LISTENING

By Clay Stafford

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I always believed that human glory and life’s meaning were found in the senses: what I saw, touched, felt, heard, smelled, and tasted as I sped down the passing lane of accomplishment. These things provided the richness of living, complementary to the mountainous regions of sentience, the arcs and trajectories of being, and the hills and valleys of experience, the satisfaction of the present moment, and the excitement of things to come. Moving through those elevations and absorbing the delight of each moment seemed attainable only through effort and discipline, verified by visible signs of progress. Passivity, I believed, would not allow fate to deepen. Nor would acceptance or routine. I was not born intentionally appreciating what surrounded me. It was up to me to seek it out. Without intention or constant effort, something in me dragged me downward, turning me negative, and closed my eyes to the beauty held even as close as a flower in my hand.

For me, work and sacrifice were never separate. I approached my work the same way I approached my love of conduct: as a builder, a creator, someone constructing what I envisioned and leaving nothing to chance, mitigating the risk of even a moment lived without purpose. Committed to experience and beauty and the love of spirit, I lived with the belief and what felt like proof that if I worked hard enough, planned carefully enough, and remained devoted to improvement, the more profound human aspects, such as spirituality, intellectual pleasure, and emotional fulfillment, would arrive on their own. I only needed to lay the tracks. I assumed understanding, timing, and wisdom would naturally follow once the visible work and confirmation to my senses were undeniable. What I did not realize was that the skill that mattered most, the one that would ultimately transform my existence and my relationships, was not something I could see, touch, feel, hear, smell, or taste. It was not visible at all. It belonged to the category of things I assumed would take care of themselves if I were disciplined enough to live an examined, well-lived reality.

Whether innate or shaped through observation as I grew and matured, I came to believe that vitality was shaped entirely by purposeful intention. When something failed to work, maybe a relationship, a decision, or a season of my lifestyle, I tried to fix it the only way I knew how: by adding more effort, more thinking, more explanation, more force, more control. Wasn’t it my responsibility to build an existence I could eventually look back on without regret, one I could reach the end of and say, well done? For me, clarity came from that assertion, from believing meaning could be pressed into place if I pushed hard enough and demanded transformation. It was unsettling to discover that my diligence, the very trait I trusted most, was often working against me.

At one of my lowest points, I realized that one’s lot was more than experience, sensation, and action. Viability, I found, communicates just as clearly when it is encountered quietly, indirectly, and without urgency. Being a fixer revealed its limits in moments that required no solution, situations that asked for no action, and questions that had no immediate answers. I flailed there. I didn’t know how to stand still. I wanted so much more from destiny than what I believed I had been given that I failed to notice what was already present. When this recognition arrived, it did so subtly, yet with quiet unease. The problems that continued to trouble me were not rooted in lack of effort or achievement. They stemmed from failure to listen to things that did not need to be, but were, without asking for my attention.

Hearing and choosing when not to attend was what I had missed. Discernment. Not paying attention for approval or instruction, but being attentive for boundaries, for signals, for the difference between what wanted to be rushed and what needed time. I had to hear the quiet truth that some things were not asking me to act, repair, or improve; they were asking me to stop interfering. And yet, I wasn’t taking heed.

To my surprise, taking into account itself became an act. It was not passive. It required restraint and patience. Concentrating asked me to tolerate uncertainty without rushing to resolve it. It asked me to leave unfinished things unfinished, to resist tidying them up or wrapping them up prematurely. Keeping my ears open meant trusting that clarity sometimes arrived only after I stopped demanding it.

At first, this felt unproductive. From the outside, monitoring resembled hesitation, pausing instead of advancing, waiting instead of fixing. When I stopped pushing, I felt lost. In doing nothing, I wondered what I was doing at all. There were fewer markers of progress, no surge of momentum, no thrill of accomplishment. Slowing down felt uncomfortable in a world and in my own world that rewarded decisiveness and speed. And yet, something began to change.

When I took note instead of forcing outcomes, the quality of my decisions shifted. My perceptions changed. I stopped shaping results that didn’t truly fit. I recognized when something was complete rather than refining it beyond necessity. I learned, often uncomfortably, that others did not always want solutions; they wanted to be heard. Silence, I discovered, could carry weight without being filled, and tuning in altered my understanding of doubt. Uncertainty became information rather than a shortcoming. Things were not broken; they were unresolved, and that distinction mattered. It gave me patience I had never practiced before.

I came to understand that the apparent inactivity of focusing was itself a form of action. It was not instinctive. Like any skill, it was built slowly through humility, repetition, and restraint. It sharpened not through effort, but by stepping back and allowing actuality to reveal itself without interruption. Once perceived, it grew. It became the foundation beneath every visible skill, every tangible accomplishment. Everything I did depended on this quiet test for its truest execution.

The quietness began to permeate my continuation. I found myself longing for it. No amount of effort could replace it. No amount of planning could override it. Without lending an ear, progress dissolved into noise. A new reality had come. And in returning to the full circle, I discovered something unexpected: even stillness had direction. I had not underestimated listening because I considered it unimportant. I underestimated it because it was quiet.

THE CHAIR IS STILL THERE

By Clay Stafford

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Mostly working from home for the majority of my life, there was no boss to meet, no comptroller checking my clock-in for work, no meetings I had to be on time for, only me, waking up and stretching in bed, thinking of how I envisioned my day to play out.

Most days were and are filled with excitement. I knew what I was going to do. I loved what I did. I was blessed to be able to do it. Most mornings were filled with ambition and excitement, so I couldn’t wait to get to work and get started. But there were those dreaded mornings when I awoke, stared at the ceiling, and realized there was no fuel in the creative engine for the day. On those mornings, there was no urgency to get out of bed, no spark inspiring me to begin. There wasn’t even resistance. In the dim light of the morning sun coming through the cracks of the closed plantation shutters, there was simply a hollow quiet where momentum typically was and should have been. Those moments felt empty, nothing resembling the welcomed heaviness of life, just a distant void, as though everything that normally mattered had somehow, during the night while I was dreaming, slipped down the hallway to another bedroom and closed the door, sometimes even locking it behind it, climbing into the bed and pulling the covers over its head.

Those were days that felt like failures even before they began, and because I predetermined them while lying in bed, they usually turned out as I expected. I used to think I could only show up for my life when my inner world was in agreement, when want and purpose matched, when I knew why I was doing something, and when the effort made sense. I could only do things when I felt like it or when the meaning was clear. When that alignment was absent, I assumed the day was already lost and a wasted day of failure lay ahead. I felt it in my heart and even in my bones. I hadn’t yet learned that the real discipline of my life wasn’t built on feeling ready, but on returning.

It wasn’t until later in my life, when maybe maturity or practice, or even serendipitous events, proved me wrong, that I realized these mornings were simply a different kind of threshold, their own unique entry into a day that, at first glance, felt formless and uninspired. Somewhere along the way, I learned that discipline, what I needed to create the perfect day, was less about preplanning, force, or even intention, but more about presence.

I don’t know when my thinking started to shift. I certainly didn’t make it happen. I didn’t will it. It certainly wasn’t some trite self-help or productivity hack. It didn’t even arrive with some revelation. It came oddly and unplanned, as a habit. Whether I had the vision for the day or not, I got my coffee as usual, set up my desk, and sat down in my chair to work, even when I didn’t know what I wanted to work on or, if I did, even when I wasn’t inspired. Motivation didn’t earn me a spot at my desk. Routine did. On those days, I kept the bar low. I didn’t promise much to those hours except the assurance to my computer that I’ll be close by if needed. No plans were negotiated, no meaning defined, and rarely was any enthusiasm offered to the Muse as tribute. Sometimes on those days, I thought my purpose in life was to drink a cup of coffee, watch my birdfeeder, and ponder, in the world of evolution, what crazy lizard found itself jumping out of a tree and realizing it could fly, thus creating a new species of birds. In other words, with no plans or inspiration, I sat there because I didn’t know what else to do.

It surprised me at some point how little was required to sit there. It was freeing. Even on those hollow mornings, the chair was still there, waiting. I didn’t need conviction. I didn’t need direction. I didn’t need to believe that anything I was doing mattered. I only needed not to leave. I needed to sit with whatever drifted through my mind. The common thread behind it all was my chair, on productive days and on days of nothing. It was always sitting there, consistent, no matter where my head was. So, I returned to it, some days with more fervor than others, but always with a refusal to hand over control to the weather outside (I write outside on my porch) or even the weather, no matter how calm or turbulent, going on inside of me.

Those neutral days of nothingness were not heroic. They were days that neither lifted nor dragged, days that offered no motivational or dramatic reason or inspiration to move forward, but at the same time, no compelling reason not to be there. It seemed on those days that the world asked nothing of me other than attendance in that chair, across the lawn from the birdfeeder, pondering the processes of the past few million years.

When I think back on my own evolution now, what strikes me is not how much time I wasted sitting there, but rather how honest those hours were. Out of boredom, I did begin to tinker, but without the need or motivation to impress, accelerate, or aim beyond the moment, I moved straight to the essentials as they popped into my head. It was all rather casual. There was no adornment, no performance, no word count, no chasing of superiority. Just small, impulsive, inner-driven activities, whether rain or shine, just some sort of private continuity with days more productive, but with no invisible audience or ego applauding, but at the same time nothing left undone. When inspired, sitting in the chair, I did what I felt inspired to do, letting direction come from the nothingness.

Over time, something shifted. Those neutral (I wouldn’t call them wasted) days, those unremarkable returns to the chair each morning, began to alter the way I understood myself in the same way that I could envision lizards growing wings millions of years ago. I don’t think I ever patted myself on my back for my consistency of sitting in a chair (that hardly seems a heroic act), but I did begin to trust it as an inkling of something I couldn’t put my finger on began to take form in my consciousness, in my being. Showing up and sitting down, I began to sense that I did not need to feel aligned with my work or even with myself to remain connected. Just drink coffee and watch the birds, and occasionally look at my computer screen. I didn’t need the weather, inside or out, to give me permission. Before I stepped into the day, I needed to go to my chair and sit. And, surprise to me, somewhere along the way, my fingers would find their way to the keyboard, and I would start to type. Somewhere by the end of the day, I would pause and look back on all that I had accomplished, even though I had had no preplanned direction.

Trust accumulated in ways I couldn’t have articulated then, but it did soften the drama around the difficulty of being aimless. It quieted the argument between desire and duty. It reframed commitment as identity rather than effort. I began to see that most of what endures in life is built not on bursts of certainty but on the steady, unimpressive, evolutionary cadence of return.

The curious, but also understandable, thing is that the work of my life didn’t constantly improve in those days, but my relationship with my work, and even myself, did. Sitting down in my chair became less conditional, less dependent on mood or inspiration, or the unpredictable tides of self-belief or raw motivation. Sitting down in my chair became, instead, something like a morning welcome, a companionship, coming with the predictability and comfort of knowing that the sun will rise each day and I will sit: steady, imperfect, patient.

Looking back, I never found the dramatic clarity I once believed I needed to move forward. I saw something quieter. I discovered that life continues, like birds in flight, even when eagerness does not. I found that meaning doesn’t always come hand in hand with willingness. I discovered that neutrality is fertile in its own way. We don’t need a parade; we only need a chair.

I once thought that discipline was a loud, cinematic declaration, something founded in great ambition or proven with relentless, knock-the-walls-down drive, but the truth, for me, instead lived in a place outside on the back porch, an ordinary chair, waiting without fanfare, and asking for nothing other than my presence. “Come as you are,” it called. “If nothing else,” it said in its Southern way, “just sit a spell.”

Perhaps the unexpected lesson for me is this: the parts of life that endure are not always those born from passion, certainty, or predetermination while lying in the bed in the morning and staring at the ceiling with the morning light coming in through the shutters, but instead it is from the steady, unremarkable decision to get my coffee, in my routine, and sit in my chair long enough for meaning to find its way back. The chair is always waiting.

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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/.

MAKING IT BEFORE IT HAS A NAME

By Clay Stafford

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There were periods when I began something simply out of interest, long before I understood why, and, oddly, the not-knowing at times unsettled me more than the effort itself. I am, by nature, a planner and a builder, and to be the best at that, one needs to know from the start what they are constructing. It’s a little irresponsible to build a skyscraper without planning and realize, too late, that you didn’t put the right foundation under the building. The longer I lived, the more I noticed a pattern that didn’t quite make sense to me: some of the most authentic things in my life began before they could be explained, and naming them too early seemed to shrink what they were trying to become, as if definition became a filter or a cell. I didn’t have that concept at the time, but the truth of it lingered as something I wouldn’t understand for years, something that existed long before I found the words to recognize it. I began to realize that some of the most important things in my life only revealed their meaning after I was already living them.

I can think of decisions, relationships, detours, and changes I made in my life that began without language, without an expressed idea, what a writer might call a “thesis statement.” Without a plan, I found myself moving toward people, places, projects, and experiences that couldn’t really be justified. Beginnings were always small, sometimes even unnoticed, like quiet shifts that pointed me away from what was familiar to something new and unknown without offering any clarity or expectations of what might come next. As it expanded into my life, my days, my consciousness, the absence of explanation began to feel like a kind of unnameable negligence, as though I owed myself, if not the world, some sort of rationale before I took the next step. The interesting thing about life, though, and especially adventure, is that nothing meaningful arrives with instructions.

Some beginnings took the form of restlessness, sometimes bordering on boredom. Others came from a pull I couldn’t seem to ignore. I didn’t think or plan my way into those moments as much as I moved my way into them by some magnetic, yet unnamed, attraction. Whatever meaning they carried waited there and didn’t announce itself at the start, like a wrapped birthday present asking to be eagerly opened with childhood innocence, but only when the birthday came. Meaning surfaced only after the momentum of action, movement, or interest, unexplained, but happening, after I gave up wanting certainty that my time or emotions were not wasted. I wanted assurance before I pulled the paper away from the birthday box, wanted to see what was inside before I undid the ribbon.

For much of my life, I resisted this uncertain stage. Maybe it was the way I was raised as a child, but it always felt safer to have clarity before action, certainty before motion. It was inherent in me to want to know the ending, what it meant, whether it was safe, and how I could justify myself if anyone should ask. Without clarity and the words, always the words, which may be why I am a writer, I always felt exposed, awkward in a way that left me sometimes rehearsing the answer, the justification, before I had completely made the choice, even as I was already traveling down an unknown path through a forest dappled with light, leaves flickering with moving brightness, the smell of wet earth rising, without the faintest hint of what it boded.

Being someone who plays chess rather than checkers, beginning something, anything, without clarity required a different posture than I was used to. Those moments asked that I enter them without strategy, even without ambition, but only presence. Being foreign to me, I didn’t have a name for what was happening then other than those moments, things, people, or ideas embraced something that kept me returning to those half-formed beginnings, unidentifiable hopes, and curious opportunities, and that returning to them by some magnetic, unexplainable pull mattered even, at times, if none of it made any sense.

In the worlds I circled, I looked to efficiency and expediency, even in relationships, and from the outside, this way of moving probably looked highly inefficient. In those unnamed spaces, false starts, reversals, and in-between states that didn’t add up clouded the clarity. I collected experiences that didn’t seem connected, yet over time, they began to mark the edges of something that appeared to form out of the mist. They revealed what stayed and what fell away. They traced a shape I did not realize I had been drawing, yet had been seemingly unconsciously engineering from the start.

It was later in life, after I had been married and even after I had a son, that I stopped using the phrases “happy accidents” and “bumbling through life.” Something began to shift when I stopped asking these innocuous beginnings to declare themselves too early. I let them happen. I felt less urgency to start justifying each step. I think part of it was because I had put myself into a world that didn’t require an explanation, a happy place of unconditional love and acceptance, something that came with marrying the right person. Because of this foundation, I didn’t rush decisions simply to escape uncertainty. I let things “percolate,” as my son coined, when he was near an adult. I noticed the quiet gravity of what I kept returning to when those things called to me from the fog, and how nothing real in those voices demanded immediate clarity or even a call back from me in return. Understanding, when it came at all, arrived later, subtle, without fanfare, and I began to let it happen in its own natural way.

The real tension wasn’t in not knowing; it was in the impulse to decide too quickly what something was supposed to be. I saw clearly that each time I started something that seemed to fall into my lap with questions, to name it, to give it a beginning point before it lived, shrank it to match my description of it, rather than allowing it to slowly manifest itself, like the bloom of a flower, into its own possibilities, shape, form, and even my relationship with or appreciation of it. Slowly, through life practice and observation, I learned to wait a little longer. An egg is an egg, but if you wait, to one’s ultimate surprise, a chick may emerge. “Wait a little longer” became my mantra. I needed to allow experience to accumulate before drawing conclusions or judging. Even without my “input,” refinement happened, though it may not have been there in the start, as the Old Me would have desired. In contrast, when meaning did arrive, it arrived as something real, something that could be refined, the “happy accident” seeming predestined on its own. That is how the subconscious works. It is a land hidden, but a calculating world in its own right.

Many of the meaningful shifts in my life didn’t arrive as predetermined or mapped plans. I didn’t select them from a menu of options or make deliberate choices. They appeared first at the periphery while I was occupied with living and paying attention, and they continued even when I couldn’t articulate what they were, what I was feeling, or the purpose or endpoint. I guess what I got out of all this, so many years later, is that life isn’t always the execution of a strategy. Sometimes it is the slow uncovering of one. Venturing into the unknown before I understood the “meaning of it all” wasn’t carelessness or irresponsibility. It was a way, and continues to be a way, of staying open long enough for meaning to emerge on its own through movement and unveiling rather than planning and anticipation. Some of the truest parts of my life found their names only after I let them exist as long as needed without one, and I suspect that might be the only way I would have ever recognized them at all.

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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/.

Staying Motivated in a Writing Career

By Dale T. Phillips

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“People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don’t know when to quit. Most people succeed because they are determined to. Persevere and get it done.”

—George Allen

Staying Motivated

Think of it this way: Failure is a single event, while success is a process.

You should realize (if you hadn’t before) that the road to success is a long, constant journey, not a short sprint to a nearby finish line. Many writers quit before achieving success, including some who were close and would have made it with just a bit more effort. You never know how close you are, where the tipping point will be. In the past couple of years, two of my favorite writers suddenly broke into top-level, best-seller, well-deserved, breakout success after many years of toiling in the trenches. It seemed to happen overnight, and yet they’d been working diligently for years to make it happen and had a number of excellent books out.

Why are you writing? To make money, win awards, get famous? Those are external goals, out of your control. What you can control is your production, your author brand, and how hard you’re willing to work. If you’re not having fun, and it’s taking a toll on your life, it may not be the thing you think you wanted. But if you have that need to write, to get your stories out to the world, you’ll keep going. 

How does one persist when success seems unobtainable? One book I highly recommend is Motivate Your Writing!: Using Motivational Psychology to Energize Your Writing Life, by Stephen Kelner. He’s also married to a writer, so he knows his stuff. 

Before my first novel was published, I was chomping at the bit to get it out. Publication seemed just out of reach for several years, and I had to prod myself to keep going. One Christmas I printed out the book draft, put the pages in a binder, wrapped it, and gave it to myself as a Christmas gift. Though my family thought it strange, it was terrific motivation and gave me a boost to continue thinking about the day when I would hold a real print copy of my first novel. That day came, and many more of amazing success. One Christmas, I had three unfinished novels, another I wanted to write, and hadn’t published enough work in too long a while. So, I printed title covers, attached them to other books, wrapped them, and gave them to myself as more gifts, as a promise and a commitment that I’d get to work and finish and publish them. 

I’m motivated by the stories of amazing writers (and other artists, musicians, entertainers, and creative people) of talent who had a much tougher time of it, who struggled to get published and make a living in years past. Now we can get published whenever we want, but the hard part is getting sold and read. Inspirational quotes and success stories help keep me going. I look outside writing, to success and motivation gurus, to see if I can use techniques for success from other walks of life. By keeping a positive attitude, you can push through the dark days. The habit of success keeps you on track when you encounter setbacks. Do not allow events to stop you. Learn the power of the word NO when asked for things that will suck up your time if they prevent you from finishing projects. 

Chart Your Success

Because our minds gloss over the day-to-day, the usual and familiar, it’s quite useful to keep a writing log for recording what steps you take and see how much you do over time. Writing a book may seem like it goes on forever, so keep logs of what you do, to keep on track and motivated. 

This can be as simple as making a time and word count entry in a notebook, or in a spreadsheet or document on a computer. You want to build momentum, so that a string of days of writing encourages you to do more. Each day that you’ve put new words down is a success! It’s great to look at the accumulated results after a few months of work, and it truly feels like accomplishment. 

You should also keep track of other parts of writing activities and successes. Publications, new editions, acceptances, good reviews, big sales, milestones reached, all that and more come together into a success chart. Record what advances you’ve made, and they will mount up into a tidal wave. You want to look back and see that you’ve made progress. Little steps in the right direction for big results.

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Dale T. Phillips has published novels, story collections, non-fiction, and over 80 short stories. Stephen King was Dale's college writing teacher, and since then, Dale has found time to appear on stage, television, radio, in an independent feature film, and compete on Jeopardy (losing in a spectacular fashion). He's a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the Sisters in Crime. He's traveled to all 50 states, Mexico, Canada, and through Europe.

www.daletphillips.com