing needs to be present, for sure, but it is always quiet. And if you space it correctly, the distance strengthens the payoff.

I think repetition of the setup is key, and I go for the rule of three. Present the information in three different ways, all subtly. Then, when it pays off, you’ve got a solid setup. Repetition without emphasis strengthens the reader’s memory of the trait, skill, or incident. One appearance is rarely enough. It’s easily forgotten. It can’t draw attention to itself, or you risk ruining the payoff. You reinforce it without drawing attention to it. Maybe a character glances at the same photograph more than once, but for different reasons: admiring it, dusting around it, rearranging the furniture, or packing it along with other items. Or a phrase appears casually in separate scenes, each phrased differently, all subtle. Same with mentioning a location: include it, but pass it by quickly. The crucial craft is to keep the repetition subtle, reinforcing the setup without drawing attention to the deal. The repetition will build subconscious familiarity so that by the time the revelation arrives, the reader will feel that the setup belongs in the story’s fabric. You’ll be praised for your cohesion.

One technique I like to use is to bury foreshadowing in a character’s behavior. Readers rarely question a character’s routine. Routines always feel normal, ordinary, and not worth paying attention to. For example, a character always locks the back door before bed, carries a specific tool everywhere, or refuses to eat a particular food. We’re all creatures of habit, and routines create visibility while also serving as a foreshadowing device. Later, when the routine changes or a revelation becomes necessary, the earlier setups pay off.

Nothing weakens foreshadowing more than explanation. Treat every setup lightly, like a rock skipping across the water. If you explain why something matters, the reader or viewer will immediately recognize its significance, and the payoff’s surprise is ruined. Let it go lightly. Trust implications, suggestions, and yourself. The reader will get it when the punch line comes. Instead of explaining that “He kept the letter because he suspected it might matter later,” say something like “He folded the letter carefully and slid it into his wallet.” Readers and viewers will remember that incident, but when used in passing, it doesn’t create immediate meaning.

Payoff is only as strong as the groundwork laid before it. If the earlier setup cannot support the later revelation, the payoff folds. Readers may not consciously identify the exact flaw, but they will feel the bump in the road, whether misplaced or poorly executed.

I once read a manuscript in which a character used a specific phrase early in the book, nothing unusual, nothing emphasized. The phrase appeared again in a later chapter, still unnoticed. But near the end of the novel, that same phrase revealed the identity of a hidden antagonist. Suddenly, I remembered the earlier moments. I didn’t feel surprised; I felt rewarded. The setup had been buried so naturally that the revelation felt inevitable, and that’s the goal.

Take one revelation from your current work-in-progress. Ask where this setup was. If you can’t pinpoint the exact setup moment, create one, or, in my case, create three (the rule of three). Insert the foreshadowing in earlier chapters or paragraphs so you introduce this element without calling attention to it. Now reread the revelation. Doesn’t it feel inevitable? Simple trick. Great payoff.

Foreshadowing and setups aren’t meant to trick the reader. They’re meant to make the reader feel perceptive, included, trusted, and respected. Exciting story events don’t happen because of surprise alone. They come from preparation. A properly buried setup is the architecture beneath any dramatic revelation. Readers may never notice the structure. In fact, let’s hope they don’t, but they will feel its strength.

Shane McKnight 6/1/26 Shane McKnight 6/1/26

Inserting Natural Action into a Scene

By Clay Stafford

One of the fastest ways to inject life into a scene is action. Not noise. Not chaos. Action. Few tools change a scene’s energy as quickly as a sudden physical altercation: a shove, a punch, a grab, a chair tipping backward. Used correctly, a physical altercation doesn’t just increase movement; it heightens tension, reveals character, and forces decisions. Used poorly, it feels forced, theatrical, and unbelievable. The difference lies in preparation, because even the most sudden fight must feel inevitable.

Don’t get me wrong: sudden doesn’t mean random. A common mistake writers make is assuming that unexpected violence automatically creates excitement. When physical conflict erupts out of nowhere, readers feel manipulated rather than engaged. A sudden altercation should feel surprising, not disconnected. The groundwork must be in place before the moment happens. How do you do this? Look at the emotional temperature of your scene: Is tension rising? Is frustration building? Is someone losing control, not necessarily emotionally, but of the situation? If those elements are present, the altercation feels earned. If they aren’t set up properly, the moment feels artificial and forced. Sudden conflict isn’t randomness; it’s the visible result of invisible (but felt) pressure.

Writers must recognize that physical altercations begin before contact. They do not start with fists—actual or symbolic. They begin with emotion: anger, fear, desperation, humiliation. Before introducing physical action into a scene, ask, “What emotional force is driving this movement?” If a character throws a punch, something triggered that decision or the action. Maybe it was an insult, betrayal, panic, or exhaustion. Physical contact should always be tied to emotional conflict, and the emotion comes first. Without that connection, the action feels hollow. With it, the action feels explosive.

Physical altercations shouldn’t feel random; they should be directly tied to the character’s revelation. A fight is not just a movement. People behave differently under pressure. Some strike first, some hesitate, some freeze, some try to escape. A sudden physical altercation gives you an opportunity to reveal truths about your characters that dialogue alone cannot. As the altercation begins, ask yourself: Does this character fight dirty? Do they hesitate before striking? Do they regret the action immediately? Do they escalate or withdraw? Also remember, when I say “striking,” I’m not necessarily talking about someone hitting someone else. It could be that, but it could also be throwing down a chair, setting a plate down too hard, or even throwing a dishtowel on the counter. It is the emotion behind it that counts. Whatever it is, the altercation becomes meaningful when it exposes personality, not just the motion or action itself.

Many writers think action is about strength, but it isn’t. It’s about timing. A well-timed shove can change a scene more dramatically than an extended fight sequence. A sudden altercation works best when the scene has reached a breaking point, when words no longer work, when patience fails, and when silence becomes unbearable. That’s where action belongs, not earlier, not later, but exactly then. Timing is what creates impact.

I once watched a scene collapse because the argument never escalated to action. The tension remained verbal, polite, and restrained. But when one character finally slammed a chair against the wall, everything changed. The room felt dangerous. The characters felt real. And the audience leaned forward.

Don’t overcomplicate the physical action. Keep the movement simple. Writers sometimes describe every movement in detail: which hand moved first, how the elbow turned, where the foot landed. But in sudden altercations, simplicity is stronger than over-description. Most real fights are messy. Even throwing a plate on the floor in frustration is messy. Action and frustration, when mixed, move quickly, uncontrollably and unpredictably. A reader should feel movement, not study choreography.

Don’t focus only on the characters. Use the environment as part of the action. Physical altercations rarely occur in empty space. Rooms contain objects: furniture, walls, doorways, glass, sound. When introducing a sudden altercation, let the environment participate: a glass falls and shatters, a table shifts, a lamp crashes to the floor, a chair scrapes violently across the tile. These details ground the action in reality and heighten sensory impact. Readers don’t just see the fight; more importantly, they experience it.

Every altercation shifts the emotional momentum. Before the action, tension builds; after the action, consequences unfold. Ask yourself: What changes because of this? Does trust collapse? Does fear increase? Does authority shift? Does someone lose control permanently? Physical altercations should carry consequences. This isn’t just an incident; it’s a turning point. Otherwise, these insertions become spectacles rather than part of the story. Action must move the narrative forward.

In sudden altercations, the first physical action matters most. That moment should change everything. Words become secondary, control shifts, safety disappears. The first blow should feel decisive, not accidental or weak, but clear, immediate, and impactful. The action signals that the scene has crossed a boundary, and once that boundary is crossed, nothing is the same again.

When physical movement increases, sentence length should decrease. Short sentences (and short paragraphs) create a sense of speed, while long sentences slow the motion. During sudden altercations, clarity matters more than description. For example:

He swung.

The punch landed.

She stumbled backward.

Short sentences mimic physical rhythm. They help readers feel movement rather than analyze it. In turn, sentence structure becomes part of the physical action. Real fights are chaotic, but written fights remain readable. In these fast-paced moments, readers should always understand who moved, what happened, and where. Clarity prevents frustration. Chaos should exist only within the scene, never in the reader’s mind.

Everything we do, in fiction or in real life, has consequences. Many writers end fights when the movement stops, but the real scene begins afterward. What happens immediately afterward matters: heavy breathing, blood, silence, brokenness, shock, regret, fear. The aftermath is where the drama lies. It defines meaning. Without consequence, action feels empty. With consequence, action becomes story.

If you want a clear way to apply this technique, follow this sequence:

Build Emotional Pressure. Let tension rise through dialogue or conflict.
Identify the Breaking Point. Find the moment when words are no longer sufficient.
Insert a Single Clear Action. Not choreography, but a decisive movement.
Let the Environment React. Objects shift, fall, or break.
Show Immediate Consequences. Physical and emotional responses follow.

This structure keeps actions purposeful, not decorative.

As powerful as physical conflict is, there are places where sudden altercations are inappropriate. Avoid using it when tension is already resolving, when characters lack emotional motivation, when consequences will not matter, and when the action exists only to create spectacle. Action without purpose weakens storytelling. Only restraint strengthens the impact of physical action. Use physical altercations only when they matter, not when you are trying to entertain, and certainly not when you are using physical action only as a device to keep the reader’s attention.

Here’s a way to test this idea. Choose a quiet scene from your current work, one with tension but little or no action. Ask yourself: What pressure exists beneath the surface? What moment could push someone in this situation to lose control? Then insert a single sudden physical action. Not a full fight, just one decisive movement. Then write what happens immediately afterward. You’ll quickly see how action shifts momentum, not just visually but emotionally.

Sudden physical altercations are powerful tools. They wake readers up, shift momentum, and force decisions, but the best moments of action never feel inserted or gratuitous. They feel unavoidable, as if everything in the scene had been leading to that moment from the beginning. In storytelling, action doesn’t exist to excite. It exists to reveal, and when a sudden altercation feels inevitable rather than convenient, the scene becomes unforgettable.

Shane McKnight 5/22/26 Shane McKnight 5/22/26

Literary Alchemy: Ingredients of the Story – Motifs

A series designed to elevate your skills and empower you to write like a pro.

By Chrissy Hicks

Motifs use repeated imagery, such as objects, places, or actions, to represent larger ideas and themes. What’s the difference between motif and symbolism? Simply this: symbolism refers to the use of something concrete to represent something abstract, whereas motifs are repetitive, symbolic images. This device allows writers to compress meaning into a single image reinforced throughout the narrative, which enriches subtext and gives readers something to unravel and interpret.

Why use motifs?

A powerful motif can capture a story’s main point, making a standalone image have a connection that strengthens the message. For example, one of the consistent patterns in The Devil All the Time (by Donald Pollock) is the highway. This connects the various character’s journeys, symbolizing escape, fate, desperation, and tragedy.
Through motifs, you can reveal character arcs. What a character treasures, discards, repairs, or destroys reveals inner transformation (or lack thereof). In The Photo Thief (by JL Delozier), the stolen photos symbolize a legacy founded on theft and silence. These become evidence of corruption, paralleling Dan’s journey from preserving the status quo (protecting career, avoiding scandal) to risking everything to set wrongs right. Another motif that drives this home is a small pin that he and his wife created to bring awareness to his daughter’s cancer. As he gets closer to the truth, he encounters these pins at random, which can be seen as symbolizing his daughter’s approval of his moving forward and doing what’s right.
Motifs build texture and can support multiple symbols or signal shifts in meaning. By linking scenes and motifs, you can make plot developments feel earned and resonant. An example of this is in The Devil All the Time. At the start, Willard and his son, Arvin, pray fervently at a crudely constructed altar in the woods, they call a “prayer log.” They pray daily for Arvin’s mother to be healed of her cancer, but sadly, she dies. In the end of the book, the prayer log reappears in a final showdown between Arvin and a major antagonist (who himself symbolizes corruption). Thus, the prayer log becomes a powerful motif that symbolizes sin and consequence.
Additionally, symbolism invites interpretation, encouraging readers to look for patterns and invest emotionally. What’s more fun than discussing the meaning of motifs during a book club meeting or with our reader friends?

How and When to Use Motifs:

Choose an anchor: pick one recurring, concrete symbol tied to your central theme or a character’s need. Show the symbol in description, dialogue, and action, but vary the method to avoid repeating the same beat too often so it doesn’t feel gimmicky. Pollock uses a pocket watch as a motif to symbolize time, fate, and a sense of doom: “He kept the watch in the palm of his hand as if he could hold what passed.” Then, he conveys this through sensory detail: “the tiny, relentless tick” (sound); “hands frozen at five past two” (sight); “the ridged weight of the watch in his palm” (touch). Tighten the sensory details (such as sight, sound, smell, or texture) so it feels lived-in and emotionally charged.
Let the motif’s significance shift as the character changes. Consider setting: though it may be cliché, there’s a reason it often rains during tragic scenes, and the sun breaks through the clouds when things turn positive. In Tana French’s The Secret Place, a private school’s noticeboard acts as a motif which starts as a dark metaphor when a photo of a murder victim appears with the message: “I know who killed him.” Then, it’s shown as a place for shared, private language among the adolescent girls who attend the school. Finally, it evolves into something like a scrapbook, preserving memory and youthful identity, rather than a function for nefarious purposes.
Be subtle! Don’t over-explain. Trust your readers to connect the dots. Heavy-handed interpretation can flatten nuance.
Test for redundancy. If you find that one motif is doing all the work, layer in other symbols (weather, significant objects, scenery).
Helpful hint: writers often plant motifs unintentionally through repeated phrases, objects, sensory details, or actions. After you finish your first draft, look for these repeats; they’re useful raw material. Ask whether each recurring detail echoes your theme or a character arc. If yes, amplify it through leaner language, contrasting contexts, or a late payoff. If it conflicts with your intention, remove it or repurpose it as tension or irony.

Revision checklist for discovered symbolism:

Find recurring objects, images, details, and phrases
Log where each appears and the emotion or situation tied to it
Choose whether the symbol will reinforce the theme, signify change, or create a contrast
Strengthen your arcs by placing a vivid, emotionally charged instance of the symbol at the story’s turning point
Prune or repurpose redundant occurrences or use them to complicate meaning
Strengthen the story with a final payoff by ensuring a late-stage scene rewards attentive readers and reveals the symbol’s accumulated meaning (or use it to trigger transformation)

Lookout!

Pay attention to motifs that appear in your current reading and the shows you’re watching. Did you notice a symbol repeated throughout a story or movie? That’s a motif! Consider how the author (or director) slipped these in. Was it subtle, overt? Was there a payoff? How does understanding their approach empower you to achieve similar results?

Prompt

Create a motif that represents a character’s progress: pick a small, tactile object (e.g., a chipped teacup, or a spilled Lego set), decide its origin (who gave it to them and when/why), and plot three moments where the object appears: beginning (comfort/identity), middle (strain/compromise), and end (resolution/transformation). Use sensory details and let the object’s meaning evolve.

Healthy Living TOP TIPS Recap & What’s Next

By Mary Lynn Cloghesy and Jason Schembri

Over a year ago, we began this series of articles on healthy living for writers. It has been a rewarding project for many reasons, not the least of which has been that we’ve passed along the knowledge and practices that have sustained us in our vocations as authors. Longevity—or rather, vitality over the course of your life—is not something to wish for, or hope will happen, but is the result of strategic decisions that address any current dysfunction and create the conditions for you to thrive in the future.

In his bestseller, Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You’re 80 and Beyond, author Chris Crowley, says, “The keys to overriding the decay code are daily exercise, emotional commitment, reasonable nutrition and a real engagement with living.” We couldn’t agree more. With that in mind, we’ve created this summary of the TOP TIPs from each of our articles for quick reference:

Upper Cross Syndrome (UCS)
Neck and shoulder strain can lead to chronic inflammation and reduced energy due to restricted lung capacity, so add movement breaks into your day. When we became full-time writers, we realized that the only way to be productive was to be fit, so we began counterbalancing longer sessions at the desk with more time running, building muscle, and stretching. Take a 30-minute break for every three hours you write.
Imposter Syndrome
To combat Imposter Syndrome, be curious about what’s happening, especially if you are struggling, and remember you are not alone. Don’t allow your internal worries to cross over into reality and kill your success. One thing unique to writers is that we get to breathe life into “real” imposters (excuse the oxymoron), villains and victims, then wipe them out with the keyboard. Let that embolden you to vanquish your internal imposter.
Lower Cross Syndrome (LCS)
Our top healthy living tip for LCS is support equals release. As mentioned in our previous article on Upper Cross Syndrome, do not pull on tight muscles. You’ll likely do more damage as “stuck” muscles need to be coaxed to move, or they can tear at the attachment points. Your body will begin to let go when you give it the support it needs to feel safe enough to do so—not a bad metaphor for life.
Freedom Fighters: Motivation and Discipline
Persistence beats resistance, every time. Writing is a practice that requires regular attention, even for short intervals. Protective discipline is built by stringing together regular writing sessions, for many days in a row, until a new habit is formed. Only then does discipline becomes the perfect partner to motivation. They are a dynamic duo that will help you cross the finish line of any writing project.
Repetitive Strain Injuries (RSIs)
We’ve all heard the expression, “no pain, no gain,” but that doesn’t apply to RSIs. Any sustained action after a clear warning sign will aggravate the joint and/or lead to greater injury, so avoid working through the discomfort. If you develop RSI symptoms, stop and evaluate. Can you manage this yourself, or do you need a therapeutic intervention? Awareness and caution go a long way to resolving any RSIs, as does a plan when/if they flare up.
Perfectionism
Perfectionism is a complex and dysfunctional mindset that requires a multi-pronged approach. However, here is a quick tip: contemplate the opposite (a tried-and-true technique that comes from Patanjali’s, Yoga Sutras) Start by asking yourself “what if” questions: What if you gave yourself permission to write a terrible first draft? What if your worth wasn’t based on your work? Your answers will help inform your next steps.
Eye Strain, Headaches & Pulling Your Hair Out
There are three key factors to mitigating the above conditions: fuel, movement, and rest. Give your body the energy it needs to meet the challenges of each day with real food. Real food means unprocessed products (with ingredients you can pronounce). Movement, even something as simple as a daily walk, can be tremendously beneficial too. You won’t regret it, but if you overdo it, move on to the final element: rest.

What’s next?

We hope you enjoyed and benefited from our healthy living series, but it doesn’t end here. As of the time of writing, we are developing a course on this subject matter and will be offering some workshops and a retreat in Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada in the near future. We’re adding a hands-on component to any of our in person events that we’re calling the Healthy Living Lab. We’re also continuing to write articles on the issues that we believe impact writers the most.

We want to thank you for joining us in our mission to ensure good health and longevity for the writing community. To wrap up, we’ll leave you with some sage advice from Chris Crowley about healthy living, “If they buy into it, they will change their lives in wonderful and astonishing ways. . . The only crazy thing would be not doing it.”

Mary Lynn Cloghesy is a writer from Calgary, Alberta, and the founder of the Leadership Literary Lab, a program for nonfiction authors. She has been nominated for the Claymore Award and the Aurora Contest, placed in literary competitions for Dreamers and Tadpole magazines, and established a writing retreat in Banff National Park. Find her on Substack @wild_rose_writer, or at https://marylynncloghesy.com.

Shane McKnight 5/8/26 Shane McKnight 5/8/26

This Crazy Writing Life: In An Ever-Shifting Publishing Landscape, Some Things Never Change

By Steven Womack

At the end of last month’s installment of This Crazy Writing Life, I threw a little teaser out there. I’d have an update, I wrote, on a project I’d mentioned in an earlier column. That project was Pearson Place, a novel that New York writer/filmmaker Wayne McDaniel and I wrote almost a decade ago.

In that earlier column, I described the agonies we’d gone through trying to publish this book. The endless queries on QueryTracker.com, most of them ignored. Endless hours researching editors or houses that would consider submissions from unagented writers…

And then the thrill of finding an editor who would read the manuscript even though both Wayne and I have been unagented for years. The even bigger thrill of discovering that she loved the book, wanted to buy it…

And then the heartbreak of discovering that one person on the acquisitions committee was a holdout. The editor who loved our book spent nearly a year trying to get the committee to let her buy it. In the end, she had to let it go.

Wayne and I found ourselves in the unusual situation of feeling worse for the editor than we did for ourselves.

So we decided to serialize the book on Substack. I thought the process of doing that would make good grist for This Crazy Writing Life and, who knows, it might even sell some copies. Pearson Place on Substack would be a revealing case study. We’d have to teach ourselves how to do it, and in doing so, could pay it forward to other indie writers. Then when the book was up, we could track the numbers and explore different marketing strategies. It would be an interesting journey we could all take together.

Then, as so often happens, fate intervened. A very successful writer and friend of mine for nearly forty years read the column. She wrote me an email: Are you sure you want to go the Substack route?

I think that’s the only route we got left, I answered.

Hold off on that… Let me see if my editor will take a look at it.

A few days later, an email landed in my inbox. My friend’s editor would love to see the manuscript. Send it along.

The Pearson Place Substack project was on hold as we waited for this editor’s response. As so often happens in publishing, the wait went on for several weeks. She was off to the London Book Fair, which took a week of preparation before and two weeks of recovery and catch-up afterward. Writers who’ve been in this business longer than a minute soon learn the art and skill of patience, even if they hate to be forced to exercise it.

Finally, the editor reached out to us. Any chance we could have a Zoom meeting next week?

Wayne and I found this greatly encouraging. Editors don’t usually schedule a Zoom meet to tell you your book sucks and they wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.

The appointed Zoom meet day rolled around and the three of us met somewhere out there in the ether. I gotta tell you, folks, it was magic. We instantly took a liking to this editor and she seemed to feel the same way about us. She clearly had read the book, got what we were trying to do, and supported it. It was the first time we had laid eyes on each other and in our very first meeting, she’s talking pub dates, marketing strategies, ad and promotion budgets, even a potential book tour. Wayne and I were thrilled, but finally one of us came back to earth (I think it was Wayne) and asked about any rewrites or editorial revisions.

Oh, she replied, there might be a few little things. Nothing serious…

The Zoom meet went on for about forty minutes and it ended with the editor saying those wonderful words that every writer lives to hear: I’ll have you something next week…

Meaning, we assumed, an offer.

As I write this, that was a month ago.

Now I’ve been in this business long enough to know that waiting a month to hear from an editor is nothing. While I don’t mean to sound cynical, on some level I would’ve been surprised had it all gone as easy as it looked.

I still have faith that we’ll hear something, eventually. I’ve often observed that the publishing industry is in the middle of one of its most turbulent times ever. The ground under our feet shakes and shifts every day.

But some things never change, and one of those is that however traditional publishing evolves and changes over the years, it still grinds along slowly…

I’ll let you know when we hear something.

Speaking of shaking and shifting, we explored in last month’s column the attempts to slow the word tsunami brought about by generative AI. Kindle has now prohibited indie pubbers from uploading more than three books a day. James Blatch, of Self Publishing Launchpad, caused a ruckus when he suggested Amazon should charge as much as $300.00 to upload a book to KDP.

Now Draft2Digital and Barnes & Noble Press have joined the fracas.

I’ve mentioned Draft2Digital or as it’s more commonly known, D2D, in previous columns. D2D is an aggregator, a company which solves a big problem for indie pubbers. If you’re distributing eBooks through every available outlet—Barnes & Noble, Kobo, BooksAMillion, Apple, Google, etc.—then it’s an enormous PITA to set up an account with each one of those outlets and then manage them.

Instead, indie pubbers set up an account with D2D and then D2D sends them out to the eBook outlets. It then processes the payments from them, shaves off a small percentage for their trouble, and sends you the rest.

Makes life a lot easier…

Historically, D2D hasn’t charged for this, except for the commission they collect on your sales. But with the increase in AI slop in the past few years, D2D (like everyone else) has faced some serious headwinds. James Blatch reported in his Substack blog that a D2D employee told him that on the day Charlie Kirk was shot, they were inundated with instant Charlie Kirk biographies that had been generated by AI from data scraped off the internet.

As the company’s announcement on April 14th read:

Like many platforms, we’ve seen a significant increase in automated and low-quality account creation in recent years. This onslaught from automated content farms threatens reader trust in indie titles and risks indies being associated with low-quality “slop.” A modest activation fee can make a difference and allow our team to stay focused on supporting genuine authors like you.

For the first time in the company’s history, they’re going to charge a modest new account activation fee ($20 USD) and an annual maintenance fee of $12.00 for accounts that don’t earn at least $100.00 annually. If you earn more than that, the fee won’t apply.

Barnes & Noble Press has also made a few changes in their TOS. Starting April 22, 2026, all B&N Press print books must have a minimum retail price of $14.99 If you’ve already got titles up for less than that, you’re either going to have to raise the price or delist them.

Additionally, B&N Press is now setting a limit on how many titles each account can publish. No single account can have more than 100 titles. This may seem a little looney tunes to most writers; how could anybody write more than 100 books? But trust me, I have friends in Novelists, Inc. who are real writers, not AI slop generators, and have published well into three digits. It’s not that unusual, especially in genre fiction. As I mentioned in a column a few months ago, Louis L’Amour published 130 books in his career.

Finally—and this is a big one, I think—Barnes & Noble Press will no longer allow public domain titles to be published on their platform, which is interesting given every Barnes & Noble retail store I’ve ever been in sells classic public domain books in Barnes & Noble editions. But as B&N’s announcement stated:

Barnes & Noble Press was established to publish and promote independent authors, and this change is intended to support this ideal.

Finally, as if we needed any further proof of how tough this business is, the largest book distributor to the library market closed its doors and liquidated earlier this year. Baker & Taylor, which had more than 4,000 institutional customers and was nearly 200 years old, folded in January after a proposed acquisition by ReaderLink fell through. Some 500 employees lost their jobs and lot of publishers with unpaid invoices were left twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.

That’s enough good news for one month. Thanks for playing along. See you next time.

Edgar and Shamus Award-winning author Steven Womack created the groundbreaking Music City Murders series, the first series to put Nashville on the map as a mystery setting. He’s also the author of a number of other novels, including the New York Times Notable Book MURPHY’S FAULT.

Shane McKnight 5/8/26 Shane McKnight 5/8/26

Between Pen and Paper: Flaneuring Through a Writer’s Mind – The Month That Almost Became …

By Andi Kopek

May is a month that refuses to make up its mind.

It wakes up wearing spring and goes to bed thinking about summer. It sends out graduation invitations and job rejections in the same breath. It smells like cut grass and sunscreen, like possibility and mild regret. It is, in every sense, a draft.

We are told to admire decisiveness. We must choose, commit, declare. There is a quiet suspicion toward anything that lingers in between. Are you in or out? Are you staying or going? Are you this or that?

May answers: almost.

Almost frost. Almost heat. Almost done. Almost there. Almost … something else.

It is the month of thresholds. Caps are thrown into the air, but almost no one knows where they will land. Leases expire. New cities hover on the horizon like rumors of a definitely better future. People say things like “we’ll keep in touch” with a sincerity that expires next month (June). Life rearranges itself in pencil.

We do not like pencil.

We like ink. Ink is loyal. Ink stays and says: this happened, this is happening, this will continue to happen. Ink makes promises that reality has no obligation to keep. Pencil, on the other hand, is honest in a way that feels almost rude. It says: this could change. It probably will. It did.

May is written entirely in pencil.

Even the weather refuses to commit. One day opens its windows to birdsong and breeze, the next presses humidity against your skin like an argument you didn’t agree to have. You leave the house carrying both shorts and a light jacket, along with a quiet sense of confusion.

And yet, for all our discomfort, something important happens in this unfinished space. In the absence of certainty, we begin to improvise.

We try on versions of ourselves the way you might try on clothes in a second-hand store with unforgiving lighting. This one almost fits. This one used to. This one will. Maybe. Later. Each of them belongs to someone I haven’t met yet. And likely never will.

We step into conversations without knowing how they will end. We say yes with a question mark attached. We say no and then revisit it three days later while staring at the ceiling.

There is a peculiar vulnerability in almost.

To be almost something is to admit you are not fully formed. Not yet resolved. Not yet decided. It is to exist without the protection of a finished sentence. There is no period to hide behind, only a trailing ellipsis that suggests continuation without guarantee.

…

We rarely celebrate this.

There are no ceremonies for the unfinished. No rituals for the nearly-there. We applaud arrival, not approach. We admire clarity, not confusion. But most of life, if we are being honest, unfolds in this quiet, unstable middle.

The job you almost got.

The person you almost became.

The version of the story that almost made sense.

These are not failures. They are evidence of movement forward. The journey … May understands this better than we do.

It does not rush towards a conclusion. It lingers in possibility. It allows contradiction to coexist without forcing resolution. It lets the future remain slightly out of focus, as if to say: you are not meant to see everything yet.

There is, strangely, a kind of freedom in that.

If nothing is fully decided, then nothing is fully closed. If you are not entirely one thing, you are still permitted to become another. If the story is still being written, then the next sentence remains available to you, even if you have no idea what it will be.

Especially if you have no idea.

So perhaps the task is not to escape May, but to learn how to inhabit it.

To tolerate the unfinished in you. To embrace the unfinished in your writing. To sit inside the almost without rushing to resolve it. To accept that some parts of your life will remain in draft form longer than you would prefer, and that this is not a malfunction but a feature of being human.

We are, all of us, perpetually mid-sentence. Mid journey … May simply makes that harder to ignore.

And if you listen closely, beneath the graduations and the departures, beneath the shifting weather and the tentative plans, you can hear it—the soft graphite scratch of something still being written.

Not yet final. Not yet fixed.

But very much alive.

Because we are always writing…

Andi Kopek is a multidisciplinary artist based in Nashville, TN. With a background in medicine, molecular neuroscience, and behavioral change, he has recently devoted himself entirely to the creative arts. His debut poetry collection, Shmehara, has garnered accolades in both literary and independent film circles for its innovative storytelling.

When you’re in Nashville, you can join Andi at his poetry workshops or catch one of his live performances. When not engaging with the community, he's hard at work on his next creative project or preparing for his monthly art-focused podcast, The Samovar(t) Lounge: Steeping Conversations with Creative Minds, where in a relaxed space, invited artists share tea and the never-told intricacies of their creative journeys.

website: andikopekart.ink
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Shane McKnight 5/1/26 Shane McKnight 5/1/26

Drop the Pen! What Every Writer Needs to Know About Real Police Work: Police Batons

In this installment of Drop the Pen!, David Lane Williams explores the history, use, and realities of police batons, offering writers an insider’s perspective on how and when these “less lethal” tools are actually deployed. Blending firsthand experience with practical guidance, the article helps writers portray law enforcement with greater accuracy and nuance.

By David Lane Williams

One of the most frequently asked questions I get at writer’s events when I speak or sit on discussion panels has to do with police weapons other than firearms. Writers want to understand how and when such tools are utilized, as well as the training involved. Tasers and pepper spray always come up, but occasionally someone wants to get a better grasp on police batons for a scene they're writing.

One of the early roles in policing in Western Europe and the fledgling American colonies was that of the Night Watchman. Often these people patrolled what we would now call the Red-Light district of his town or city, charged with keeping the peace—or at least keeping the ruckus relatively quiet so that the folks in the swanky part of town weren’t disturbed. There was no training curriculum or written policy manual. The men hired on (often just for a night or two to make enough for a few pints) were almost always from the same neighborhood they patrolled, often just as likely to get into a knife fight, gamble, or hire a lady of the evening as the people they’d been hired to manage.

A night watchman was usually a large fellow, willing to get into a physical scrape but menacing enough that most people wouldn’t take him on. Just in case, though, night watchmen are always depicted as carrying some type of club. This “billy club,” a name derived from burglar slang for a short bar or length of wood used to pry or bust windows, became a symbol for the long (and potentially brutal) arm of the law.

Flash forward in history to Rodney King, a man whose assault at the hands of Los Angeles police officers after a high-speed pursuit was filmed on a newfangled device called a handheld video recorder in 1991. The footage of the incident was seen by millions internationally, and a new era of the public documenting and broadcasting actions taken by their government began.

The officers who struck King so relentlessly were using a style of baton called the PR 24. The PR 24 came with a handle jutting out perpendicular from one end of the stick, which allowed for a variety of techniques, such as swinging it with greater speed, using it on body pressure points, and gripping it in a way that allowed for greater protection against a blow from a blunt object or a slashing knife blade.

The outcry after the Rodney King assault was so loud and angry that police chiefs and sheriffs across the land pulled the PR24 off the streets. That was fine with most patrol officers because the old-style batons were already falling out of use. I suppose they were a reasonable tool back in the days when cops primarily walked a beat, but they were lousy for getting in and out of a car. For that reason, most guys took them out of their belts and laid them on the passenger seat while driving around their districts. This resulted in batons being left behind in the car when the officer got out to address an emergency or chase a suspect on foot.

Enter the expandable baton. This form of “nightstick” is about 9 inches long when collapsed, but some models can extend to nearly 3 feet with the flick of a wrist. This makes them ideal for carrying in a leather holster on one’s duty belt, making it much easier to get into and out of the squad car. They’re also less intimidating than a full-length bat-style or PR24 baton, which is better for officers out there trying to forge positive relationships in the community.

In my Texas police academy, cadets were expected to take one strike to the outer thigh with the baton. Our academy chief was a sadistic marine with sociopathic tendencies. He was an inch or two over six feet, muscular, Mr. Clean bald with an angry brow line. The only time I ever saw him smile was when I was doing pushups (usually for laughing while standing at attention), or on the day he was hitting us with that damn baton. I remember him raising that nightstick back behind his shoulder and slamming it sideways into my left thigh with all the power in his frame. I collapsed to the ground as I squeezed my throbbing leg and bit my lower lip to keep from wailing like a lost calf. I didn’t walk right for weeks.

Ah, training.

A police baton falls into the category of “less lethal” on the force continuum, meaning it is not intended to inflict a mortal wound but could if it strikes the head, throat, or neck. Training and policy dictate that a baton strike be aimed at the limbs, and only in a situation that has turned violent. It is not to be utilized as an implement of punishment, and any such use of force should be documented and investigated to ensure the officer wielding the weapon used reasonable force in the moment.

I only used my baton four times during my career. Two of those were to break and rake a window to gain entry during manhunts. Another time, I cracked the windshield of a guy stoned out of his gourd while driving his pickup through an outdoor concert crowd. I was running alongside his truck, yelling at him to stop, but he was so high he didn’t even know I was there until I started whacking his truck with that metal stick.

He stopped.

The only time I struck a human with a baton was on a fellow who had pulled a pair of scissors on his ex-girlfriend. Before he pulled the scissors, the ex was taunting him in front of me with her new boyfriend, saying all manner of cruel things about his manhood. I couldn’t let him stab her with the scissors, but I felt bad for the guy even as I hit him with all I had. I’ll never forget his face: anguish, heartbreak, agony, and surprise all showing at the same time. It was a rough way to learn about toxic relationships.

It is possible that some of you might want to incorporate a police baton into the story of a future work in progress. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have more questions on the topic (or others related to authentic police work for writers). Happy to get you squared away in that regard, and I won’t even make you take a baton strike to the leg.

Carry on.

Shane McKnight 4/24/26 Shane McKnight 4/24/26

ACCOUNTABILITY BEGINS WITH INTENTION

In “Accountability Begins with Intention,” Clay Stafford reframes accountability as something that starts long before action. Rather than focusing on deadlines or performance, he emphasizes the importance of setting clear, purposeful intentions that guide consistent behavior—arguing that true accountability is rooted in clarity, commitment, and personal ownership.

By Clay Stafford

Most people think about accountability only after a project begins—such as showing up, meeting deadlines, providing progress reports, and doing check-ins to gauge your status. They consider the consequences if you fail to show up. But true accountability doesn’t start once you begin a project and hope to complete it. It actually starts before taking the first step. Accountability begins in that quiet moment when you decide what you truly want to do. It starts before you ever take any action.

This quiet moment is where intentions reside. So, what is accountability, the motivation that will carry you over a designated finish line? It is establishing clear intentions before you begin working on a project. This step is where many people stumble because it provides the guardrails that guide you along the path to your completed goal. Intentions. It’s that simple. Without clear intentions, accountability can become frustrating, confusing, and often discouraging. With clear intentions, accountability becomes empowering. Let’s explore how to achieve that practically, simply, and in a way you can implement immediately.

Most people start projects by identifying something they want to achieve, which motivates them to work hard to reach it. They feel excited, inspired, and energized. However, the problem is that motivation is emotional, and that’s okay. You need positive feelings and eager anticipation to keep moving forward. Underneath this, whether recognized or not, are intentions. Motivation says: I want to do this. Intentions say: This is what I’m doing, and this is how I will measure my success. Without clear intentions, motivation often fades quickly as other distractions take over. When motivation fades, we often think we have failed. Having clear intentions from the beginning helps avoid confusion. Intentions give your goal direction, even before you start.

Let’s clear up a common misunderstanding. An intention is not a wish; it’s not a vague desire, nor is it just a motivational phrase. An intention is a specific purpose that guides our actions and decisions. It always answers three key questions: What am I trying to accomplish? Why does this matter? What does success look like? If you can’t clearly answer these questions, accountability becomes guesswork because you don’t have measurable goals. Relying only on guesswork leads to burnout, as you have no clear endpoint for success.

There is a cost to starting without clear intentions. Most abandoned projects don’t fail because of a lack of ability; they fail because of a lack of clarity. When clear goals aren’t defined, you begin quickly but veer off course soon after. You will likely lose focus midway because you don’t know your destination or how to recognize when you’ve arrived. You might question whether the effort is worth it because you can’t seem to get to a place you’re not sure you want to reach. You feel overwhelmed by choices because you haven’t set initial guardrails. Without that framework, you struggle to measure progress. Ultimately, the frustration of moving forward without a compass replaces momentum, and the project stalls—not because of a lack of discipline, but because of a lack of direction. Accountability relies on direction, and direction requires intention. I’ve seen this happen more times than I can count. Early in one project with my team, we started moving fast because everyone was excited. We had ideas, energy, and momentum—but we had never clearly defined what success actually looked like. Within weeks, tasks multiplied, priorities shifted, and frustration began to creep in. Once we stopped, wrote down exactly what we intended to accomplish, and defined what success meant, everything changed. Progress became measurable, decisions became easier, and accountability finally had something solid to stand on.

There are several ways I’ve found to make intention work. The first is to clearly define the outcome I want. This means that before starting any project, I should pause and ask myself: what does this finished task actually look like? Not in theory or emotionally, but in practical terms. For example, if you’re writing a book, thinking the goal is to “finish the book” is too vague. You’ll never reach that. A clearer goal would be to “complete a 70,000-word first draft in six months.” That line contains many specifics, and that’s what you want. If you’re launching a new project, “getting started” isn’t an outcome. Instead, “launching a website that offers three core services or highlights my skills by June 1” is detailed. It gives you a concrete target to work toward. Clarity and specifics like these turn dreams into actual plans. Then, plans help create accountability.

The second thing, important not only to me but also to my team, is “why does this matter?” I always try to frame what I want within the idea of “a worthy goal.” I have a definition of “worthy” for our team, but you’ll have your own. Unfortunately, this is a step most people skip, and it’s often why projects lose momentum. You really need to know, and emotionally connect with, why this project matters to you. Not to others, not to your audience, not to social media, but to you, because when obstacles arise—which they will—the emotional and intellectual strength of your reason will determine whether you keep going or give up. So, I always do this: I write out a sentence that says, “This project matters because…” and then finish it honestly. “This project matters because I want to prove to myself I can finish what I start.” “This project matters because it creates new opportunities for my future.” “This project matters because it allows me to share something meaningful.” When the “why” is personal, accountability becomes internal rather than forced.

It’s important to see the end game. What does success in this venture look like? Here’s a truth that often surprises many: success must be measured. You can’t specify everything, but you should have an idea of what the end game will look like. Without measurements, you won’t know if the project is succeeding or how well it’s doing. You also won’t know if you’re on track for success if a timeline is included. You can address this by defining the final result and dividing it by time. For example, here are some specific tasks: write 500 words per day, complete one module per week, send five outreach emails daily. This gives you daily tasks and makes achievement measurable. They create forward momentum, which will strengthen your accountability.

Intentions, like those outlined above, don’t just specify what you will do; they also define what you will not do. You set goals and steps to achieve them, but you also establish boundaries you won’t cross, along with a clear idea of what counts as successful completion. It’s crucial to see the big goal and then plan it out strategically into smaller goals, because without that, unnecessary tasks can sneak in, expectations might shift, and you’ll likely get stressed. Instead, before you start, ask yourself, “What am I committing to? And what am I not committing to?” These boundaries will keep you grounded. Keep it simple. “I will work on this project for one hour each morning.” “I will not add new features until the first version is finished.” “I will not compare this work to others during the drafting phase.” These types of boundaries help protect your focus, which is essential for successfully completing your project.

This next step seems simple, but it is incredibly powerful. Write down your intentions. Not only can you see them, but if you’re working with a team, they can see them as well. Thoughts can disappear, become muddled, slip away, and lead to misunderstandings. Written intentions are concrete; they stay clear. When you write down your intentions, the plan becomes visible to everyone, including yourself. It can be reviewed and, if necessary, amended. Why? Because all the steps are laid out. It’s not a fixed manifesto that can’t change, but rather a working document. It creates clarity. For example, “My intention is to complete the first draft of my novel within six months by writing 500 words each weekday. This matters because I want to build consistency in my creative life. Success means finishing a complete draft, not a perfect one.” There you go—simple enough. Because you do this, you’ll have a better chance of achieving your goal, as this statement serves as your daily anchor. It provides guidance through the challenges that come with any project.

I mentioned team members. Accountability strengthens when documents are shared because the team performs better when they know. However, choose carefully. Share your intentions only with your team, trusted friends, mentors, and collaborators—of course, not with everyone. Public declarations can create pressure. Let the public see the results only after things are accomplished. Private accountability, on the other hand, fosters responsibility and brings the added benefit of encouragement. During this phase of any project, you don’t need applause (skip the public), but you do need guided alignment and support (your private core).

You wrote this down for a reason. Your document and your private declaration to yourself or those closest to you are not fixed goals. They can change over time. Every mountain you climb will help you see further, and then you’ll climb another. This is normal. Your written statement is a living guide. Having it in writing helps you review your intentions regularly and adjust them when needed. I recommend reviewing your written statement at least weekly. Ask yourself, “Am I still working toward the defined outcome?” “Does the purpose still feel meaningful?” “Do the success measures still apply?” If something seems off, make adjustments as needed. But beware of your motives. Don’t abandon a direction you’ve already committed to after deep reflection. Ensure it still connects to your original plan.

People often confuse goals with intentions, but they are not the same. They are related, yes, but they differ. Goals focus on results, while intentions focus on behavior and direction. One is the destination; the other is the journey. A goal is to “Finish the project.” An intention is to “Work consistently on the project for one hour daily.” Goals measure completion. Intentions guide actions. This brings us back to accountability. Accountability depends on action, not just outcomes—actions.

What are some mistakes that weaken accountability? Being too vague. Vague intentions lead to vague results. Be specific. Being unrealistic. Ambition is good, but unrealistic expectations are useless. If your schedule doesn’t allow you to do a task for an hour daily, set it for 30 minutes or whatever you know will work. Just like time, don’t ignore your personal capacity. Energy matters as much as time. To achieve what you hope to, you need to be prepared for the challenge.

When your intentions are clear, you understand what to do, why it matters, how to track your progress, and when you’re succeeding or falling short. That clarity builds confidence, confidence encourages consistency, consistency promotes accountability, and accountability leads to the results you want: results.

If you take nothing else from this article, remember this: there are four steps to every act of intention: 1) My intention is to…, 2) This matters because…, 3) Success will look like…, and 4) I will commit to…. That’s it. Short. Clear. Actionable. Achievable. Use these steps for anything you want to accomplish. You’ll notice a difference.

Whenever we start a project, clarity is essential; we must understand our goals, have direction, and keep momentum. When intentions are clear, accountability feels different. Desperation, stress, and pressure all lessen when intentions are clear. Negative emotions are replaced with purpose because you are no longer guessing. You’ve made your decision beforehand. Once you decide, accountability shifts from pressure to following through on a commitment you made to yourself before taking that first big step. A plan in action is a practical and successful plan. Accountability doesn’t begin with effort; it begins with intention.

Shane McKnight 4/24/26 Shane McKnight 4/24/26

Making History Relevant to Story without Slowing the Pace

In this craft article, Tori Eldridge explores how writers can seamlessly integrate historical and cultural detail into fiction without slowing the pace. Through practical techniques like embedding history in character genealogy and revealing information at impactful moments, she demonstrates how to enrich storytelling while maintaining momentum and reader engagement.

By Tori Eldridge

(Includes an Excerpt from Hawai‘i Rage)

I write and enjoy reading page-turning fiction. So I cannot afford to slow down the pace, no matter how much character development, cultural information, or history I include. The key for me is to choose the right moment to share relevant facts that will stick with the readers. The tricky part is how.

I’m one of those authors who begins every new project with a place and sometimes a topic or community I want to explore. I dive into research, regardless of how familiar the location or topic is to me. It is during this process that I discover my characters, and a hint of a story appears. Although I’ve been writing contemporary fiction, my last four novels have also entwined historical timelines and facts. But since I don’t want to give a history lesson, I pick and choose what I share.

I rely on two techniques to weave in pertinent information that won’t put my readers to sleep.

The first is to create a family genealogy that is interwoven with the historical background I want to share.

I did this in The Ninja’s Oath by tying the ancestry of Lily Wong’s “uncle” Lee Chang—whose grand-niece she would help rescue—to the history of Shanghai. This connection to place became so significant that it inspired the thriller plot of the book.

I created an even more intricate genealogy for Ranger Makalani Pahukula’s family in Kaua‘i Storm, beginning with Makalani’s great-grandmother Punahele and her ten children. The story’s drama and mystery emerged from the cultural differences of intermarrying and depleting fractions of Native Hawaiian blood each generation had.

In Hawai‘i Rage—a contemporary Hawaiian western and family drama mystery—the ancestry of Hiapo Ranch began with the son of an early Mexican vaqueros King Kamehameha III bought over from Alta California to teach his people how to ride. I was able to include a lot of this fascinating Hawaiian cowboy history because it was woven into Hiapo ancestry and pertained to my plot. In this way, the history moved the story forward and added character depth.

My second technique is to drop relevant information at a moment in my story when it will stick in the reader’s mind.

With a book as richly entwined with history and culture as Hawai‘i Rage, it was especially important not to dump exposition or overload my readers with facts. My primary goal, after all, is to entertain. That said, my protagonist just took a new position as an interpretive ranger at Pu‘u Koholā Heiau National Historic site that King Kamehameha I was instructed to build to help him unite the Hawaiian Kingdom. Readers are going to be interested in learning a bit about that history. Not all. And only the parts that are relevant to my story, especially if the information I share helps my protagonist solve the mystery in my book.

The following excerpt exemplifies what I mean. In this scene, Makalani is plagued by a conversation she overheard while trying to study the historical materials her supervisory ranger has assigned her to read. Makalani is surprised to find clues to her mystery in the heiau’s treacherous past.

Why else I do what I do?
Makalani had stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep.
What did you mean, Malu? What did you mean?
His words refused to wash away even as the evening rainstorm pounded her roof. And when she rolled out of bed in the morning, she found them stuck in her sleep-deprived mind like sticks in the mud.
Why did you say that? What did you mean?
The conundrum followed her to work. In Pidgin English, locals frequently used the present tense even when they referred to something in past. When Malu had said, “Why else I do what I do?” was he reminding Louie of something he was doing now or something he had done before?
Like kill Larry Hiapo so Kupunakāne could put Louie in charge.
The treachery was echoed in the story she was reading, about how Kamehameha’s trusted military adviser and uncle murdered Kamehameha’s rival cousin in Kawaihae Bay—the same bay where Hiapo’s stepfather was killed swimming a steer to a boat. Makalani dropped her head into her palms as past and present muddled into a convoluted mess.
“Need a break from reading?” Ranger Akaka asked from the doorway.
“Yes!”
He laughed. “Come on. We can talk while we walk.”
She glanced down the hall for her supervisor. “Won’t Ranger Machado mind?”
Ranger Akaka smiled. “He’s on Maui today.”
The warmth of the midday sun eased the tension from Makalani’s shoulders as they walked along the visitors’ path. The stone heiau stood on the mauka side of the flat, barren land, muddy now because of the previous night’s rain. The lava platform was huge, over two hundred feet wide and twenty feet high. She had never seen one this large or with multiple tiers.
“How did they actually use it?”
“Good question.” Ranger Akaka said. “The kahuna or ali‘i—King Kamehameha I was both—would perform religious ceremonies or hold political meetings on this space. The attendees would sit on the lower two levels according to their standing in the community. Structures were sometimes built on the top level to offer shade for chiefs and advisers. Pu‘ukoholā’s size reflects its importance.”
He gestured toward the ocean. “When the visiting chiefs and their entourages would sail their outriggers into this bay, one of Kamehameha’s top warriors would throw a spear at the chief. If he caught the spear it meant he had enough mana—divine power and authority—to proceed.”
Makalani thought about the treacherous bit of history she had been reading that morning. “Was that how Kamehameha’s uncle killed his rival cousin?”
“No. Instead of throwing the spear, Keʻeaumoku opened his arms for a hug. Although the rival cousin knew Kamehameha would kill him as a sacrifice for the heiau, he had come to save his people from war.”
“Then why murder him?”
“Kamehameha wanted to talk with his cousin first. Keʻeaumoku feared the rival would deter the king from his destiny, so he and his men slaughtered all but one. But the treachery happened on both sides. Although the cousin had come willingly, he had mutilated his body to taint the sacrifice. One version of this story says the rival chief had even decided to live and planned to assassinate Kamehameha when they met.”
“So Keʻeaumoku acted without Kamehameha’s knowledge?”
“There are many versions of this story, but the one I believe makes Keʻeaumoku seem like the General Patton of the Pacific and a mafia hitman rolled into one.”
Makalani stared down at the beach, envisioning the multilayered treachery at play. In many ways, it reminded her of the Hiapo family today.

Tori Eldridge is the author of Kaua‘i Storm, the Lily Wong ninja thrillers, and Dance Among the Flames. Born in Honolulu—of Hawaiian, Chinese, and Norwegian descent—Tori graduated from Punahou School with classmate Barack Obama before performing as an actress, singer, and dancer on Broadway, television, and film, and earning a fifth-degree black belt in To-Shin Do ninja martial arts. Her literary works have garnered Anthony, Lefty, and Macavity Award nominations and the 2021 Crimson Scribe for Best Book of the Year. Tori lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, near her precious mo‘opuna (grandchildren), where she narrated the audiobooks for Hawai‘i Rage and other Ranger Makalani Pahukula mysteries. For more information about Tori, her book club extras, and her reading ‘ohana, visit www.torieldridge.com.

Shane McKnight 4/24/26 Shane McKnight 4/24/26

Between Pen and Paper: Flaneuring Through a Writer’s Mind – The Manual of Becoming a Tree

In this contemplative installment of Between Pen and Paper, Andi Kopek explores what writers can learn from trees—stillness, patience, interconnectedness, and quiet growth. “The Manual of Becoming a Tree” blends philosophy, nature, and craft to reframe writing not as constant output, but as a process of deep attention, rooted presence, and gradual transformation.

By Andi Kopek

Step 1. Stand still longer than is comfortable.

On the first day of spring, as I am writing these words, even though planets and stars align in their quit geometry, nothing remarkable happens. The grass has been green for weeks. Cardinals and mockingbirds have been rehearsing morning for at least a month. Purple flowers of Eastern Redbud—already confident—have been decorating neighborhoods, our moods and our minds.

The trees… the trees, as always, in their ancient wisdom, ignore the announcement. They proceed according to their own instructions—ones written in rings, in long negotiations with light, in patient agreements with water and soil, in a language that does not translate easily into urgency.

I am trying to follow.

Step 2. Abandon the clock.

I am trying to follow.

A tree does not measure time in hours or deadlines. It keeps record through winters endured, through droughts survived, through fires remembered. What appears to us as stillness is, in fact, accumulation—experience layered and held quietly in place.

There are trees older than most of our stories. Some have lived through empires we forgot existed. And some, like the aspen in Pando, complicate the idea of individuality altogether—a forest that is not a collection of trees, but a single organism repeating itself underground, one root system speaking in many trunks.

We tend to think of time as something we move through. Trees suggest the opposite.

Time moves through them.

Step 3. Grow roots.

Time moves through them.

And because they cannot move, everything must come to them. Light is not pursued, but received. Water is not reached for, but waited for. A tree does not relocate to survive. It negotiates with its conditions.

Roots are not only anchors. They are instruments of communication. They extend into darkness, into soil, into the unseen, mapping the world not by sight but by contact. Through them, the tree senses, exchanges, chats—participating in a network that is both intimate and vast.

I am beginning to understand that to write well is to do something similar. Not to describe a thing from a distance, but to accept its limits as your own. To give up movement. To remain. To feel, as much as one can, what it means to depend on what arrives.

To grow roots is to let the world find you.

Step 4. Be one, be many.

To grow roots is to let the world find you.

No tree grows alone. Beneath the surface, there is an exchange—nutrients, signals, warnings—passed along through roots and fungal threads, a slow conversation without voice. What appears above ground as individuality is, below, a shared system. A forest is not a gathering. It is a continuity.

Identity, here, becomes less certain. The boundaries soften. One tree feeds another. One suffers, and others adjust. The self is no longer a fixed object, but a participant in something larger, something distributed.

I am beginning to suspect that writing asks for a similar surrender. Not expression, at first, but dissolution. The ego—so eager to assert, to define, to be seen—must loosen its grip. To write well is not to place yourself at the center, but to become permeable, translucent. To let the subject move through you, as time moves through trees.

To be one is to discover that one was never singular.

Step 5. Grow toward the light.

To be one is to discover that one was never singular.

A tree does not choose the sun in the way we choose our paths. It turns toward it. Slowly, persistently, without certainty of arrival. This is not ambition as we understand it, but something closer to orientation—a continual adjustment, a patient alignment with what sustains.

They call it phototropism: the quiet intelligence of growth bending toward light. Not in leaps, not in declarations or milestones, but in increments so small they initially escape notice. And yet, over time, the entire form of the tree is shaped by this reaching.

I wonder if our aspirations are meant to function the same way. Not as destinations to conquer, but as directions to guide us. Something we lean toward, even knowing we may never fully arrive.

To write, perhaps, is to practice this leaning. To shape yourself, sentence by sentence, ring by ring, toward a clarity you cannot yet hold.

To grow toward the light.

Step 6. Opening the Canopy: Komorebi

To grow toward the light.

light finds every leaf
voice unfolds into verses
time moves, we become

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Shane McKnight 4/17/26 Shane McKnight 4/17/26

THE HABIT OF FORWARD

In “The Habit of Forward,” Clay Stafford explores the quiet discipline of continuing to move ahead—especially when motivation fades or clarity is uncertain. Through reflection and experience, he reveals how progress is less about inspiration and more about consistency, showing that forward motion, no matter how small, is what ultimately shapes both the work and the writer.

By Clay Stafford

I didn’t realize when moving forward stopped being a conscious decision and became an ingrained habit. Initially, forward motion felt like discovery. Each new task I completed, each small success I achieved, fostered the sense that movement was shaping my future. I believed, even if I couldn’t articulate it then, that standing still carried risks I didn’t fully understand, that slowing down meant I was destined to live the life I had been given, even the life that was expected of me, not the one I truly desired. When I paused, my mind became habitually restless, always scanning for the next thing that might propel me further. I started writing and making 8mm movies. I sold a short story at ten. I became a publisher of a tabloid filled with gossip, short stories, and essays in the fourth grade and sold the newspapers to the student body for ten cents a copy. These early successes, though small, on my path to becoming who I would grow into, did not remain isolated. The process, the discipline, the passion, stacked into patterns that laid the foundation of my future self. Selling onions, homemade cinnamon toothpicks, a newspaper, stories, poems, and, later, soda and candy out of my school locker led to saving coins. Saving coins enabled me to buy animals and a farm before I even reached puberty. Buying animals meant watching them grow, multiply, and produce something tangible that had once only existed as a dream in my mind. Each step of creating, selling, reinvesting, and buying built upon the last, until the constant motion began to feel less like a series of actions and more like a compulsive current carrying me forward, whether I fought it or not.

There were mornings when I woke up already thinking about what needed to be done, long before anyone in the house moved. After doing morning exercises while watching Jack LaLanne and his white German Shepherd, Happy, on my small black-and-white TV, I often fixed breakfast myself because my mother liked to sleep until 10:00 and my dad left for work early. The day stretched out before me like a path already laid, formed in my sleep. I didn’t yet know to call it ambition. To me, it was simply a necessity, a compulsion. I felt responsible for actively moving the day forward, as if time itself might slow down or break apart if I didn’t keep it going.

I valued each night lying in the dark, listening to the window air conditioner and humidifier, both of which I had to have because I was a sickly child. I learned to measure days by how much I accomplished, rather than by reflecting on what I had become. A day that moved forward felt successful. Days when money was added to my piggy bank, hidden in the closet, felt successful. A day that didn’t yield the desired results felt wasted, and sometimes I’d struggle to sleep because of guilt and failure. Childhood was a stressful time, filled with disappointment: in myself, in the life I had been given, and in the family that kept me, not as a child to be loved, but as an example to their world that we were a traditional family, and that this was what was expected of parents like mine: to have a child. No one ever mentioned that the child should be nurtured and loved. Lying in the dark, seeking sleep that often didn’t come because of my early insomnia, it became clear to me that, at least in my mind, satisfaction and happiness could only follow successful effort. Finishing a task from the day left quiet proof that I was capable of shaping the world around me, that I didn’t have to accept the world I had been given. I was free, for this was true freedom, to build something beyond where I was, even if, as a child, I couldn’t yet imagine what that might be. To me, the proof and truth of this mattered more than praise. Often stressed, unhappy, and melancholy, the idea that I could design something bigger for myself mattered more than comfort. Somewhere along the way, movement stopped being just something I did and became something I was. It turned into a compulsion, and I was convinced that if I took action, results would follow; therefore, it was up to me to keep going.

I felt compelled to take action, even in the smallest routines: carrying buckets, feeding animals, selling onions and homemade cinnamon toothpicks, smuggling candies and sodas to kids in elementary school, writing stories, selling poems, and counting coins. It became an obsession: planning what might come next. I saw life as something that needed to be lived, something that had to be pushed forward, even forcefully. The idea of moving ahead and taking no prisoners grew stronger each week, leading to years of steady pushing. Every moment seemed to hold the potential for progress and for escape. Even rest started to feel temporary, a brief pause before moving on, a distraction even, so much so that I avoided going to bed and woke up early, getting ready for my day before sunrise. If I woke my parents, I knew I’d get a guaranteed beating, so I stayed in my room reading and writing until Jack LaLanne appeared, and then my day could begin.

There were moments when I sensed the shift but didn’t question it. I felt pride when work filled my hours. In school, I was constantly in trouble for daydreaming, staring out the window, or writing scripts instead of listening to math instruction. No punishment, not even Mrs. Running’s drill-holed paddle, could dampen the pride I felt when I was working. I was beaten at home, so why not at school? It didn’t matter to me as long as I was moving forward. When nothing demanded my attention, I felt uneasy and lost. Movement became essential. Being productive became normal. Stillness always carried a slight uneasiness, as if it revealed something I didn’t want to face. Movement became the only thing that mattered because it masked all of life’s uncertainties, even my own realities, with action. If I kept moving, I believed in my mind and heart that the future felt closer, more reachable, less abstract. One day, I would take the money from my hidden piggy bank and hop a train heading south or west.

The adults around me often talked about hard work, but their actions told a different story; their words seemed to fade into the background noise of their everyday laziness. They were stuck in their lives, living in leaky houses without electricity, running water, or a phone, because they lacked the drive to change. Their laziness taught me a lot, as did the emptiness of their conversations and the lack of effort in their actions. What stayed with me wasn’t what they said, but what I saw. I observed hands that sat still, as well as hands like my Grandmother Stafford’s that never rested for long. I saw bodies that moved despite exhaustion and bodies that never moved at all. I learned that survival depended on persistence, especially for a few in my family who tried to escape the poverty that seemed most natural and expected for most people I knew. These experiences shaped me, even though at my young age, I couldn’t yet put it into words. Consistent and deliberate forward movement became a direction I trusted more than any specific destination.

Throughout those early years, I developed a habit of seeing possibilities where others saw burdens. Chores became opportunities. Small responsibilities became proof that I was capable of more than that. Each task completed, each story, poem, or essay published strengthened the belief that effort drives movement and movement drives change. The cycle quietly fueled itself, without ceremony, bells, or whistles, until motion became a part of me, an understanding that it was the safest way to exist.

There were evenings when the world seemed to slow down after dinner, when the animals were settled and put to bed, and the air grew still. My parents watched television while I retreated to the backyard to lie in the grass and look at the stars, wondering if I would ever reach them. In those moments, I sometimes felt the quiet pressing in from all sides, but it did not feel peaceful. It felt unfamiliar. The absence of activity, the stillness and relaxation, left a hollowness in me that unsettled and even depressed me, as if something had gone missing because I had taken a moment to lie in the grass, listening to cicadas and frogs. I couldn’t stay still for long; I had to return to motion, whatever that might mean. Even in church, I practiced sleight-of-hand magic tricks beneath the back of the pew, sitting in a spot away from everyone and my family so they wouldn’t see what I was doing. I had to keep busy and keep improving, even as the preacher droned on about how much Jesus loved me. I often wondered if Jesus loved me that much and delivered people, when was he going to come and deliver me? I learned to rely on my own ability to do magic tricks. No one, not even Jesus, was coming to save me or heal the stripes on my back from childhood abuse. Everyone made a big deal about the blood flowing from the slices on Jesus’s back, but no one cared about me. I was alone and, if I wanted to escape, I had to do it myself. I always returned to motion.

Before I went to bed each night, I would stare at the ceiling in the darkness and look at the stars outside the windows built above the bookshelves my dad made for me to store my small library. I always planned the next day. I knew what needed to be done to make it successful, and if it wasn’t, I scolded my childhood self for a lack of discipline or for cowardice in letting adults change my plans. I vowed that one day I would not let anyone tell me what to do. In my mind, there was God, then me, then everyone else. I would only answer to God. So each night, I reaffirmed myself and what I hoped to see in the fog of my future. I counted what I had earned that day. I imagined what could be built from what I already possessed. Thinking about the next day’s movements reassured me. It gave shape to the uncertainty of my life. It created the illusion that time could be guided if only I worked hard enough, and working hard was what I intended to do.

What I didn’t realize in these early years was how easily my reputation became my identity. As I advanced in life, school, and ambition, the tasks increased, and the responsibilities expanded. The small successes of my childhood slowly hardened into not just actions and accomplishments but also into expectations. I came to believe that progress was not only desirable but essential. If movement created possibility, then stopping or even slowing down threatened it. This idea quietly settled into my mind, becoming less visible with each passing year. I began to feel most like myself and at peace when I was moving toward something. Not necessarily arriving or celebrating, but just moving. I achieved a lot, but there was rarely a moment to celebrate because, no matter what I accomplished, I always felt I fell short. Even success has its own form of failure.

The act of moving forward itself showed that my life had purpose. At home, feeling unwanted, I made my family my future, just like Jesus saying God could raise his children from rocks, not even from human parents. It became a sign that life was unfolding as it should. I was a rock. Even uncertainty felt tolerable as long as I kept moving. Stagnation, on the other hand, felt dangerous and deadly. It suggested that failure was imminent even before it had a chance to appear.

Looking back now, I see how easily motion disguised itself as identity, and I still struggle with the wiring my childhood brain formed. Each step forward in my brain’s synapses reinforced the belief that progress defined worth, that effort justified existence, and that movement protected against the uncertainty that lingered beneath the stillness. The childhood habits, built on fear, anger, sadness, and depression, formed quietly without notice. One day followed another. One task followed another. One tear followed another. What started as survival slowly became a rhythm as organized and structured as Jack LaLanne’s exercises. That rhythm turned into expectation. I didn’t question any of it because it worked and, to me, that was all that mattered. Movement produced results. Results built confidence. Confidence led to more movement. Together, all of this gradually changed my life.

By the time I reached fourth grade, I had become someone who kept moving forward even when no one was watching. I did it not because I was told to, not because I was beaten into submission or abused to make a point, and not because I was forced to, but because my father told me several times that I disgusted him because it seemed I was trying to “outgrow my raising.” I fell in love with moving forward because it felt like the natural state of being alive and, moreover, about staying alive. Once movement becomes identity, stillness then has no choice but to start to feel like loss.

Shane McKnight 4/17/26 Shane McKnight 4/17/26

Literary Alchemy: Ingredients of the Story – Conflict

In this installment of Literary Alchemy: Ingredients of the Story, Chrissy Hicks explores conflict as the driving force behind compelling fiction. From internal struggles to external battles, she breaks down how conflict shapes character, builds tension, and mirrors real life—offering practical techniques and examples to help writers craft stories that keep readers fully engaged.

A series designed to elevate your skills and empower you to write like a pro.

By Chrissy Hicks

Since April is tornado season in Tennessee, it seemed a suitable time to examine this essential element of storytelling. Conflict is the struggle between opposing forces. We encounter this through mental battles and external forces.

Why use Conflict?

A story without conflict is boring. Imagine if Yossarian never left the hospital in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22? For one, we wouldn’t have the classic novel that became a popular catchphrase. More importantly, it’d be a giant yawn. Who wants to read a story where nothing happens?
Escalate tension and keep the reader on the edge of their seat. The type of conflict—its level of intensity—depends on genre. In literary fiction, internal struggles are often emphasized over external challenges, while in thrillers, although internal dilemmas are important, external conflict often takes center stage. Consider TJ Newman’s thriller, Falling, in which a pilot is given an impossible choice: crash his plane, killing hundreds, or witness the murder of his kidnapped family.
Provide character insight. Internal conflict creates good use of interiority and helps us relate to characters. External conflict causes people to react, and these reactions show us their character and personality. In Michael Rigg’s Voices of the Elysian Fields, Jonathan Gray, a deputy coroner, struggles with grief over the traumatic loss of his child and anger at a broken, bureaucratic system (internal struggles), and fights through obstacles as he investigates connected events that reveals dark secrets within the city’s elite—people who will do anything to stop him (external battles).

Art imitates life, and life is hard, complex, challenging, and conflicted. Simply put, conflict reflects real life. It’s intertwined with human experience. Not a day goes by without some sort of obstacle or difficulty, whether we like it or not. In my short story Baby’s Breath, a pregnant woman struggles to cope with an eating disorder while carrying her firstborn child, and deals with external pressure from a concerned boyfriend and the looming responsibility of motherhood.

How and When to Use Conflict:

Conflict is the backbone of a good story. It forces characters to act; it can result from characters’ actions (or inactions), and it can come from anywhere, showing up in subtle or explicit ways. For the sake of example, I’ll split this section into two: Internal vs. External.

Internal

Moral Dilemmas: Gray areas create drama. Bill Hoffman’s family was kidnapped—and he can do absolutely nothing about it because he’s flying a plane. But that’s not his biggest problem! The major conflict comes from the abductor’s ultimatum: the only way to save his family is to crash the plane. (Falling).

Granted, not all moral dilemmas are this extreme. Take, for example, a young pregnant woman struggling with bulimia. A recent visit to the doctor reveals she’s losing weight. She promises she’ll eat more, but can’t overcome the bulimic urges, despite her desire to care for her unborn child. (Baby’s Breath).

Identity crises: Self-image, beliefs, and desires can create enough conflict to fill volumes. Yossarian constantly searches for connection and meaning in the face of war. In the chaos, he grapples with his identity as a soldier while overcome by fear. (Catch-22).
Emotional struggles: Conflict reminds us we are less in control that we’d like to be, and some people will go to great lengths to avoid it. Instead of dealing with her past, Bella copes by bingeing and purging. “I’d been fine on my own, had everything under control, a high honors student on a fast track to pharmacy school; my bingeing and purging episodes perfectly strategized.” But the statement alone is contradictory—despite trying to convince herself and others she’s fine, Bella’s less in control that she believes. (Baby’s Breath). However, other characters find strength by turning their anger, sorrow, jealousy, or bitterness into action. Dr. Gray’s personal loss drives him to channel his heavy grief into activism. (Voices of Elysian Fields).
Unreliable (or biased) Narrators: Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? “Facts” told by a narrator aren’t often as black-and-white as presented, and an unreliable narrator can skew our perception, and the reality for those around them, creating conflict from their biases, lies, and little ‘t’ truths. Consider Rachel—an unemployed woman struggling with alcohol—who witnesses a shocking event that leads her to dig into a missing persons case, but can she trust what she saw? Or is her mind too far gone? (The Girl on the Train).

External

People vs. People: Conflict can arise from characters’ actions or inactions. Aren’t we often the root of our own problems, too? Yossarian’s conflict isn’t just with the enemy he fights during WWII, but with those around him. He is constantly up against Cathcart, who represents the absurdity of bureaucracy, as well as Milo, who’s manipulative and solely focused on turning the war into a profit-gaining enterprise. (Catch-22).
People vs. Society: This includes conflict stemming from cultural norms, traditions, or laws, economic wealth, or disparity. Dr. Gray contends with a bureaucratic system that has neglected the coroner’s office. Inadequate space leaves them dealing with bodies piling up (literally). His situation is exacerbated by corrupt politicians whom he suspects are at the core of a scandal. (Voices of Elysian Fields).
People vs. Nature (Setting): Setting itself can be a character, and sometimes, an antagonist. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the bleak, ash-covered landscape acts as an adversary. Throughout much of this story, father and son grapple with natural forces, and the environment emerges as a significant character.
People vs. Supernatural: Spirits, ghosts, demons—anything not of this realm can be a source of conflict for our characters. In Claire Fraise’s They Stay series, the protagonist is up against supernatural forces, and she interacts with ghosts (both friend and foe). These paranormal elements are the backbone of all conflicts within the series.
People vs. Machine: With the ever-constant rise in technology, we see this form of conflict played out daily. When the pilot drifts in and out of consciousness, Jo battles to land a plane with instruction from the tower; in this instance, the machine (the plane) has become a grave antagonistic force and the stakes are heightened—if she fails, everyone dies. (Falling).

Lookout!

Observe how conflict unfolds in your favorite movies and books. Study both internal and external conflicts and how they play out. If the internal conflict isn’t stated or obvious, can you infer a character’s inner struggles based on their actions and reactions to outer circumstances? How does the author or director make use of this device? Was it effective? How can your understanding of what they did help you accomplish the same?

Prompt

Develop a character facing two conflicting desires. Perhaps he wishes to be closer to his girlfriend, who’s moving to New York for a dream job, but doesn’t want to leave his quiet life on a Pennsylvania farm. Then, choose from the list of external conflicts above and add that element. Perhaps ghosts come to settle on the farmland, disrupting his peaceful life. Or just as his girlfriend lands in New York, an autonomous AI-controlled technological barrier encircles the entire state, preventing anyone from entering or leaving.

THE FIRST MOMENTUM

In “The First Momentum,” Clay Stafford reflects on the subtle but powerful moment when effort begins to shape direction. What starts as a small, almost unnoticed impulse grows into a force that builds confidence, discipline, and forward motion—revealing how even the simplest actions can spark lasting change.

By Clay Stafford

The first time effort changed my world, I felt it before I understood it. It wasn’t a dramatic moment; it was an impulse. We had few neighbors during my boyhood, but as I walked down the road, I saw wild onions growing in their yards. Someone had mowed their spring grass, and the scent of onions was strong. The night before, my mother had cooked beef liver and onions for dinner, which was one of my favorite childhood dishes. Something aligned in my four-year-old mind. We planted onions in our garden, but the onions in the neighbors’ yards required almost no effort at all. Everyone I knew cooked with onions. I saw an opportunity and walked up the Ledford’s driveway. “One cent for five freshly dug, spring onions,” I offered. I didn’t realize the offer was accepted not because they wanted the onions, but because they wanted them gone from their yards. Regardless, I made my first sale. I went home, got a mattock, dug all the onions from the yard, and made a small pile of change. I offered my services to other neighbors.

It all happened quietly in a private corner of my mind, where work first intersected my imagination without witnesses. Even at this age, I wanted to leave my childhood behind and escape for many reasons. Selling wild onions to neighbors from whom I picked them, essentially selling something that was already theirs, caused a shift inside me. A small inner hinge turned, and a life that had once felt mostly imaginary (getting out) started to seem possible for the first time.

Before that moment, effort mainly meant doing what I was told: chores for my parents, helping both sets of grandparents with their farms, working alongside my father as a mason’s assistant, and managing projects when assigned. But with onions, I became self-directed at a very young age. It came from listening to adults talk, especially my father, that if I worked hard, I would achieve what I wanted. Before walking up the Ledford’s driveway, this advice, ingrained from such an early age, felt unfamiliar to my experience. I understood the words, but they didn’t truly resonate with me until I perhaps sensed a hint of opportunity in the smell of fresh-mowed grass.

I had dreams before then, of course. I’d stand between the ties of the L&N railroad tracks and look one way and then the other, knowing that there had to be something at the end of each direction. I dreamed of finding what was at the end of them, like that pot of gold hidden at the bottom of rainbows that my Grandmother Stafford told me about. These were carefree childhood dreams, the kind without experience, simple dreams, the kind that come before the realization that dreams will eventually face obstacles. As a child, I was Superman. I did not yet know my kryptonite. At that age, it’s easy to imagine many futures, even conflicting ones, like a boy imagining a distant city. I had never been to a large city, though I had seen Chattanooga, and that was enough to imagine one. But as I gazed north and south along the tracks, it seemed unlikely that the futures my small, inexperienced mind envisioned could be reached by walking there. It would require the jets I sometimes watched fly overhead.

At that age, I truly had no understanding of how the world worked. Effort felt abstract then, something distant from my everyday life. The outside world seemed vast and complicated as I tried to understand it by looking at pictures from my mother’s National Geographic subscription. Whatever movement or life existed inside it seemed to belong mostly to other people: older individuals, those who knew what they wanted, my older brothers, people who seemed to know things I didn’t and couldn’t grasp. Then, almost by accident, I did something on impulse: I went door to door with a mattock, selling people their own wild onions. Part of me felt I was pulling a fast one on the neighbors, not realizing they were doing the same thing, but I approached this new venture with a seriousness I hadn’t felt before until the wild onions went back into summer hibernation. I know it made me want more, but wild onions only grew so fast, so a second understanding began to develop: patience. Selling wild onions meant returning to the effort more than once, checking the yards to see how fast the onions were growing. This required a stubbornness that even surprised me, even as I felt it taking hold. I didn’t tell my parents what I was doing, nor did I let them see the money I earned. This was mine: my idea and my rewards.

When I was six, something important happened. I had been secretly saving my money in a Mason jar hidden beneath the debris in my closet to prevent anyone in the family from stealing it. My grandfather Parker, Papa, must have known (I guessed the neighbors had talked about what that Stafford kid was doing), and when he appeared, he offered to sell me his eighty-acre farm if I had $10 to buy it. I eagerly accepted, and I now owned a farm, much to the anger of my father and one of my brothers, who believed the farm should have gone to them. This opened a new door. With more money I saved from wild onions and selling vegetables to neighbors from my family’s large gardens, I began buying cattle, then poultry, and then selling cows, poultry, and eggs. I even started breeding and selling mice wholesale to pet stores. The work I started on impulse (selling wild onions) began to open up more opportunities. For a long time afterward, I looked back almost suspiciously at how strange it seemed that a boy like me should own a farm, make money, and plan his own escape.

Although I couldn’t name or verbalize the idea, I realized that my world wasn’t moving randomly. It moved because I kept putting in effort. I understood it not intellectually but physically, the way a body learns something before the mind does.

Once that understanding arrived, even in its smallest form, it changed the atmosphere of everything around me. I got involved in small businesses, using the money I had to generate more money. I opened a bank account by the time I was eight and moved money from my Mason jar to a safer place where it earned the most interest. By fourteen, I started my own production company, which I even registered as a DBA with the state of Tennessee. I didn’t realize it then, but it would change the course of my life and open the door for the escape I had hoped for so long. The world didn’t seem easier through all of this; it felt more demanding, but it was a demand I welcomed. Most importantly, life and effort no longer felt indifferent. My father was right: if I worked hard, the things I wanted would come.

There is a current beneath everything that effort seems to touch. It felt intoxicating to me in a way I didn’t yet recognize, but I sensed the addiction and the rush. Effort carried the promise of movement: the gap between imagination and reality might not be as wide as I thought. I began noticing what effort could do in everything around me. I saw it in the quiet persistence of people working long after anyone was watching. I saw it in the small improvements from consistently returning to the same unfinished task. I saw it in the steady accumulation of results that, from the outside, looked like sudden success. But nothing was truly sudden. Patience played a role once again. Yet what stayed with me most was that initial feeling of discovery: if you knocked on the door, people would buy their own onions. Effort created something, even as simple as a knock and an offer. It wasn’t luck. It had nothing to do with timing. It only existed in the realm of self-chosen and self-directed effort.

I still didn’t realize how complicated the truth would become later in life. I hadn’t yet understood how often my future efforts would face resistance or how many things the world would refuse to move, no matter how patiently I pushed. In my young Appalachian life, things moved more simply and slowly than what would eventually come. But I knew one thing, and I would never forget it: selling onions changed my life. Work could change things, and because I had felt that even in its simplest, smallest form, I could never forget it. Early effort shaped the way I approached everything afterward. Not exactly with confidence; confidence would come much later, but with quiet curiosity about what might happen if effort was applied again, and then again.

Effort as an adult can be unpredictable. Sometimes it yields nothing, and the world remains exactly the same. But at times, in those precious moments, things change. A little progress here, a small breakthrough there, a quick “yes” when it’s most needed, a faint sense that movement has begun where there was once only stillness or even stagnation. Looking back now, I see that what started on the day I walked up the Ledford’s driveway wasn’t success; it was momentum. It was the subtle pull forward that appears when effort and possibility first meet. There was no certainty or clear direction. It simply came as an impulse: the feeling and belief that once motion begins, it can create something new, and perhaps even keep offering its own kind of blessings in response to the effort I put in. That was enough. Once I sensed the world responding to my effort, even once, like when I pulled those first pungent wild onions from the Ledford’s front yard, I would never again believe that standing still was all the world knew how to do.

Shane McKnight 4/10/26 Shane McKnight 4/10/26

This Crazy Writing Life: Four Million And Counting! Please, Somebody, Make It Stop!

In this installment of This Crazy Writing Life, Steven Womack examines the explosive rise of AI-generated books and the growing challenges facing today’s writers. With millions of titles flooding the market each year, he explores how shifting publishing models, algorithms, and emerging technologies are reshaping the industry—and what it means for authors striving to create meaningful, lasting work.

By Steven Womack

As I mentioned in a previous installment of This Crazy Writing Life, it’s impossible to determine how many books are published each year throughout the world. However, most experts seem to agree that our best guess estimates now pop four million a year.

Four million books a year!

It gobsmacks the imagination. And with the advent of generative AI, that number’s going nowhere but up. It’s indicative of how much alarm this has caused that Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)—Amazon’s indie pubbing platform—now limits you to publishing three books a day. If you’re good with AI, you can produce a “book” in under an hour. There’s evidence that there are thousands of accounts out there uploading more than 100 books a month.

It’s insane.

So when British writer and indie pubbing guru James Blatch (who is perhaps best known as Mark Dawson’s partner in what used to be called Mark Dawson’s Self-Publishing Formula before rebranding itself) wrote a Substack post a couple of months ago in which he suggested that KDP should charge $300 per upload…

Well, as we say in the screenwriting biz, chaos ensued.

This sent people straight into panic mode. I get it; most self-published books don’t earn $300 over the course of their entire lives (and a lot of trad books don’t). This would put a ton of folks out of business. And it’s going against the tide of where the indie-pubbing industry is headed. Ingram used to charge to upload a book, but now they’ve dropped that.

Apparently, Blatch (who is a genuinely nice guy; I had dinner with him and Mark Dawson at the Novelists, Inc. conference a few years ago) received nothing short of an avalanche of insults and threats over this idea. In a follow-up to the original Substack post, he wrote that:

Clearly the figure of $300 was the main issue. Even if it covers all derivatives, including translations, it would adversely affect more authors than I considered. But I will stand by the theme of the post.

Blatch makes a good case for putting up some kind of seawall against this word tsunami. If there’s no limit to AI slop, then we’ll all soon be drowning in it. Let’s also not forget The Elephant in the Middle of the Room, which is that a great many human-written indie-pubbed books should have never seen the light of day either (okay, there, I said it).

Of course, I’m not talking about your book or mine, but c’mon folks… We’ve all seen indie-pubbed books that are, frankly, embarrassing.

Prior to AI, my reasoning would have been that the market would have been the seawall. Word gets around that a book sucks and nobody will buy it. But these AI-generated tomes are also encased in AI-generated covers and backed up by AI-generated marketing. And if you’ve ever noodled around with AI covers and marketing (I have), you’ll soon learn that AI can produce some pretty good B.S. Their covers aren’t bad either.

This massive digital landslide hurts serious indie-pubbed writers. Amazon doesn’t give a rat’s rusty flip about you as an author. What they do care about is profit, and how do you protect profit?

By not p^*#ing off your customers.

Blatch wrote that Amazon has achieved this by altering its algorithm so that indie titles are penalized and held back from some chart positions. The algorithm has been tilted to the conservative side, so that books that make the best-selling charts tend toward those with a larger sales history.

I get why Amazon does this.

But it still hurts.

What we’re up against is the business model of AI-generated books. Humans who take writing seriously want to produce quality work that sustains itself over a long period of time. In the early days of my writing career, I imagined that my books would be a kind of annuity that would support me in my dotage and then continue to produce for my family after I’ve gone (reality quickly shut that dream the hell down).

AI-generated books are a new business model. When you’re producing a hundred books a month, if each one sells a couple dozen copies before people realize they’re drek, then you’re on your way to making a good living.

All this sounds like there are people running clandestine AI-slop farms from obscure offshore locations with no extradition treaty, like the folks with exotic accents who call me ten times a day offering me help with Medicare or make an offer on my house. That’s not always the case, though. Consider romance novelist Coral Hart, who was profiled a couple of months back in The New York Times. Ms. Hart is open and aboveboard about it: she creates romance novels with AI (specifically Anthropic’s Claude). She produced more than 200 last year, selling over 50,000 copies, and earning a good, solid six figures. To prove it could be done, she generated one while being interviewed.

It took her not quite 45 minutes.

So that’s what we’re up against. The competition was bad enough before AI. Now it’s even worse, and it’s not going away.

Now this effluent storm has even hit the trad publishing space. Hachette cancelled publication of the horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard in the wake of The New York Times raising suspicion about the book. The cancellation of the novel, originally self-published and then picked up by Hachette after presumably good numbers and reviews, has caused a real ruckus in publishing. Apparently, there was a lot of speculation about AI content in the book from the get-go, but Ms. Ballard has vehemently denied in interviews and statements that she had anything to do with this. She maintains that the editor used AI to change some of her text without her knowledge.

But this begs the question of why a professional author wouldn’t go over the editorial revisions and catch the AI changes. Most writers that I’ve ever known, myself included, go absolutely medieval over a manuscript that’s been touched by an editor. Sharyn McCrumb once told me she was so put out over a copyeditor’s changes to her manuscript that she had two rubber stamps made. The first read Stet. The second read Stet, damnit!

The other issue that pops up here is why didn’t Hachette catch the AI problem before the Times pointed it out. Publishing industry guru Jane Friedman speculated that perhaps publishers need to start taking advantage of tools like Pangram, which are designed to detect AI. Maybe trad publishers are just behind the learning curve on AI.

But, Friedman pointed out, the real issue is that AI has now evolved to the stage where it’s going to get harder and harder to detect it. As she wrote: “I hope (finally?) that this is a wake-up call for publishing professionals. This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Jane Friedman is spot on with this one. AI isn’t going anywhere; in fact, it’s going to get a little bit better each day. I read a blog post by a very famous and important writer (no need to name names here) who raged against AI, saying it was the devil incarnate and he’d never have anything to do with, never touch it.

I think that’s short-sighted. For one thing, if you don’t know anything about AI and refuse to even look at it, then you won’t notice it when it sneaks into your life. If you consider AI the enemy (and I don’t, by the way), then the first rule of war is know your enemy.

To circle back around to James Blatch, he wrote recently that he’d had a conversation with a senior Amazon executive, who told him that Amazon would never introduce an AI checker. As soon as you created one, AI would find ways to get around it. The technology moves too quickly on both sides of the equation.

I don’t have an answer to this one. I’ve noodled around with AI and found it to be an incredibly useful tool. I’ve done everything from generating marketing copy with AI just to see what it looks like, to screening stocks for options opportunities, and planning travel itineraries. AI’s like any other tool; it can be used for useful, worthwhile purposes or it can be used to cause great harm.

The one thing I would never do is use AI to generate copy that I then put my name on.

Bottom line: this is the price we pay for, as the old curse says, living in interesting times.

Next month, I’ll have some news on a project I mentioned in a previous column.

Until then, as always, thanks for playing along.

Shane McKnight 4/6/26 Shane McKnight 4/6/26

Drop the Pen! What Every Writer Should Know About Real Police Work: The Bladed Stance: Why Do Cops Stand Like That?

In this installment of Drop the Pen!, David Lane Williams breaks down the “bladed stance,” a subtle but critical detail in real police work. Blending practical insight with storytelling application, the article shows how posture, positioning, and body language reveal both tactical awareness and communication strategy—offering writers an authentic edge when crafting believable law enforcement characters.

By David Lane Williams

One of my students recently observed two police officers interviewing an intoxicated man who’d caused a disturbance in a downtown bar. The student is pre-law, taking criminology electives to better understand a profession she’ll often engage with after she passes the bar. The incident she witnessed took place in a party district near her campus, an area dominated by college kids on any weekend night.

She had questions about how the two walking beat officers engaged with the belligerent man. One of her questions concerned how the officers were standing. In her words: “There was something odd about their posture, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.”

What she described is something that writers of police procedurals or mysteries involving police officers should understand. Knowing how and when this “odd” posture comes into play could give your work an insider detail that other writers might not know to include in their stories.

Watch a cop the next time you see him talking to someone he doesn’t yet know if he can trust. I predict you’re going to see him standing in what is called a “bladed stance.” Think of a boxer staring at his opponent across the ring. His hands are up, one leg is in front, the other back to lend stability in case he takes a punch.

The bladed stance in police work is the same thing, except the officer’s hands aren’t raised in fists. The stance is taught in police academies around the world because it works well for what it is supposed to do. It gives tripod-like support from behind in case the officer is punched or shoved, while allowing the cop to move out of the way faster should the suspect(s) suddenly try to tackle him.

Let’s pretend you’re playing a game in which your opponent gets a point every time she throws a rubber ball and hits you in the chest. Were you to stand with your feet planted firmly facing your opponent, your ability to move out of the way is slower when the ball is thrown than if you were to stand slightly sideways. The bladed stance allows you to move quickly while only moving one leg back the moment the ball is thrown. Now, imagine replacing the rubber ball with a fist or an attempt to grab you. Being able to move nimbly and with minimal coordination between your feet makes you faster and better able to dodge or absorb the impact.

A bladed stance also offers the distinct advantage of placing most of the officer’s weapons farther from the suspect. There are people in this world who seriously practice grabbing a cop’s gun out of the holster. Outlaw motorcycle gang members have been known to hold practice drills for their members to perfect this dangerous attack. Subsequently, cadets in police academies practice blocking such an attack so that they are never caught off guard or stripped of their weapons during a physical confrontation.

Take a moment to observe a police officer engaging with a citizen the next time you have the opportunity. Chances are, he’ll have his gun, baton, and pepper spray on one hip, with his radio, flashlight, and taser device on the other. In a bladed stance, the deadliest weapon is on the opposite side of the cop’s body from a suspect or detainee.

This makes it more difficult for someone intent on taking a cop’s weapon and using it against him to reach a gun holstered on the opposite side of the officer’s body. The bladed stance adds a layer of protection, making this type of attack less likely to succeed.

There is an additional detail I’d like you to observe next time you’re around officers. Watch their hands. Well-trained and experienced officers will most often stand with their hands in front of their torso while engaging in conversation with someone they’re trying to size up as a potential threat. Some steeple their fingers, others clasp one palm against another. This stance with their hands out in front offers a couple of advantages.

First, their hands are in the perfect position to respond to a surprise attack. I used to have a police chief who would bellow all kinds of less-than-kind things if he spotted a cop standing with his hands in his pockets. The chief’s communication skills could have been better, but his reasoning was sound. Only a brazen idiot stands with his hands in his pockets when facing someone who might mean them grave harm. Being ready for anything means standing in the guarded position I’ve described but doing so in a way that doesn’t telegraph your plan.

Second, a police officer who keeps her hands visible is proactively using body language to convey peaceful intent. This is especially important when dealing with someone experiencing anxiety or who does not automatically trust the police. We talk a lot about training officers to be good communicators in stressful situations. While that certainly means using our words to de-escalate tense moments, this also means conveying benign intent with our entire bodies.

Policing is both a science and an art. The bladed stance is data-proven to be reliable when violence erupts. Great communication skills learned and utilized during some of the most stressful moments between human beings is an art form. Being able to seamlessly blend such science and art is foundational to great police work, and applying such skill to your protagonist makes for outstanding prose that your readers will appreciate and remember.

Carry on.

Shane McKnight 4/3/26 Shane McKnight 4/3/26

THE QUIETNESS BENEATH THE STRIVING

In “The Quietness Beneath the Striving,” Clay Stafford reflects on a life driven by constant motion and ambition, only to discover a profound shift when the striving finally quiets. In that stillness, he confronts the deeper question of identity—who we are without the chase—and explores the peace, clarity, and self-understanding that emerge when we stop pushing and simply listen.

By Clay Stafford

In that quiet moment, I realized I was no longer striving. For most of my life, I chased something I could never quite name. I moved against the ticking of an internal clock only I could hear, always aware that time kept moving forward.

No actual Big Ben was telling the time, but I felt its presence in how I approached work, opportunities, relationships, meals, sleep, and even the ordinary moments of each day. My life carried a quiet urgency that fueled my ambition. I rose early, pushed forward with determination, pursued the next project, the next mountain to climb, the next room, the next possibility, hoping it meant I was moving in the right direction. Movement was always necessary. Ambition was desired. Action was virtuous. I questioned none of these. Movement, always, justified itself.

Although I always felt overwhelmed and behind, those outside my mind admired my life and career, often complimenting me on how much I had achieved with so little sleep. I worked hard. I built things. I wrote. I traveled, spoke, taught, and organized. My days were packed, seven days a week, driven by what I saw as purpose, and I rarely questioned purpose when it showed measurable results. Invitations came. Opportunities followed. Doors opened. I moved through them all with the confidence of someone who has long believed that forward momentum is the key to a well-lived life.

A ghost haunted me. No matter how much I searched within myself, I couldn’t see it clearly, but there were many small, hollow, and lonely moments when I sensed something hidden just beneath my movements. I couldn’t quite grasp it and mistook it for guilt for not working harder. I walked the hotel hallways late at night, stared at the stars after a long day of writing or directing, and always, there was a lingering vibration inside me, something unsettled. My days went well, but it was the quiet of the night that seemed to condemn me. I searched for the source of that restlessness but could not name it. How could I feel so empty when the day had gone so well?

Caring and striving were like twin threads woven together in my mind. I grew up in and intentionally stepped away from circumstances where effort wasn’t optional if you wanted to escape a room with no doors or windows. If something mattered or freedom was vital, I approached it with intensity. “How would you describe me?” I would ask my friends when we sat around reminiscing about our day. “Intense” was the word most often used when describing me. And why shouldn’t it be? If something truly mattered, didn’t it demand intensity? If a dream was worth chasing, didn’t it call for force? The world does not open easily, and I learned early that doors had to be pushed because something on the other side was always pushing back. Over time, through experience and different situations, my mind rewired itself, and my posture hardened into a habit. I became skilled at many things, especially pushing.

The work itself never felt wrong. I loved writing. I loved creating in many forms. I loved teaching. I enjoyed building companies and projects. I cherished the strange and wonderful spaces where ideas moved between people and something unexpected appeared in every room. Those moments of exchange and growth felt like the closest I knew to being true to myself, but the path to them still carried a constant, underlying tension that I rarely examined, even though I always felt it. I assumed it was simply part of the deal. Years passed this way, much of my life.

The shift happened gradually enough that I didn’t notice it at first. Nothing sudden or dramatic took place, no failures, no collapses, no abrupt rejections that forced a change in direction. I kept climbing. The work continued. The invitations kept coming. The doors I pushed so hard against started to open. I kept writing, speaking, and building the things I believed were worth creating, but something began to change within the movement itself.

I started to notice, gradually, that the urgency that had driven me and been inside me for so long was beginning to fade. Projects still mattered, but they no longer felt like evidence of anything. Conversations still energized me, but they didn’t carry the same weight to confirm my place in the world. My focus started to expand beyond work. I didn’t lessen anything; I added my family life to the mix with the same sense of purpose. Professionally, then personally, the invisible clock kept ticking. Yet, something strange happened: the constant ticking somewhere behind my ribs and in my gut began to fade, then grew oddly silent, enough to scare me. At first, I wondered if I had lost my edge, or maybe I had climbed so high that there was nowhere left to climb.

To me, intensity was synonymous with vitality. As intensity faded, it left behind an unfamiliar silence. I lacked the experience to understand or accept it. Sometimes, I would sit down to work in the mornings and notice that the old edge, the one that had propelled me forward for so many years with relentless energy, was no longer there in the same way. It felt unsettling. Shouldn’t I be feeling stressed this morning? The absence of stress felt wrong, as if a hole had opened somewhere. The work was still there. The desire to do everything well persisted. What had disappeared was the feeling that the work needed to justify my existence.

For years, I believed and knew that striving was the driving force of my life. Without it, I thought, the entire structure of who I was and what I had built might fall apart, yet the opposite seemed to be happening. The work continued, but it changed. The writing deepened. The conversations felt less like performances and more like authentic encounters. I found myself listening longer, talking less, pausing before responding, and letting ideas come in their own time instead of forcing them. I began to see my mind shift from rapid change to deep transformation. I wondered if it was age. I questioned whether something essential was fading. But it was something else, still without a name or face. The love of the work was still there exactly as before. What had vanished was the tension that once surrounded it.

I began to realize that much of the effort I had invested wasn’t really about the work itself. It was about what the work might prove. Every project once carried a subtle secondary goal: to confirm that I was moving in the right direction and that the path I chose mattered. When that need was alleviated, writing felt less like arguing with the future and more like engaging with the present. Teaching felt less like displaying knowledge and more like sharing a space with people who were thinking their way through something together. Even the long days of organizing and planning, which once felt like necessary battles against time, began to take on a calmer rhythm. As I loosened, my work shifted as well. The life I loved no longer required the intense striving that once defined it. The realization was both simple and disorienting.

One afternoon, while at my desk, I realized that hours had passed without the usual tightness in my chest that often came with long periods of focus. I had been writing steadily, absorbed in my work, moving smoothly from one idea to the next with a calm attention that felt almost strange. When I got up and went into the kitchen, I noticed that the day had gone by without that old sense of pressure. Nothing had been forced. The work had simply happened.

I reflected on earlier years when every step forward seemed to need a kind of inner strength, as if the next moment might demand more effort than the last. I remembered the determination that carried me through those times, the relentless push that opened doors that might otherwise have stayed closed. The past brought me to where I am today. I don’t regret any of it. The effort served its purpose. It carried me through landscapes where effort was the only language that worked. It built things that mattered. It took me to rooms I had once only dreamed of entering, but somewhere along the way, the reason for that stance quietly faded. The work I love no longer needs to be defended by force. It has become its own justification.

Looking back on the past, I see my younger self moving forward with admirable determination, overcoming obstacles that once seemed impossible. I feel gratitude and tenderness for that version of myself. That younger man believed that intensity was the price of meaning, and in many ways, he was right; however, the life that followed didn’t require the same approach. The projects still mattered. The conversations still mattered. The writing still mattered. My family still mattered. What changed was the environment around those things. The atmosphere felt clearer, the movements lighter, and living no longer carried the burden of proving anything beyond itself. Instead, it demanded attention. When I finally saw it, the fullness of life had always been there.

I still worked. I still built things. I still loved. I still followed the ideas that sparked my curiosity and the conversations that drew me deeper into the strange and beautiful experience of being alive, but the motion felt different. The clock had stopped ticking somewhere beyond my awareness, and when I finally noticed the silence it left behind, I realized that the life I had been chasing had quietly been walking beside me all along.

Shane McKnight 3/27/26 Shane McKnight 3/27/26

WHEN BEING SEEN WAS COSTING ME MY VOICE

In “When Being Seen Was Costing Me My Voice,” Clay Stafford reflects on the hidden cost of visibility—how recognition, success, and constant presence can slowly erode authenticity. As he examines the tension between being seen and truly being heard, he uncovers the quiet realization that reclaiming one’s voice sometimes requires stepping back, setting boundaries, and redefining what it means to show up.

By Clay Stafford

I had been visible for years before I realized I was disappearing. My name appeared on programs. My work circulated in rooms I wasn’t in. I was introduced, quoted, and invited back. People recognized me in hallways and said kind, even effusive, things about my presentations. From the outside, it looked like presence. From the inside, it felt like a faint but steady misalignment I couldn’t put my finger on, as if I were arriving everywhere slightly ahead of myself, leaving something essential behind.

At the time, I did not have the words for it, but I could feel it. I knew only that I could move through a day of being seen, noticed, acknowledged, and included, and still return to my hotel room with the peculiar sensation that nothing of me had truly been encountered. The interactions had been real, the exchanges polite, always warm, encouraging, and welcoming, yet something beneath remained untouched, like a current beneath the visible surface of water that no one had dared to step into. This was when I realized that remaining visible on others’ terms was costing me my own voice.

For a long time, I mistook participation for expression. I spoke when asked, contributed when invited, shaped my words to the room’s tone, adjusted emphasis, softened angles, and translated what I meant into what could be easily received. I had been taught and trained that these were exemplary traits of a professional speaker. It did not feel dishonest; it felt appropriate, even skillful. I believed I was being effective by being flexible and quick on my feet.

There were advantages to this way of moving: doors opened, conversations stayed smooth, I was easy to place and include, and I played the game well. I rarely disrupted the existing architecture of any space I entered. Whatever I carried that did not fit the frame, I held back without quite noticing. I conducted myself as a seasoned professional. It seemed natural to assume that whatever was most central in me would eventually find its way forward once conditions allowed. However, conditions remained remarkably consistent.

I began to notice that the more visible I became, the more carefully I edited myself in real time. It was not overt suppression but a series of small internal calculations: this part later, that part reframed, this angle unnecessary, that thought too sharp for this context. I watched myself adjust mid-sentence, reading the audience, sanding edges before they reached the air. Others responded positively. I was articulate, measured, constructive. I left interactions intact. I also left them unmarked by anything that would have required me to stand fully behind what I knew but had not said. I sought to encourage and entertain, never saying anything that would lessen my audience’s zeal. The cost did not appear as a loss; it was loaded with positives. The audiences were left uplifted, but I was left fatigued without an obvious cause. I still couldn’t put a name to it.

There were evenings spent in those hotel rooms, looking out over whatever new city I was in, when I could not find exactly what had been spent. I had not argued, had not defended, had not even disagreed strongly enough to be memorable, and yet I felt as though I had been slightly erased in my own presence, the way a photograph fades not all at once but in increments too small to notice until a comparison is made, a hollowness that could not be explained.

The recognition came during an ordinary conversation while I was delivering a speech on “Thinking Outside the Box” to a group of high-ranking officers in the U.S. Department of Defense, following the usual pattern. I was asked a question that touched something I cared about deeply. I began to answer, but halfway through, I heard myself shift tone, redirecting toward safer phrasing, aligning with the prevailing view before my own thought had fully formed. The person in the audience who asked the question nodded, satisfied. The exchange moved on. Another question, another sincere but necessarily incomplete answer. No one would have registered anything unusual, but I felt the moment standing there on that stage in front of a couple of thousand intimidating individuals that I had stepped aside from myself.

It was not dramatic, but I felt myself stumble and pause, then kick back in professionally as if nothing had happened. No one interrupted or contradicted me, and nothing external kept me from finishing the thought as it had first formed; I doubt anyone in the audience noticed. The change came entirely from within, so practiced that it barely registered. That was what stopped me: how automatic it had been, how quickly I had chosen to align with the room’s expectations of what they wanted to hear rather than with myself. The presentation and question-and-answer session ended. I left the stage, hearing the echo of applause, but also the echo of what I had almost said.

What startled me was not fear. It was recognition. I had done this many times. I had mistaken being allowed to speak for being willing to say what was true. I had accepted inclusion that required no more than participation. I had equated circulation with expression, and in doing so, I had stayed visible in ways that asked nothing of me that might have cost me acceptance or an invitation to return.

I began, quietly, to track these moments in future speaking engagements, not correcting them yet, only noticing. The sentence softened before release, the point abandoned mid-formation, the thought translated into something adjacent yet less precise. Each instance was minor, but together they outlined a pattern I would later reflect on in my hotel: I had learned to remain seen without risking being fully heard.

There were reasons. Early experiences in which speaking or writing directly carried penalties, contexts in which smoothness ensured safety, and environments where standing apart invited correction or withdrawal. Adaptation had been intelligent. It had worked, and professionally, it had worked well. It had also lingered long past the conditions that required it, operating now in rooms that might have held what I actually meant, had I placed it there. What I confronted was not silence imposed from the outside but a self-maintained narrowing of what I allowed to be revealed.

The loss revealed itself in the absence of resonance. Interactions ended cleanly but did not land. My contributions were acknowledged, yet others shifted only within their comfort zones, including mine. I left exchanges intact yet untouched, as if I had hovered at the edge of my participation. The visibility remained, but I realized the genuine encounter had not.

Sitting alone in the hotel room, I felt grief in that quiet realization, not for opportunities missed or recognition withheld, but for the accumulated distance between what I carried and what I allowed into the conversation with those around me, those who had trusted me and looked to me for sincerity. I had not been prevented; I had remained within boundaries that required only parts of me.

I did not change abruptly. I could not, because I had been developing my style and presentation for decades, but I did begin to allow one thought to finish before editing, then another. Sometimes the room shifted slightly; sometimes it did not. But I could feel myself shifting. Occasionally, there was friction, but more often there was simply a different quality of attention, one that met what I allowed myself to say rather than what I had made acceptable to the room. I felt exposed in unfamiliar ways, yet exhilaratingly present, and, to my surprise, audiences engaged more, not less. New boundaries were approached by all of us.

What I noticed most was internal: a reduction in that unexplained fatigue, a sense of having stayed intact through an exchange, and the absence of that faint afterimage of self-erasure. Being heard did not happen everywhere, but it did not need to. What mattered was that I had remained audible to myself.

Visibility continued, and speaking engagements increased. Invitations continued, and nothing outward collapsed, but the terms shifted, first privately, then publicly. I no longer assumed that inclusion required dilution. Some spaces held what I brought, while others did not. I began to recognize the difference not by response but by whether I had departed from myself to remain.

Looking back, I do not see deception in my earlier ways of speaking. I saw that the way I had learned to present myself no longer matched what I knew. I saw habits that had outlasted the conditions that formed them. I saw a skill settle into habit without being questioned. I saw how easily I had stayed visible in versions of myself that asked little of me. The moment I realized hiding was costing me came not when anyone refused to hear me; it came when I heard myself step aside and recognized that no one else had asked me to.

Since then, visibility has felt different, less like light falling on a surface and more like space in which something either stands or does not. I still speak carefully and consider context, but I no longer edit the core before it reaches my speech, writing, and life and relationships. What remains unsaid now is unsaid by choice, not by reflex. I am still seen in many of the same places, but now, when I leave, I am there too, and I leave whole.

Shane McKnight 3/27/26 Shane McKnight 3/27/26

Between Pen and Paper: Flaneuring Through a Writer’s Mind – Column 14: The Missing Hour: The Curious Elasticity of Time

In this installment of Between Pen and Paper, Andi Kopek explores the strange, elastic nature of time—from the lost hour of daylight saving to the way memory, storytelling, and even planetary movement reshape how we experience it. Blending science, literature, and personal reflection, “The Missing Hour” invites writers to consider how time bends not only in the universe, but on the page.

By Andi Kopek

Last night was one hour shorter than usual.

My phone said so, my car clock confirmed it, and my coffee maker seemed slightly offended by the sudden schedule change. At two in the morning, we simply moved the clock forward and politely agreed that sixty minutes had vanished.

This annual ritual is called daylight saving time. Yet it rarely makes me think about daylight, and it certainly doesn’t feel like savings.

What it really makes me think about is something much stranger. Time.

Time appears perfectly orderly when we look at a clock. Seconds march forward with mechanical confidence. Minutes stack neatly into hours, hours into days, days into years.

But the moment we pay attention to how time actually feels, the neat machinery begins to wobble.

Five minutes waiting in line for coffee can feel longer than two hours spent sipping it with friends. The last ten minutes before a deadline accelerate with alarming enthusiasm. Meanwhile a “quick check” of the phone somehow lasts forty-seven minutes. And childhood summers, when we were eight or nine years old, somehow lasted forever.

Clocks measure minutes. Humans measure experiences.

Writers know this especially well. Three hours at a desk may produce a single stubborn paragraph. Yet occasionally an idea arrives and five pages appear in twenty minutes as if the words had been patiently waiting somewhere outside ordinary time.

For the reader, of course, the ratio reverses. A page that took three days to prepare may be consumed in thirty seconds.

Writing, in this sense, quietly bends time.

Time becomes even stranger when we start moving across the planet itself.

One of the most delightful examples appears in my all-time favorite book, Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, a storytelling genius. In the novel, the famously punctual Phileas Fogg travels around the globe to win a wager that he can do it in eighty days. When he returns to London, he believes he has lost the bet by a single day.

But he has forgotten something subtle.

Because he traveled eastward around the Earth, crossing time zones along the way, he quietly gained a day without realizing it. While racing the clock, he had slipped ahead of the calendar itself.

Travel in the right direction around the planet and time behaves differently.

Our modern system of time zones is surprisingly recent. In the 19th century every town in America kept its own local solar time. Noon simply meant when the sun was directly overhead. That worked fine until railroads appeared. Suddenly trains were trying to run on hundreds of slightly different clocks. In 1883 the railroads solved the problem by introducing standardized time zones across North America.

On November 18, what became known as “The Day of Two Noons,” thousands of clocks were reset in a single afternoon. For a brief moment, some cities experienced noon twice.

Modern science fiction has pushed this idea even further. In Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, astronauts visit worlds where gravity stretches time so dramatically that a few hours for them equal years back on Earth.

You do not need black holes, however, to find a planet with a different clock.

I am currently working on a science-fiction novel that takes place partly on Mars.

A Martian day, called a sol, lasts about twenty-four hours and thirty-nine minutes. Each sunrise arrives just a little later than the one before it, as if the planet itself prefers to linger.

Even more striking, however, is the Martian year. While Earth circles the Sun once every 365 days, Mars takes 687 days to complete its orbit. A year there is almost twice as long as ours.

The simple astronomical act of circling the Sun for nearly twice as long as Earth has surprising consequences.

A ten-year-old by the Martian calendar would be roughly the same age as a twenty-year-old on Earth. Education might unfold differently. Careers might develop at another rhythm. What does retirement mean if a year is nearly twice as long? And what exactly is a thirty-year mortgage on a planet where years stretch so far apart?

Birthdays themselves might become rarer and perhaps more meaningful. On Mars, a child might wait nearly two Earth years before blowing out another set of birthday candles.

That reveals something quietly profound.

A year is not a universal measurement of time. Change the planet and you change the calendar. Change the calendar and you change the meaning of life.

Which makes our annual daylight-saving ritual seem almost modest by comparison.

Last night we misplaced an hour when the clocks jumped forward. Jules Verne once showed that a traveler could gain a whole day by circling the Earth. And somewhere on Mars, a twenty-year-old visitor from Earth would discover that, by the local calendar, they are barely eleven.

The more we think about it, the stranger time becomes.

We imagine it as something universal and precise, yet it quietly shifts depending on where we stand, how fast we move, or even which planet we call home.

Einstein showed that time is relative. Perhaps it is more like an ocean, and every world simply drifts through it at its own pace.

Last night was one hour shorter than usual for some inhabitants of the pale blue dot drifting through endless space.

But if that missing hour sparks a moment of reflection about lost hours, gained days, and life on other planets, then perhaps it was not lost at all.

Andi

When you’re in Nashville, feel free catch one of his live performances. When not engaging with the community, he's hard at work on his next creative project or preparing for his monthly art-focused podcast, The Samovar(t) Lounge: Steeping Conversations with Creative Minds, where in a relaxed space, invited artists share tea and the never-told intricacies of their creative journeys.

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