MEETING MYSELF LATER THAN EXPECTED

By Clay Stafford

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I realized I had become someone I didn’t recognize. It didn’t come with an announcement. It was a transformation unfolding in the most ordinary circumstances. I was standing in a doorway, of all places, listening to someone speak harshly to me about a matter that, at one time, would have sent adrenaline through my ears, tightened my chest, and flushed my face.

I remembered, even as it was happening, the version of me who would have rushed to repair the moment, to blow it up, to soften the other person’s discomfort, to slam them verbally against the wall, to explain myself more fully than was asked, to restore ease as quickly as possible, or to press the plunger that would blow the whole bridge. The reflex for all of these seemed to live benignly in memory, and I could almost anticipate them waiting behind my ribs. But they did not arrive. I observed them, and they sat there, like old bottles on a dusty shelf.

I stood there, leaning on the doorframe, hearing the words, feeling nothing but a strange steadiness I had never known before. It wasn’t disrespect or defiance. It wasn’t withdrawal or cowardice. It was nothing, really. I can’t say I felt nothing, because I did; it just wasn’t anything that prodded me to act. It was simply an absence of the urgency that had plagued me my whole life, one I had always called care.

I answered the reprimand briefly. I didn’t elaborate. I didn’t feel the energy to defend. When the exchange was over, I felt surprisingly nothing. I didn’t replay it. I went back to my work, got back into my Zone, and went on with what I had been doing as if what the person had said, or even the person themselves, weren’t important enough to acknowledge. It wasn’t the conversation, but the fact that I was nonplussed that unsettled me.

This was a small moment, a brief encounter with another person known for being a jerk (we always encounter these people), someone I had previously tried to appease in an old pattern. I don’t think the moment was big enough for anyone else to notice anything unusual, except the other person, who probably took my single answer, “Okay,” as a dismissive “Whatever.” But the exchange stayed with me for days, the way I might turn a stone over in my pocket, testing its shape, or fiddle with a cuticle that really should have been trimmed a few days ago. The incongruity of my own reaction was what bothered me. Something inside me had changed without announcement. There were no trumpets. There was only “Okay” and “Whatever.” The person (me) I had watched do this, as though standing outside myself, did not match the person I still assumed myself to be, and I wondered where this new person was coming from.

I spent days overthinking this disorienting experience of discovering someone I quietly did not yet know. For decades, I had measured myself against an internal image formed years earlier, full of traits I believed defined me: accommodating, responsive, eager to smooth edges before they hardened, mixed with indignation when misunderstood, and a tendency to shut someone else down quickly by whatever means necessary when I felt they had crossed the line. Here, I did not care. I did not care in the way I once had. And what had been discussed was a big deal, but for the life of me, I could not make it one in my head or heart. “Whatever.” Over the following days, I remembered how quickly I had once moved toward tension, how readily I had assumed responsibility for the emotional weather around me, calming the storms when I wished and bringing cyclones when I thought that appropriate. That self felt not only familiar but moral, as if vigilance and universal alignment were a form of kindness to both myself, those around me, and the world. Yet here I was, answering “Okay” without haste, leaving without rumination on the incident (only on its aftermath), and, frankly, feeling no corresponding loss of care other than the puzzlement over my own odd behavior and changed emotional center. I truly didn’t care if I was right or wrong; I frankly didn’t care when I thought I should.

The new quietness could have been mistaken for several things: lack of caring, retreat, indifference, fatigue, insubordination, or bravado, but it was none of these. The urgency was gone, not the concern. It was just “Okay, whatever.” What I found was a narrower channel of attention, a more focused self, as if energy that had once scattered outward now gathered close and stayed.

The change continued in other conversations and altercations. I didn’t give a flip. I listened, then went back to what I was doing. “Okay, whatever.” There had been no decision on my part. Whatever had transformed within me was not the result of one inciting incident but, as I look back, years of smaller negotiations, responsibilities accepted without spectacle, disappointments without rehearsal, and choices made under pressure when no ideal option presented itself. Each instance, each small thing, had asked something of me, and I had given it, without declaring or even noticing that anything fundamental was shifting until that one cumulative moment when I stood in my overcontrolling, micromanaging boss’s doorway.

Again, none of this was planned. I did not react the way I had to anything before. I was more concerned about my work and the quality of my life than about others’ opinions and their dramas. I noticed other small deviations from the earlier version of myself. I paused longer before answering questions that once would have prompted immediate reassurance or a firm confrontation of the other person’s subjective opinions. I began declining invitations I would previously have rearranged my life to accommodate. I gained time and emotional and mental energy by explaining myself less, not because I was trying not to rock the boat or out of secrecy, but because I knew that what I thought and felt needed no explanation unless I felt inclined to give one. None of these felt like personality shifts. I was trying on the new coat, and it seemed to fit well, but it certainly wasn’t the same cut. All of this felt like an efficiency of time, space, emotion, and thought, adjustments made in passing. Yet taken together, they described, if I looked at myself in the mirror, someone I had not consciously intended to become, but one I did like the reflection of.

I think what troubled me most was the lack of ceremony. There had been no threshold, no announcement, no prior thought, no acknowledgment, no moment when I had declared that I was leaving one part of myself behind, a mask I realized, and entering another that wore none at all. The transition, gradual as it was, had gone unmarked, which meant I continued to describe my masked self in ways that no longer fit. I kept expecting reactions that never came, anticipating moments that should have been sprinkled with more than “Okay” or “Whatever,” but those impulses had faded. Those motivations, whatever they were, had lost their force, yet I felt bad because I didn’t feel bad.

After weeks of observing my changed interactions with others, I recognized how partial my earlier understanding of my true self had been. I had believed I was defined by responsiveness and good manners, by the ability to read and accommodate others’ needs, even by the absence of my own sanity. But that trait, that mask, had carried costs I had once accepted without question. When those costs became less bearable, the change began, not by declaration but by attrition. Some habits fell away like dead skin. Some roles loosened. “Okay.” “Whatever.”

My newer self felt quieter, less big, less explosive, less performative, less pleasing, and less eager to be legible in every exchange. The absence of my old turbulence could be mistaken, even by me, for diminishment rather than strength. I no longer required intensity or tangled emotions to feel present. I no longer organized my responses around anticipating others’ reactions. I stated the truth, and when others received it, no matter how they took it, it was once again “Okay, whatever.” Certain parts of myself that had once seemed in constant need of defense now rested unguarded. I no longer needed a fortress; I no longer needed to play that game.

Recognizing this new self took time. I had to revise the internal map I had used to orient myself. I had to release descriptions that once felt accurate but now constrained my true perception of who I was, how I saw the world, and what I expected of myself, rather than what others expected of me. I saw the mask clearly. It had been given early, by upbringing, by conditional love, by shunning. The new or rediscovered me felt unfamiliar. What bothered me most was the lag between change and recognition. It was longer than I expected. One would think I was a smart guy and could have figured this out earlier. I was not that smart. Even after the change and the realization, I continued to live as someone new while still believing in the old.

What I had taken in youth to be identity turned out to be provisional, assembled from early circumstances, early fears, and early approvals. As these conditions shifted, my identity changed not by addition, as one might expect, but by an odd subtraction. I relinquished the need to be seen in a certain way, the reflex to repair every discomfort within reach, and the roles that once organized my behavior because they kept me safe and others happy at my expense. Each relinquishment felt minor at the time. Normalcy is an incredible liar. Together, being told who I should be and accepting others’ definitions left me with no plan. Sloughing off the deadness of it all revealed someone I never foresaw.

When I look back on my earlier self, I feel neither rejection nor nostalgia. I feel recognition of continuity, the same attention and care, now expressed with less urgency and less diffusion. The difference lies not in substance but in boundary. I never lost what mattered, but I shed what no longer served.

Meeting my new self, this new person, later than expected, carried a peculiar strangeness. I moved through familiar settings with altered reflexes, speaking in tones that once would have surprised me, letting moments pass without intervention, whereas I once would have stepped in, and letting encounters fall away before I reached the end of the hallway. I watched myself do things with a mild astonishment that gradually softened into acceptance of this new self. Accuracy replaced familiarity as a measure of self-recognition.

In this transformation, I did not become someone else. I arrived at myself, slowly enough that when I finally noticed, I had to meet myself for the first time and say goodbye to an old friend I thought I knew. The mask went in the trash. “Okay, whatever.”

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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/.

ON TIME

By Clay Stafford

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Who can turn the world on with her smile?

I grew up watching The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, so I was bouncing off the wall, as a young screenwriter, when Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM Enterprises (co-owned with Grant Tinker) wanted my script. Mary Tyler Moore was an icon. Then it fell apart. The disappointment, embarrassment, and failure did not end me, though for a long time, I truly believed it might.

The opportunity arrived unexpectedly through a mutual friend, wrapped in the kind of moment I had always imagined would confirm everything I had been working toward. It was the legend of being discovered, that old Hollywood myth, suddenly stepping into my actual life.

When Mary Tyler Moore asked to see the screenplay, it took everything I had to remain vertical. I still remember the sweet elation of that moment, the sense that something I had been moving toward for years had finally turned and recognized me. They wanted it. Now. I said it needed one more rewrite, perfectionistic as I was. One of her producers gave me a reasonable due date. We shook hands. The deal was on. I was so elated at the fulfillment of a dream that it was difficult to settle into the work itself. All I could think was that I had finally arrived.

When the deadline came, what I had written still hadn’t risen to the heights I knew I could give. I ghosted the producer and dug deeper into the script, convinced that better mattered more than time, despite knowing one of filmmaking’s simplest truths: on time and on budget. I missed the deadline.

I delivered the script anyway and waited for the applause. The producer refused to read it, handing it back to me directly. The look on my face was probably good fodder for his lunch that day. “What a look,” I could imagine him saying, friends laughing. It was the best work I had ever done. But the fact that I was unreliable showed brighter than the script itself. I had been dismissed. I had delivered late. I blew it.

Nothing dramatic happened in my world. Life continued as normal, except for the depression that crushed my heart. No public failure marked the moment, though friends occasionally asked how the MTM project was going. It was acid on my soul. Total embarrassment.

Yet while licking my wounds, something inside me began to shift. The lost opportunity started to feel less like a single event and more like a doorway into a future I had already begun to inhabit in my mind. When the door to MTM closed, the loss was not only external and emotional, but structural. I wandered off course, without direction, not knowing how to orient myself once the outcome I had taken for granted had been stripped away.

Over the next six months of beating myself up, I slowly realized that I had built parts of my identity around results I believed I could control, assuming effort alone would secure them. Before the balloon popped, I had believed progress followed sincerity, that as a craftsperson and artist, vision was what counted. It wasn’t that I thought anything else was unimportant; it was my naïve belief that vision was all there was. I believed that if the work was good enough, and if I cared enough, things would align to match its quality. Deadlines felt negotiable compared to devotion. Precision felt morally superior to completion. I had never questioned those beliefs because they had always carried me forward. Missing the deadline didn’t contradict my core loudly, but when the door closed, I was left staring at it and gradually began to see that even quality had limits. Some birds, no matter how ready, must fly when the appointed time arrives.

What unsettled me most in the long run was not the lost opportunity itself, but my own part in it. I had not been denied arbitrarily. Purchased scripts often never see production. But I had killed the chick before it could come out of the egg. I had participated in the loss.

That realization reached deeper than ambition or even culpability. I began to see how easily good intentions became excuses, how care could turn into delay, and how quietly I had assumed the world would move at the pace I set for myself.

In the months that followed, no earthquakes occurred. What came instead was a quieter reckoning. I began to see how much of my direction had depended on imagined outcomes that ignored external reality and requirement. I saw how often I measured movement by where I expected to arrive and by the quality and applause waiting there, without recognizing the outer structures that also shaped my path. Without that full interior and exterior reference together, I was unmoored, as though the map I trusted no longer matched the ground beneath me. It was seismic.

Getting cut by MTM didn’t erase my hopes. It changed my proportion. I began to understand that effort and result were related, but not the same; that devotion did not replace structure; and that aspiration, no matter how noble, did not suspend time.

These realizations did not arrive as neat conclusions. They gathered slowly through self-incrimination, discomfort, reflection, and a gradual willingness to see what had been invisible while success had seemed so close.

Over time, the disorientation eased. I went back to work on the next project, but differently, not less carefully, but within forms that honored both my inner standards and the outer realities of the world I wished to belong to. I did not become immune to disappointment, but I became less dependent on projection. My work continued with a steadier proportion between what I could shape and what I could not, and within the confines in which I had to do it. The world did not operate around me. I had to operate within the world.

The opportunity I lost never returned in that form. Something else did: a clearer understanding of responsibility, restraint, and completion that might not be perfect. I no longer mistook perfection for devotion or delay for depth. My work reached others when they held out their hand, never later. And because of that, a career took shape. My path altered. The failure did not end me. It became a necessary step in my growth.

I came, eventually, to cherish it. I told the story to others, laughing at my own naïveté. Because of MTM, I rewrote the map by which I moved forward. The experience served me better than if the script had been produced, because it changed not my career, but who I was and the professional I longed to be.

And so, thanks to Mary Tyler Moore, I realized: you’re going to make it after all. I now toss my hat into the air at the proper musical beat.

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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/.

LIMITS

By Clay Stafford

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I was raised to believe that when I came to an obstacle, it was a personal shortcoming if I did not push through, a personal failure if I did not succeed, and a personal cowardice if I gave up. Those beliefs inhabited the marrow of my bones and festered in the recesses of my brain. I had no natural limits, none of us did, or so I thought and was bred to believe. Even giving credence to such an absurd suggestion felt irresponsible. I knew I and everyone else could overcome anything if we only pushed hard enough. There was no skill we couldn’t learn, no talent we couldn’t expand, no mountain we could not climb. I not only judged myself; I judged everyone. I taught it to my students and in my lectures. We all needed to be responsible for the optimal performance of our lives. It was called being dependable, being responsible, rising to the challenge, working harder and smarter, and pushing through. The push was always highly emotional, causing stress and conflict not only in me but in all my relationships, where others’ performances fell short, but I knew it was worth it. It brought out the best in all of us. Like a winning coach, I pushed myself and those around me. And when they pushed back, I viewed their lack of participation as denial and even laziness. Emotionally wrought, I could never see the mental clarity lost in this thinking. From the dejected faces of those I lived and worked with, it seemed I failed in the very presence that I thought I was being, the one I thought I was protecting. Even in that, I strove to do better.

The satisfaction of control brought me peace, or so I thought. I put myself in charge of my destiny. I oversaw my own future, and nothing could get in the way of that, and very little did. I offered every problem and relationship a doorway that could make things easier for me and everyone around me, but if it was blocked, I had no qualms about going through the wall. Pushing longer, harder, and stronger was, to me, a form of commitment. Staying with a problem until the end of the day, even if that day ran into the night, or even several days without sleep, was applaudable devotion and intention. Accepting limits or growing tired meant one had no self-respect. This was how a meaningful life was to be built; the lives of the great men and women I read in biographies exemplified that. They pushed through because they had something all of us could acquire: character. They built meaningful lives; I would, too. Endurance, discipline, and refusal to quit were the framework of success. Refusal to quit meant refusal to retreat, like cowards, like those who were weak. Even rest itself, I told myself, could wait. “I can sleep when I’m dead” was not uncommon coming out of my mouth in reply to those who were close to me and cared, as I popped my trucker’s caffeine pills, drank my ten Cuban coffees, and my gallon of daily tea.

The cost of this thinking and living with such force didn’t show up immediately. It took decades. That’s the deception we take to heart when we believe the deceitfulness chocked at us by the sycophants of the famous. The famous lied to the watching world, the obsequious flatterers lied to readers of books about great men and women, and then I took those as truths and lied to myself. Sure, the lies gave me extra waking time, or something that resembled it anyway. I learned how to stretch the day thinner, how to draw more from myself than I thought I could. The point that activity didn’t always equal accomplishment, though, was often lost on me. What I gained in hours, I lost, though I didn’t realize it, in life and relational clarity. After decades of this rat race, my attention to the important things, not just the walls to burst through, began to dull. My decisions about where to focus slowed. Simple things began to take longer, though I attributed that to age. Regardless, the very life I had always believed I was protecting by defining my own fate began to resist me.

I began to see, or rather I began to feel, that the very wall that I could not seem to push through was myself. Nothing dramatic happened to show me this. Fatigue didn’t announce itself to me publicly. Nothing in my life collapsed. Feeling tired all the time wasn’t bad; it was my baseline. Yet, focus began to take on the persona of irritation toward my work, myself, and the people around me. I no longer set out to tackle only the big things; small problems now carried more weight than they should have, and small mistakes by others began to irritate me. Life began to feel painful, even at times undesirable. Everything became such a big deal. I found that where I used to slam through walls, I began to make choices not out of intention, but out of relief. I became drawn to whatever would end the discomfort the fastest.

Being successful, I began to wonder, why did I feel at rock bottom? Being high in my profession, having relationships others would envy, having built the life I envisioned, something had to change, though I didn’t know how to give it a name. My choices began to become ill-guided, not from indifference, but from dullness. The part of me that once noticed nuance grew silent. Subtle distinctions in life, work, and people disappeared. I lost my sense of when effort was required and when time was the truer answer. I could still function, but I was compensating, now relying totally on force on everything where attention and inspiration once worked cleanly.

Then came denial, and the emotional cost that followed. Each time I overrode the yokes, big and small, that pulled me down, I taught myself not to listen. Signals that I used to welcome began to annoy me. They were inconveniences to my peace. Discomfort became something to suppress, to submit to silently rather than with understanding. Gradually, all trust eroded, not just in my body, mind, emotions, or energy, but in myself in general. A faint impatience began to settle in, yet flat, a sense that I was now pushing through life, all parts of it, still accomplishing, but rather than moving with it, things were no longer flowing.

As a result of shutting out the world and the world within my own head, my world narrowed. Limits began to change perspective. Everything became about getting through the day. Curiosity, my lifeblood, even began to fade. I knew something needed to be done, but that was the problem. I had everything I could ever want. Recovery from that seemed crazy and certainly ungratefully indulgent. Surprise began to have no place or excitement. My world was perfect. I was not in crisis, yet I was living as though I were. Survival mode replaced presence without my consent. Everyone around me felt it or felt the brunt of what I would not share.

I think the most dangerous part was how ordinary it all felt. Nothing told me to stop. Nothing told me to slow down. Nothing hinted at any type of collapse. Nothing told me I needed to stop bashing walls. No one told me I had a problem, or if they did, I didn’t hear. What I was doing, though, was operating below capacity, and I’d been doing it for way too long. I focused on my limitations to the point of obsession, at the expense of seriousness and gratitude about what I could control. There were limitations that I could not power through, I realized after too many years. And because I didn’t realize this earlier, all limitations, even challenges, began to operate out of the same intensity. Out of the blue, it hit me that if I couldn’t power through certain things that didn’t erase who I was or what I could become despite them. I realized that maybe those walls were there for a reason, that maybe I was meant to be something I didn’t consciously see myself as. The realization was slow and painful, but my life began to change. Centering took the place of warfare.

My limits took on a new light. They were never obstacles; they were misconceptions on my part. They were even guardians of who I was meant to be. The sad thing is, I had been deluded and deluded myself for a lifetime. I recognized the pundits of the super life were frauds. I began to respect those limits. At first, I didn’t respect limits dramatically or perfectly, but rather honestly, and, when I did, something softened inside me like the Grinch’s frozen heart. Efforts on things that were within my limits became cleaner. Decisions within my framework grew quieter and more precise. Life began to deepen again, rather than merely expanding. I began to do less because I stopped slamming into walls and instead spent my time doing more. That was the paradox. In fact, I did better at everything I did. The cost of refusing to stop at natural limitations had been the gradual loss of the very capacities that made my efforts meaningful in the first place. Limits and walls became not challenges to defeat, but invitations to stop long enough to acknowledge, honor, and preserve those things that did matter within the sphere of life I’d been given in which to live. Limits became no more than a beautiful river in my life, a life without a boat, that asked me to choose the path to the left or to the right when it told me in so many ways I could not cross but promised adventure no matter which direction I chose.

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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/.

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.

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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/.

Between Pen and Paper: Flaneuring Through a Writer’s Mind – The API of the Human Heart, or Why Your Characters Keep Misunderstanding Each Other

By Andi Kopek

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There has been no shortage of criticism lately regarding artificial intelligence (AI). Some of it is thoughtful, some quite theatrical. I may dedicate a future column entirely to the ethical, economic, and existential anxieties surrounding AI. Today, however, I want to focus on something far less dramatic and far more revealing: how advanced AI systems actually talk to one another, how this can shine new light on human communication and miscommunication, and how it could inspire a modern writer.

Beneath the glossy headlines and dystopian forecasts, most modern digital systems communicate through something called an API, an Application Programming Interface. An API is essentially a structured contract that defines how one program can send a request to another, what format the data must follow, what information is required, and what kind of response will come back. In other words, before artificial intelligence can destroy our civilization, it must first agree on grammar.

Imagine two computer programs trying to talk. They cannot rely on vibes. They cannot roll their eyes. They cannot say, “You know what I mean.” They must follow a strict contract, a rulebook for how one system talks to another. An API. If the message does not match the expected structure, it fails. Not emotionally. Structurally. The receiving system does not feel hurt. It returns an error code: 400 (Bad Request).

Let’s have a little fun and apply this communication model to human interactions. Every person you know is running an API. It is undocumented. It is unstable. It auto-updates without notice. Your internal API defines what tone you accept, what topics are permitted, what context you require, what emotional load you can process, what you interpret literally, what you interpret as subtext, what feels like attack, and what feels like affection. When someone speaks to you, they are making a request against your interface. When you respond, you are sending data formatted according to theirs. Conversation is not just expression. It is parsing.

In programming, parsing means interpreting incoming data according to a defined structure. If I send { emotion: sad } but you expect { mood: sadness, intensity: 0.7 }, the request fails. Not because we disagree about sadness. Because we disagree about formatting. Now consider the most dangerous sentence in the English language: “I’m fine.” One person means: I am overwhelmed but not ready to unpack it. The other hears: Everything is okay. Same words. Different schema. According to our little game, human miscommunication is not malice. It is incompatible parsing.

If humans were honest, we would speak in status codes.

200 OK: I understand you.

401 Unauthorized: You do not have access to that story.

403 Forbidden: That is a boundary.

404 Not Found: I do not recognize the version of me you’re describing. 429 Too Many Requests: Please stop asking.

503 Service Unavailable: I am exhausted and pretending otherwise.

Instead, we say things like, “Whatever,” which is the emotional equivalent of a corrupted packet.

In AI networks, data can be corrupted, and signals can degrade. In humans, fatigue, stress, trauma, and cognitive overload can increase the error rate. The same sentence can succeed at 9

a.m. and fail by the late afternoon. Moreover, different neurotypes run different parsing defaults. As a simplified analogy, consider autism as a condition where parsing is more literal. If someone says: “It’s cold in here,” one person hears a temperature observation. Another hears a request to close the window. Different inference engines. Not broken. Just different schema.

From this perspective, depression can look like low processing bandwidth, high error sensitivity, and reduced response generation. Instead of getting a return of 200 (OK) for a typical request, the system returns 503 (Service Unavailable). Anxiety resembles a hyperactive validation layer. Every incoming message is checked for threats, rejections, or hidden errors. Neutral packets get flagged as suspicious. False positives multiply. Psychosis might be described as a model in which incoming data is integrated into a framework that diverges from shared consensus reality. The API still functions internally, but its mapping to the broader network has shifted. The person is not failing to process. They are processing through a different model.

AI systems do not have feelings, though they are becoming increasingly sophisticated at parsing human emotion in text and speech. So what about empathy, a feature we tend to reserve for living organisms? Some would say only humans. In this model, empathy is not absorbing someone else’s emotions like a sponge. Empathy is adaptive formatting. It is the willingness to say: Let me rephrase that. What did you hear me say? What did you mean? How would you prefer I ask? Empathy does not eliminate conflict. It reduces unnecessary 400 errors. Rigid APIs cannot do that. Flexible ones can. Consequently, the opposite of empathy is not cruelty. It is interface rigidity.

Since I’m writing this in February, I cannot ignore Valentine’s Day. Love, perhaps, is long-term API alignment. Over time you learn each other’s required fields. You anticipate response formats. You adjust rate limits. You recognize known error codes. You stop assuming malice in malformed packets. I think we could use more long-term API alignment right now.

Now, writers, this approach can be useful to your craft. Characters do not fight because they disagree. They fight because they parse differently. One character speaks in subtext. Another requires explicit declarations. One needs reassurance before vulnerability. Another needs vulnerability before reassurance. Each is making valid requests against an interface the other does not fully understand. Conflict is born in the gap between intention and interpretation. A character says, “You never listen.” What they mean is: “I don’t feel seen.” What the other hears is: “You are incompetent.” Boom. 400 (Bad Request), followed by 500 (Internal Server Error).

In thrillers, the villain often exploits API weaknesses in other characters. The villain withholds required fields, manipulates format, overloads of the emotional bandwidth, and sends signals designed to be misparsed. Gaslighting, in this model, is deliberate schema corruption. It forces the victim to doubt their own parsing logic.

And when two characters finally understand each other, what has actually happened? As in love, they have aligned their APIs. They have learned that “I’m fine” sometimes means “Please try again.” LLMs (Large Language Models) require enormous amounts of training data to achieve alignment. We train on years of shared experience. And still …

We live in an age obsessed with communication tools. Faster messaging. Smarter devices. Infinite connectivity. And yet our communication remains fragile and far from perfection. The next time a conversation collapses, pause and ask: was this bad intention from a sender, or bad formatting in the receiver’s API?

I hope that this little mental exercise will help to deepen characters in your story, sharpen your dialogue, and make the conflicts feel inevitable rather than contrived. And in your own life, you may discover that many arguments are not wars. They are documentation failures. Which, hopefully, can be revised.

Andi

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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 monthly poetry workshop, participate in the Libri Prohibiti book club (both held monthly at the Spine bookstore, Smyrna, TN), 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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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/.

When a Rejection Isn’t Really a Rejection

By Lois Winston

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The unicorn of publishing occurs when an author with her first book immediately gets an agent, then scores a six-figure, multi-book deal, all within a few weeks. For the rest of us, it can take anywhere from years to decades. During that time, we deal with too many people telling us our baby is butt ugly (although hopefully, not in such harsh words).

As much as we try to develop Teflon-coated skin to keep the rejections from getting to us, it’s not easy. Our emotional awareness is one of our writing superpowers. We not only often cry while reading certain scenes in books or watching them in movies or TV shows, but we’ve even been known to shed more than a tear or two while writing a poignant scene. That same heightened sense of emotion is what makes it difficult for us to deal with rejections.

However, publishing is a tough business. It’s run by bean counters who are always looking at the bottom line. Finding an editor who loves your book is only the first step in selling your book. Few editors have the power to make unilateral decisions. They need to convince others at the publishing house that your book is worthy of a contract.

The truth about this profession we’ve chosen is that you WILL get rejected because everyone gets rejected, even bestselling authors, even the unicorn author when her unicorn book doesn’t live up to its hype and earn out that mega-advance.

If you can’t deal with rejection, you have two choices: you can toughen up, or you can save yourself the heartache by quitting before those rejection letters start filling your inbox.

When I started writing, no one told me the publishing facts of life. By the time I discovered the odds were stacked against me, I’d been infected by the writing bug and couldn’t stop writing. If you HAVE to write, if writing is as much a part of you as eating, sleeping, and breathing, keep writing.

In the beginning, I received my share of form rejection letters. The worst was a 1/2” x 1” rubber stamped NOT FOR US at the top of my query letter, which was shoved back into my SASE. I wondered if I was a glutton for punishment or simply delusional, but I couldn’t stop writing.

One day I found myself with three agents interested in the same manuscript. I chose the agent who rose at 6am on a Sunday morning to call from Hawaii where she was attending a conference. I figured if she was that eager to land me as a client, she’d be as aggressive about selling my work.

Little did either of us realize how long it would take to convince the publishing world of my talent. Most agents cut a client loose after a year or two of not being able to sell their work. Mine stuck with me. Her faith in my writing kept me writing through years of rejections. When you have a professional who believes in you that much, you don’t give up on your dreams. (Family doesn’t count. They’re supposed to love and believe in you).

Having an agent meant I no longer received form rejection letters. Editors took the time to highlight what they liked about each book but also why they were rejecting it. This was how I learned that sometimes a book is rejected for purely business reasons and has nothing to do with the quality of the author’s writing.

But here’s another truth about publishing: sometimes writers sabotage themselves. Although editors will tell an agent why a book was rejected, they rarely give specific information to unagented writers. If an agent or editor takes the time to outline her reasons for rejecting your manuscript, file that rejection away at your own risk.

After you’ve stomped around the house, ranted about the unfairness of life, called your critique group to cry on their collective shoulders, eaten way too much chocolate, and washed it down with too many glasses of wine, stop whining and get to work. Because that rejection isn’t a rejection; it’s a rejection for now. And there’s a big difference.

If an agent or editor explains why your book is being rejected and what you need to do to revise it, she’s telling you she’s open to you resubmitting that manuscript to her. Otherwise, she wouldn’t bother. She’d simply reject with a standard thank you for submitting (fill in the book’s title) but a) this isn’t right for us b) we already have an author writing similar books or c) we’ve already filled our list of (fill in the genre) for this year.

Settle your tush in your chair, place your fingers on the keyboard, and start revising that manuscript. Don’t take forever, though. The agent or editor doesn’t expect a one-week turnaround, but there’s an expiration date on that offer of resubmission. Wait too long, and by the time you send it back to her, she may have already found a similar author or book.

Even if you send your revised manuscript to the editor in a reasonable amount of time, you still might receive a rejection if she can’t get approval to offer you a contract. If that happens, it’s not the end of the world. You now have a much better manuscript to send off to other agents or editors. And who knows? You might wind up with a better offer.

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USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. She also worked for twelve years as an associate at a literary agency. Her most recent release is Seams Like the Perfect Crime, the fourteenth book in her Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series. Join her at this year’s Killer Nashville banquet where she’ll be the Keynote Speaker and divulge the other clues she got along the way to becoming a published author. Learn more about Lois and her books at www.loiswinston.com. Sign up for her newsletter to receive an Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mini-Mystery.

Healthy Living Practices for Writers – Silent Killer: Imposter Syndrome

By Mary Lynn Cloghesy and Jason Schembri

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Did you know that you have a silent killer within you? One that is capable of not only derailing your writing life, but also your profession, personal relationships, and pastimes? Recent research has shown that creatives are uniquely susceptible to this disease due to the subjective nature of their work, the solitary aspects of their craft, and the competitive landscape of the arts. A whopping 70% of writers will suffer from this affliction, including some unlikely characters. Consider what Dr. Maya Angelou has said about herself and her work, “I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’” She’s not the only one. Even John Steinbeck has cried, “I am not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people.” If the icons among us are negatively impacted by Imposter Syndrome, then what hope is there for the rest of us? Clearly, it’s critical to know what it is and how to deal with it in order to protect ourselves from this author interrupter. 

What is Imposter Syndrome?

While you may not know the term, I’m guessing you’re familiar with its symptoms. Ask yourself: Have I experienced persistent self-doubt or feelings of inadequacy despite evidence of success? Have I wondered if I was a fraud or feared being exposed as such regardless of my skills, qualifications or achievements? If so, you’re in the thralls of Imposter Syndrome. It’s a form of dysfunctional thinking that has been described as “chronic self-doubt and a sense of intellectual fraudulence that overrides any feelings of success or external proof of competence.” This mental affliction plays on your fears, needling you with subliminal suggestions, and causes you to question yourself, your talent, and your ability to achieve your dreams. It’s subtle, insidious, and stalking you right now. In fact, it’s such a common experience among writers that it could be considered an epidemic.

While Imposter Syndrome will cause you to hang your head in shame, it has many other faces. It will drive you to adopt the behaviours listed below rather than address its root causes, especially when you are feeling vulnerable, such as during the query process or in the midst of critiques. Here are the masks it wears:

• Perfectionism – Setting impossibly high standards and feeling like a failure when they aren’t met.

• Overworking – Trying to compensate for perceived inadequacies by working excessively.

• Discounting success – Attributing achievements to luck or external factors rather than talent, skill or effort.

• Fear of failure – Avoiding new challenges due to the fear of being "found out.”

Diagnosing Imposter Syndrome

To combat this disease, you must diagnose it correctly, but how do you know if you’re simply having a bad day or struggling with Imposter Syndrome? Frequency and consistency are important factors to consider, as are patterns in your thinking that reveal deep-seated worry and self-sabotage. Telltale signs that you are suffering from Imposter Syndrome include the following:  

• Negative Self-Talk

• Do you often think, "I’m not a real writer," even though you’re increasing your word count regularly and actively creating new works?

• Do you believe your work isn’t good enough, no matter how much you revise?

• Perfectionism & Procrastination

  • Do you keep rewriting the same passages because they’re "never good enough"?

  • Do you delay submitting work or starting a project because you fear failure?

• Dismissing Accomplishments

  • Do you downplay praise or attribute success to luck instead of your talent and hard work?

  • Even after recognition (awards, nominations, publication), do you feel like you don’t deserve it?

• Fear of Being "Exposed"

  • Do you worry that other writers, editors, or readers will figure out you’re a fraud?

  • Does the idea of publishing or speaking about your work make you anxious?

• Comparing Yourself to Others

  • Do you feel like other authors are "real writers," but you’re just faking it?

  • Do you look at their success and think, "I’ll never be as good as them"?

• Overworking to Prove Yourself

  • Do you push yourself to exhaustion, believing you must work twice as hard to deserve success?

  • Do you avoid celebrating milestones because you can’t accept you’ve really earned them yet?

What can you do about it?

Recognizing Imposter Syndrome is the first step. Take off the mask, look in the mirror, and say out loud, “I am a writer. I am accomplished, I work hard, and I deserve my success,” then notice how you feel. Free write about it. The key is to manage self-doubt rather than attempt to eliminate it. Leading expert, Dr. Valerie Young, author of The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women, has stated, “The only difference between people who feel like impostors and those who don’t is that the impostors’ thoughts stop them.” Here are some practical steps: 

• Acknowledge It & Call It Out

• When you hear that inner voice saying, "I’m not a real writer," or "I don’t deserve this," challenge it. Ask yourself: What evidence do I have that this is true? Spoiler: There isn’t any. Use the mirror to reflect what is real instead. Write an affirmation and say it out loud to yourself, then get back to your writing. Your work and readers are waiting.

• Reframe Your Thinking

• Pay attention to your inner dialogue. Instead of saying, "I just got lucky" try: "I worked hard, improved my craft, and took advantage of my opportunities." Whenever doubts and fears come up, remind yourself, "Every writer doubts themselves—this is normal, but it doesn’t define me."

• Keep a “Proof” Folder

• Create a digital or physical folder where you save:
  ✅ Positive feedback from editors, agents, or readers
  ✅ Good reviews or contest recognitions 
  ✅ Personal milestones—finishing a draft, hitting a word count goal, getting shortlisted
  On tough days, revisit these to remind yourself that your work has real value and made a positive impact.

• Stop the Comparison Game

• It’s easy to look at other writers and feel lost or behind, but their journey isn’t yours. Even bestselling authors struggle with Imposter Syndrome! Instead of comparing yourself to others, focus on your progress. The only person to compare yourself to is you. Also, cheer others on knowing they need your support as much as you need theirs.

• Write Through It

• Fear and self-doubt thrive in inaction. Keep writing, even if you don’t feel "good enough" that day. One of the best ways to grow as a writer is to write. The only way out is through.

• Share Your Struggles with Fellow Writers

• Imposter Syndrome relies on silence. Talking about it with other writers can be eye-opening—they probably feel the same way! Other authors will have tips as to how to beat this too, so reach out to your critique group or friends in the field to gather collective wisdom. 

• Celebrate Your Wins (Big & Small)

• Finished a chapter? Got positive feedback? Submitted to an agent? Celebrate it! Recognizing progress helps rewire your brain to see your success instead of dismissing it. If in doubt, go for a quick win: write a flash fiction piece, watch a video on the art and craft of writing, read one of your favorite authors. Your choices are endless.

• Accept That Doubt is Normal

• Even established authors battle Imposter Syndrome. The trick is to acknowledge the fear but not let it control you. You’re not an imposter—you’re just a writer pushing past your perceived limits.

Healthy Living Top Tip

Like most diseases, it’s a coordinated approach over time that promotes healing. While there are some actionable steps included in this article to help you diagnose and manage Imposter Syndrome, you may need to go deeper. Our top tip for this month is to be curious about what’s happening, especially if you are struggling, and to acknowledge that you are not alone. 

Don’t allow your internal worries to cross over into reality and kill your success. One thing that is unique to writers is we get to breathe life into “real” imposters (excuse the oxymoron), villains and victims, then wipe them out with the keyboard. Take advantage of this unique ability and feel emboldened to vanquish your internal imposter. Eradicate the disease at its source. Your story awaits.

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Authors: Mary Lynn Cloghesy & Jason Schembri. Mary Lynn is the founder of the Leadership Literary Lab (https://leadershipliterarylab.com), and Jason is a long-term weight loss specialist (https://jasonschembri.coach) Together, they host a luxury writing retreat in the Canadian Rockies. 

The Writer’s Playbook: Michael Jordan, Me, and a Poster

By Steven Harms

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To all aspiring authors, this one’s for you.

I’m fortunate to have two published books with a third taking shape on my computer, but aspiring I am. To be sure, my journey has had its share of bumps and bruises. For new and aspiring authors, the headwinds of the publishing industry are not only real but magnified. One big hurdle is securing a literary agent if you’re inclined to go the traditional route. That’s followed by the excruciating rollercoaster ride of landing a publisher, which comes with a healthy dose of rejection. Or, you can go self-published, but then you must manage the entire process and the burden that presents with perhaps a steeper climb to the top. There’s no right or wrong method. The point here is the odds of becoming a best-selling author are not favorable.

For as many authors that have “broken through” and reached a level of success, there are immeasurable others that haven’t, despite pulling all the right levers. With two books out, I’m decidedly in the second camp.

The reality is that there’s an ocean of books out there, and it can be daunting to wade into those waters. Establishing your brand, marketing your book, growing your sales, getting exposure, building a following, and then, ultimately, hopefully, expectantly, and with a measure of luck or timing or both, you catch a wave and ride it to the bestseller list.

I have an amazing agent and a supportive publisher, and I’m grateful for her. Killer Nashville Magazine also taking me on as a contributing writer has been a fantastic blessing as well. Yet, like so many others, I’m still in the trenches looking up and trying to break through.

In most any endeavor, realizing one’s dream includes a dose of luck and timing. They are uncontrollable variables, and they are real. Ask any athlete, actor, model, artist, singer, or musician. If you reach the elite echelon of one’s chosen pursuit, there was some degree of those two elements somewhere in the process.

With all that as the backdrop, my career in the sports business affords me an interesting take on the journey to author success. The parallels are weirdly similar.

At this juncture, you may be asking, where does Michael Jordan come into the conversation? Well, I had a unique experience that sort of captures my points here. Let’s jump back to February 7, 1988, inside the old Chicago Stadium, former home of the Chicago Bulls, and to the NBA Slam Dunk contest going on as part of the NBA All-Star Weekend. Specifically, let’s move ourselves down onto the court. And to the Slam Dunk staging area courtside by the Gatorade table near mid-court. That’s where I was stationed.

I was there at the request of the NBA to help manage the event. At that time, I was with the Milwaukee Bucks as head of ticket sales and the NBA had gotten to know me. They pulled in three team executives they knew they could rely on to help. Besides me, Don Johnson from the Denver Nuggets and Brad Ewing from the Houston Rockets were part of the team. We became a three-headed event manager, taking lead from the NBA’s VP, Paula Hanson. Thus, the headsets. We were to ensure that the participating players were seated in line as instructed on the team bench, and that we had the next player to compete informed and sent to that mid-court table to wait their turn for the competition. That’s where I was stationed, while Don and Brad were on the sideline managing the media and player positioning. I was there to keep the player in place and tell him when he should go.

I relay all this for a reason. 

That Slam Dunk contest is now part of the annals of NBA lore. It was, to some extent, Michael Jordan’s coming out party that cemented his reign over the NBA for years to come. He beat out Dominique Wilkins to win the slam dunk title, and in the process, executed a dunk where he sped the full length of the court and leaped at the free throw line to slam home the basketball. In mid-air, he looked like he was flying with his left arm slightly back, his legs like wings, the ball held high, and his elevation almost inhuman. A photographer captured that moment, and the photo went on to be a best-selling poster every fan wanted. Smart phones and personal devices with cameras weren’t around back then. Images of celebrities were monetized through posters sold at retail locations (no internet either!).

Look up that moment online and you’ll see two well-dressed guys on headsets squatting on the sideline, each sporting a mustache. That’s Don and Brad. On the poster. Forever. To the right, the Gatorade table where yours truly was squatting is cropped out. Forever. 

The three of us were equals. We each were young executives doing the same job for our respective teams, having got to that point because of our talent and capabilities. The NBA noticed us. We did all the right things to achieve our position. We worked hard, put in the hours, learned our craft, and improved ourselves by networking and just being in the business. But at that moment, on the floor of the Chicago Stadium, something unexpected happened to my two colleagues. They caught a break in that they’re visually and permanently part of a historic moment. And for the record, I have zero consternation that I was cropped out. I’m genuinely elated for them both. 

I tell this story because it speaks to our ambitions of finding success. As aspiring authors, we’re all the same in many ways. We have talent. We can write compelling stories. We network and learn and improve. We pour ourselves into our dream and spend countless hours writing, editing, rewriting, marketing, and sweating over the details. But sometimes, it simply comes down to luck and timing. 

And maybe I should’ve added Thomas Jefferson to the title of this article, because he said something that should give all aspiring writers some solace we’re doing all the right things to succeed. Jefferson is quoted as saying, “I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it." The newer version of that is “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

So, keep writing and keep working hard. A dose of luck is an element to success in most any field. Stay the course and know that the road we’re on isn’t necessarily paved, rather that it’s a bumpy ride with potholes and hills to climb. But keep driving. Luck and timing seem to find their way to those that persevere.

Productivity

By Dale T Phillips

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“Writing a novel is like driving at night with your headlights on- you can only see a little of the road ahead, but you can make the whole journey that way.”

—E.L. Doctorow

You write a novel the way you’d eat an elephant—one small bite at a time.

Writing even one novel is a lot of damned hard work. Continuing to write them is little short of obsessive. But to be successful, you’ll have to keep doing it over and over. Unlike singers, however, you get to do different ones each time, not the same thing over and over. 

Every writer has a different way of doing the work. Two major types of writers are (with many of us doing one or the other, or both):

• Plotters, who carefully detail everything before writing, doing the outline, and setting the scene first.

• Pantsers, who write “by the seat of their pants,” just jumping in without a complete structure in advance. Dean Wesley Smith uses this method, which he calls “Writing into the Dark.” He has an advantage, though, in having done it several hundred times!

It’s good to keep files of ideas, titles, character sketches, and turn of phrases. When you need a new idea, scan these files for things that spark your imagination. I’ve got hundreds of potential titles in one file and ideas for new stories in another. I’ll never run out of things to write.

The best way to be productive is to write every day if you can. It builds the habit. Don’t wait for inspiration. If you can do that, it’s a wonderful way to be productive. On the other hand, I do it the “wrong” way (even though fellow writers compliment me on my productivity, which I find amusing). I have to be inspired by the ancient Greek concept of “The Muse,” which many say is not effective, because you won’t write as much. Lucky for me, I take The Muse seriously, and She often drops by to tell me what to write next. It sometimes messes me up because I shift projects at a moment’s notice. 

For too long, I was working on three different novels and not completing any of them. One was 75 percent done, another was 50 percent done, and the third was 25 percent done. Which all adds up to zero percent finished. There were some publishing strategy changes and various issues in the narratives which bogged me down. 

Then I finished one novel, but before I got to the other two, another novel sprang into being. I wrote most of that, and got stuck again when illness, depression, and Covid-19 hit in rapid succession. I was down and out for too long before I decided that writing would give me back my life. Indeed, it did, and I burst forth with a completed and published novel, a new story, and a finished draft of another novel. 

Write whenever you want or can: early morning, late at night, on lunch breaks, whenever. Find the time that works best for you. Short stretches or long marathon sessions, it doesn’t matter. Keep a notebook handy for ideas that come to you when you’re doing other things like driving, showering, or taking a walk (when many ideas turn up). 

If you have trouble, try the “Pomodoro Method” of sprints and movement. http://graemeshimmin.com/the-pomodoro-technique-for-writers/

NaNoWriMo is a fun method to put out a lot of work in just a few weeks. If you’re having trouble getting words down, think about giving it a try to kickstart your brain into fevered word production.

One good habit is to set aside your writing time as the primary task for the day. Writers procrastinate better than anyone else, and it’s so easy to get sidetracked that writing time can easily slip away. Write first, do all else later. Don’t do research in your writing time because it’s easy (and lots of fun) to fall down the rabbit hole. If you come to a passage that needs to be researched, just mark it as such and move on.

Doing the Math 

If you’re just starting out, you may produce at a slower rate. That’s okay, it will just take you longer. If you’re going to be a successful indie writer, you’ll need a fair amount of good work. Do you know how long on average it takes you do finish, edit, and publish each book? If not, start with an estimation of writing one book a year, 50-100,000 words. When you get more experienced, you’ll definitely want to increase this output, but it’s a good place to begin. At that pace, it will take you roughly five years to write five good books, which will (simply by that output) put you in the top 20% of all published writers. 

Have you got at least five good books in you, just as a start?

So, your first novel. Say 75,000 words, and you want it done in a year. That’s only 1500 words a week (a few hundred a day) and around 5 pages. Fifty weeks later, you’ve got 250-plus pages, and those 75,000 words. Congratulations! You’ve done more than many who set out to do this. It may not be the best yet, but you got it done.

Celebrate!

Then get to work on the second novel. You’ve practiced for a year, so maybe this one will go faster. Up your word count to 2500 words a week. Still quite doable. This means you’ll get this one done in just over six months. How about that? Almost half the time. You learned a lot more, and it’s probably better than book one.

Celebrate! 

Write the third book, slightly better pace. Finish. 

Celebrate! 

Two years total, three books under your belt.

Starting to get the hang of it? Hopefully. Rinse and repeat. 

If you need a million words to get really good, how many can you write in a year? A book a year is a decent pace, better than most, but for more success, you might want to step it up some. If you can put out 5,000 words a week, you can have 250,000 in a year, and a million words in only four years. 

One book a year might net you a few hundred dollars in income (or a few thousand), but you want more, you want volume. The more you write and publish, the more you’ll make. If you want to make 48,000 dollars a year, you’ll need 4,000 dollars a month, or roughly two thousand total sales at two dollars profit each, or 500 sales a week. One book will sell x number of copies, ten books will sell much more. So you want to get to ten good books published, as quickly as possible. That takes discipline and dedication. 

Figure out how much you make per hour, and scale up. If you make a penny per word, an hour of good writing at one thousand words nets you roughly ten dollars. That’s your scale. If you want to make $48,000 a year, you have to either write faster or get paid more. Daunting, yes. 

After six to ten books, you should be selling more of everything. Each new book adds to the total. The “Halo effect” means that other books of yours are bought because people discovered a first book, then went on to others. Especially if you have a series or connected books. 

In the old way of publishing, some authors could get by with one book a year. Today, you’ll likely have to be far more productive to make a decent income. It’s up to you to determine your level of success.

Dean Wesley Smith calls his copyright and production output The Magic Bakery.

Imagine that you have a storefront with all your items for sale within. If you have one book in one format, you have one product. Have you ever walked into a store and bought a single product? You likely won’t stay long. As a successful author, you want variety and choice, different price points, and for shoppers to come back again and again to buy more. A series can bring them back for more. Put your work out as an e-book, in print, as audio, and other formats, such as graphic novels. The other aspect of The Magic Bakery is that as an indie author, you can keep licensing pieces of each product, while keeping the original. Traditional publishers buy the whole product, which you cannot resell. Dean made thousands of dollars from one story, by licensing different pieces of it. Make your work into a virtual storefront, and fill it with tempting merchandise. 

It’s amusing to me that when I set up my display at book events (24 books currently, plus anthologies with others), people look at the output, and think I’m prolific, when I feel like a slacker who doesn’t do enough. I smile and say, “If you want it badly enough, you’ll work for it.” I sell more than most writers at these events, because of my sheer variety, and the different price points (with prices shown for each book, so browsers don’t have to ask). A few secrets of my success. I point out that someone can grab a book of short stories for little more than a cup of coffee or get a good novel for half the price of a hardcover in a bookstore. And because people love a bargain, I’ll give them a price break if they want to buy more than one book. By having so much available, with ebooks and audio of everything, I’ll offer them other free versions of the work when they purchase print (which costs me nothing). People will remember and come back in subsequent years to buy more. And every year they come back, there’s more to sell. 

Advantage, productivity.

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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.