WHEN BEING SEEN WAS COSTING ME MY VOICE

By Clay Stafford

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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.

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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/.

Punctuation Is Power - Part 4: Finding your style: Free your mind and readers will follow

By Angela K. Durden

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Ernest Hemingway wrote a novel you may have heard of called The Old Man and the Sea. It is described as a brilliant short novel, but before editors got hold of it, it was neither brilliant nor short. In fact, it meandered here and there. What a mess. It took an editor to find the story and chop out the crap, after which Ernest could finish it to become the brilliant, short novel we all know and love. 

Part 3 of my series ended with the recommendation of getting an editor who was not in love with a particular style manual and forcing your story into a predetermined mold that may not fit. Hemingway was well served by just such editors. This column is about finding a style and training readers to it.

Many new writers, not having a technique or approach of their own, attempt to copy the writing style of an author they love. For writers endeavoring to learn the foundational elements of storytelling, pacing, power, scene setting, and so forth, there is nothing wrong with that. Like a musician practicing scales of chords and note patterns of famous works and then learning to vary those themes with his own flavor, a writer must can emulate the masters until that deeper understanding of interplay comes.  

Delve into your heart of hearts and answer this question: Why do you write?

For myself, that answer is: Because I can’t not. Words are my thing and have been since I began learning to talk. Semper fidelis—always in the service of words.

Still, the question can lead to a huge list of follow-ups we don’t have time to cover here. King Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 12:12: “To the making of many books there is no end, and much devotion to them is wearisome to the flesh.” And this is a business that demands attention and can weary a soul.

That being said, it is important to know your own reason. There are no right or wrong answers to the question. But if you find you are wanting to write in order to sell your work for a large, anonymous crowd of readers—that is, you want to sell it in the retail marketplace and be in the business of book sales you will want to bring the best version of your work to that arena and make it stand out from other books also vying for readers’ attentions. 

A book may feel like a baby, but it is a product. So, how can you find your own voice and train a reader to like it, understand it, want more of it?

Finding your own voice is a mysterious process. It cannot be taught, but it can happen. Training a reader is easy. Once you’ve found your voice, now you refine it on the page. Once you’ve got the story pretty close to finished, the hard work of checking the flow begins. 

Then and only then you will question the use of every punctuation mark you’ve put in. You may find a long, run-on sentence that is convoluted and meanders down paths no one can find, yet each part seems important. You must now decide if it needs to be broken up into fragments and whole sentences of varying lengths, or something else entirely. 

What I like to do is copy that one sentence (or graph) and paste it twice into a blank document. The first I will leave as my reference to the original. The second I then play with. Break here, here, and here? Comma there? Colon or semicolon? Then I paste the original sentence in for a third time and play again using both the original and the new edits as reference. Comparing how the meaning and pacing has changed, I change the order of the words, use a thesaurus, maybe work in some alliteration, and look for clichés and repetitions.

After about the third time of doing this, an Aha! moment may arise and you’ll see that maybe the original was perfectly fine, but that the problem was the graphs leading up to it. You rework those portions and bingo, bango, bungo, you got some words worth keeping. 

That’s just one method. However, at this time something seemingly magical will happen. You will begin to find your voice. Like the musician practicing his scales, chord progressions, and inversions, and thus seeing all the variety he can produce, you won’t be afraid of words any longer because the words will know you are treating them as equals and respecting the power they bring to your tale by punctuating with powerful effect and affect. 

Now, once you start punctuating to tell you story your way, make sure you follow that same style throughout the book, and guess what? By about the end of the second chapter, the reader will learn to follow along, simply and naturally enjoying the story.

Punctuation should never get in the way of a tale. Those marks are the workhorses that make the story look good, but they never take center stage away from the star, your story.

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Author, editor, publisher, and more: learn about Angela K. Durden here and here and here.

Five Writing Tips No One Has Ever Told You

By Philip Cioffari

A bold assertion, I know, but there are things one learns over a lifetime of writing that seem to contradict what we’ve been taught and even, at times, to defy both logic and rationality. What follows is a short list of—insights might be too strong a word—items that I’ve learned the hard way.

ONE. You don’t need an idea to get started. Waiting for inspiration or for a “good idea” can be frustrating and time-consuming. Another way of saying that is you’re wasting precious time. Ideas are curious entities and they form in many different ways and for many different reasons. Most often, I’ve found they develop in stages; rarely do they appear fully formed. In lieu of that fully dressed idea, a writer can begin with an image, a single sentence, a character performing a simple action, a particular setting, or even a single word. Anything can serve as a starting point.

Take for example the case of Tennessee Williams. He has stated that his play, A Streetcar Named Desire, began with a single image: a woman in white sitting on a porch. That image eventually became the character Blanche du Bois: the tragic heroine of arguably one of the greatest American plays of the 20th century. When I began my first novel, I had only this notion: a group of boys playing in one of New York City’s urban swamplands. I had no sense of what I wanted to write—or that it would indeed turn out to be a novel—beyond that small detail. Some 10 years later—I know, I know, a hell of a long time, but it was my first—and my novel, Catholic Boys, emerged.

My point is, you can begin anywhere, with the barest scrap of material. Who knows where it will lead? The journey toward the idea is half the fun. One word on the page leads to a second, one sentence to a second sentence. It’s as basic as that.

TWO. Plot is another name for character development. One doesn’t have to agonize over outlining a plot or whether a plot is interesting enough. You don’t need a plot to begin. If the characters are interesting, the plot will be too, because the most genuine, credible plots are an extension of a character’s desires. If you know what a character wants, what the obstacles are, and what he or she will do to overcome those obstacles, then the plot, as if by wizardry, takes form. Simply follow your character’s struggle to reach an objective. And you will have your plot.

THREE. Tension should exist in every sentence. Much can be said about the ways to create narrative tension, but a simple rule I strive for is to have some kind of tension in every sentence of my books. That tension can be of varying kinds, it can be explicit or implicit, but it needs to be there. And I’m not talking about obvious explicit tension—a stabbing or a fist fight or an argument between people. That speaks for itself. I’m referring to the more subtle variations of implicit tension: something is unfinished or unresolved, something is left unsaid, something needs fixing, something is missing that a character needs or wants, and so forth.

Take for example a typical poem of the Romantic era. On the surface, the poem is praising the beauty of a particular flower, but the tension beneath the surface is that as beautiful as this flower is, it’s going to wither and die. So ultimately the poem is about, and the tension comes from, our sense of transience, loss, and grief.

FOUR. Finding your way when you get lost. Nothing is worse for me than losing my emotional connection to my work in the midst of creating it. Where did it go–that connection to the material, that passion that got me started on the work in the first place? Personally, I try to never abandon a work I’ve begun. Something stimulated my initial interest, impulse, or passion. For some reason the material or characters reached out and grabbed hold of me. There’s a story there that needs telling, so I try to forget what I’ve written so far and go back in search of that original impulse. Maybe that means revisiting a place or making contact again with a person or people connected to the incident I’m writing about. Often it’s a matter of feeling my way back to the source: those feelings that first got me engaged in the piece. I might listen to songs or look through photos from a particular period. Essentially, though, I’m trying to pinpoint the source of the impulse that made me want to begin writing the piece in the first place. If I can reconnect to it, I can usually reconnect to the story I’m telling. (This may mean eliminating some or even most of what I’ve written. It may mean going back to that point in the story where I went offtrack and picking up from there.)

FIVE. Revisions take time and distance. One can, and should, do some revisions at the conclusion of completing a piece. What I’ve found is that vital revisions require some kind of separation from that initial effort. What has served me best is to set the work aside and begin a new writing project. When I’ve completed a draft of the new project, then I go back and rework the previous piece. There’s something about immersing oneself in a new writing project that brings with it a sense of objectivity and awareness that’s necessary in the final polishing of a manuscript. Resist the temptation to rush it off for publication. A piece of writing needs time to mature. And we, as writers, are well-served to mature along with it.

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Philip Cioffari grew up in the Bronx and received his B.A. from St. John's University and his Ph.D. from New York University. He teaches in the writing program at William Paterson University. His novels and story collections include: If Anyone Asks, Say I Died From The Heartbreaking Blues; The Bronx Kill; Catholic Boys; Dark Road, Dead End; Jesusville; and A History Of Things Lost Or Broken.