The Question Every Audience Eventually Asks

It comes in different forms, but it's always the same question.

Sometimes it arrives directly: How do you find the courage to keep creating when you don't know if it matters? Sometimes it's more specific: How do you keep writing when no one seems to be reading? Sometimes it's quieter than that. It might not be a question at all but a look, a hesitation, the way someone lingers after a talk with something they can't quite bring themselves to say.

But it's always the same question underneath. Does this work mean anything? Am I making something that matters, or am I just making noise?

I've asked it myself more times than I can count. Every honest creative person has.

And I can't resolve the uncertainty. I still feel it nearly every day. However, one thing I've learned is you are almost never the right judge of your own work's impact. The piece you labored over and doubted and almost didn't finish is often the one that reaches someone in a way you'll never fully know. The moment you almost cut is often the moment someone else underlines, highlights, or marks with a dog-eared page.

You don't get to see most of what your work does in the world. You have to make it faithfully and release it and trust that it finds who it's meant to find.

That's not a comfortable answer. But it's the honest one. And every time I give it, I watch the person who asked the question visibly relax, as if permission to not know was exactly what they needed.

Create faithfully. Release bravely. Trust the rest.

Have you ever doubted whether your creative work matters? What brought you back to it anyway? I'd love to hear your story in the comments.

What Speaking Taught Me About Writing

I became a better writer the day I started speaking.

That's not the direction the influence is supposed to run. Writers write; speakers speak. The skills feel adjacent but separate. But standing in front of a live audience and watching in real time how people respond to language has taught me things about writing that I'd never have learned from years at a desk alone and isolated.

An audience gives you immediate feedback that a manuscript never can.

You feel the moment a story resonates with your audience. The quality of the attention shifts, the room leans in. You also feel the moment it doesn't. The restlessness that returns, the slight drift of focus. You learn quickly which words carry weight and which ones dissipate into the air without leaving a mark. You discover that sentences which read beautifully on a page sometimes collapse when spoken aloud, and that the clearest, simplest construction almost always wins.

I brought all of that back to my writing.

I am becoming increasingly more aware of rhythm. The way a sentence sounds as well as how it reads. More ruthless about clarity. More attentive to the moment when I was holding a reader's attention and the moment I was losing it, even without a live audience in the room. Speaking has taught me to feel those things in my body, and once you can feel them, you can't unfeel them.

These two disciplines have made each other stronger. Writing gave me better material to use when speaking. Speaking gave me a more calibrated ear to utilize when I write.

That isn't something I expected, but I'm grateful for it.

Have you ever found that one skill you developed in one area unexpectedly improved something completely different? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

The Talk I Was Most Afraid to Give

The talks that scare you most are usually the ones that matter most.

I've spoken on craft, on publishing, on the intersection of faith and fiction, on the writing life in all its unglamorous reality. Most of those talks live in territory I know well. I've inhabited it for years, and while preparation still matters, there's a foundation of familiarity underneath it.

The talk I was most afraid to give was different.

It required me to speak from a place I hadn't finished processing. To stand in front of people and talk honestly about a season of my life that still felt raw. The long hiatus from writing, the complicated tangle of reasons behind it, what it cost and what it eventually produced. It required me to be a person telling her own story rather than an author talking about craft, and those hold two distinctly different kinds of pressure.

What I discovered is that the talks that cost you something personally are the ones that give the most back to an audience. They're not looking to delight in your suffering. That's not what impresses them. And while I've been burned multiple times by those who sought to gain from exposing my weaknesses or struggles, I've tried hard to not let that stop me. 

Because honesty is disarming.

When a speaker is willing to be genuinely vulnerable, a room responds with a generosity that is almost overwhelming. This isn't the performed vulnerability, where a false reality is presented with the intent to manipulate. This is the real kind, the kind that still has some uncertainty in it because the speaker hasn't worked out everything yet.

People don't connect with polished. They connect with true.

The talk I was most afraid to give became one I'm most grateful I gave. The fear, it turned out, was pointing directly at the thing the audience most needed to hear.

Is there something you've been afraid to say or share because it felt too personal or too unfinished? What's held you back? I'd love to hear in the comments.

What Happens in a Room When a Story Is Told Well

There's a specific moment I watch for when I'm speaking.

It happens a few sentences into a story, and sometimes sooner. The quiet shifts. The restlessness that lives in any audience settles. Phones go face-down without anyone deciding to put them down. Eyes that were drifting come back to the front of the room. The collective attention of a group of separate individuals becomes, briefly and remarkably, a single thing.

It's neuroscience. But sometimes, it can feel like magic. It's the way human brains are wired to respond to narrative. To synchronize, to lean in, to follow a story the way they'll follow almost nothing else.

But story doesn't have to be dramatic to produce that magical reaction.

It doesn't require high stakes or unusual circumstances or a particularly remarkable outcome. What it requires is specificity and honesty. A real moment, rendered with enough detail that the listener can step inside it. A genuine emotion, named or implied, that creates recognition.

When those elements are present, the speaker doesn't have to forcibly manufacture or control the reaction. It just happens. The audience brings themselves into the story. They map their own experience onto it. They're no longer just listening. They're participating, finding themselves somewhere in the narrative.

It's why I recently branched out and landed on the Get Rooted platform. On the blog and inside every graphic that goes on a product, the power of words and story take center stage. Every single person has a story to tell, and we help make that happen at the Get Rooted blog, all while grounding everything in God's truth. Those simple stories change lives.

That's the moment I work toward every time I speak. I don't hope for any applause at the end. No, I strive to achieve that quiet shift, a few sentences in, when the room becomes one thing.

Have you ever felt that shift in a room? The moment when a speaker or storyteller captured everyone at once? What were they talking about? I'd love to hear in the comments.

Why I Speak About Story

I didn't set out to be a speaker.

In fact, the first time I was asked to share my story, a well-respected woman approached me just before, with her narrowed eyes and slight curl of one side of her mouth. She looked me up and down and said, "Who do you think you are coming here to talk to us women? You're barely out of school and not married or a mother, and you're just getting started in life. What could you possibly have to share that would help us?"

Ouch, right? That one hurt. A lot! And although I did get up in front of those women to share my story, I allowed that woman's words to haunt me for the next 15 years. Every time I thought I might have some insight or wisdom to share with someone else, either individually or in a group, that "imposter syndrome" would rear its ugly head, and I'd keep my mouth shut.

Instead, when the opportunity to write fell in my lap, I jumped right on that path. Writing has always held a special place in my heart, and I'd still consider it my primary calling. But for too long, I hid behind the protection of distance between what I wrote and my audience.

After I had a few books and a couple dozen articles under my belt, the opportunity to speak came my way again. Although a part of me wanted to run the other way, I chose to step forward. It took everything I'd learned about communicating truth through story to figure out how to do it standing in front of a room full of people instead of alone at a desk.

Once I stood at the front, the small audience looking at me, I realized something.

The principles are the same. A room full of people responds to story the same way a reader does. The defenses lower, the attention sharpens, the emotional access opens. A well-placed story in the middle of a talk does what a well-placed scene does in a novel. It makes the abstract concrete. It makes the distant personal. It makes the truth become real in a relatable way.

I speak about story because story is what I know most deeply. It's also because the longer I've worked with it in fiction, content, or conversation, the more convinced I've become that it's one of the most powerful tools available to anyone trying to communicate something that matters.

Not just writers. Anyone.

The business leader trying to inspire a team. The teacher trying to reach a struggling student. The parent trying to explain something important to a teenager who has stopped listening to direct instruction. Story reaches where argument can't. It always has.

That's why I speak about it. When you understand how story works, it changes how you communicate everything else.

Has a speaker ever used a story that completely changed how you received what they were saying? What made it land? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.