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.