The Stories Writers Tell Themselves
Aug 13, 2026 · 3 min · 5 segments
**Episode 12 - When you can see the story** Writers spend a lot of time making up stories and not all of them end up in our books. *The Stories Writers Tell Themselves* is a free limited audio…
Katherine ColletteHostNot because writers are particularly dramatic or fragile, but because writing asks something really unusual of people.
It asks you to keep working for long periods of time without much feedback, and to spend months, years, making something that may never find its way into the world.
When you think about it like that, it is not surprising our minds start generating stories to explain what's happening.
We try to make sense of that rejection, or to interpret silence, or to predict the future.
Sometimes these stories are helpful, but often they're just us trying to protect ourselves from uncertainty.
The moment you start to see these stories clearly, something cool happens.
You don't necessarily stop having the thoughts, but you stop taking them so seriously.
Instead of thinking, "This means I'm not good enough," you might think, "Oh, there's that story again." Instead of thinking, "Everyone else is doing better than me," you might say to yourself, "My brain is comparing again." That small shift creates space, and that space matters because it means you're not pulled around by every thought in quite the same way, and the weight you give things starts to shift.
A single response doesn't define the work, and one book doesn't determine what happens next.
Something not landing straight away doesn't mean very much on its own, because a writing life isn't really decided there, it's shaped in the moments where you keep going, when you continue with a chapter that isn't quite right yet, or start something new after the previous thing doesn't go the way you wanted, or when you stay in the room long enough for things to evolve.
They're how writers build a body of work and a career, and that's why writing is sometimes described as a long game.
Not because success necessarily takes a long time, though sometimes it does, but because writing asks you to stay engaged with your work long enough for the right projects, and opportunities, and readers to slowly find their way towards you.
Not because writers are particularly dramatic or fragile, but because writing asks something really unusual of people.
It asks you to keep working for long periods of time without much feedback, and to spend months, years, making something that may never find its way into the world.
When you think about it like that, it is not surprising our minds start generating stories to explain what's happening.
We try to make sense of that rejection, or to interpret silence, or to predict the future.
Sometimes these stories are helpful, but often they're just us trying to protect ourselves from uncertainty.
The moment you start to see these stories clearly, something cool happens.
You don't necessarily stop having the thoughts, but you stop taking them so seriously.
Instead of thinking, "This means I'm not good enough," you might think, "Oh, there's that story again." Instead of thinking, "Everyone else is doing better than me," you might say to yourself, "My brain is comparing again." That small shift creates space, and that space matters because it means you're not pulled around by every thought in quite the same way, and the weight you give things starts to shift.
A single response doesn't define the work, and one book doesn't determine what happens next.
Something not landing straight away doesn't mean very much on its own, because a writing life isn't really decided there, it's shaped in the moments where you keep going, when you continue with a chapter that isn't quite right yet, or start something new after the previous thing doesn't go the way you wanted, or when you stay in the room long enough for things to evolve.
They're how writers build a body of work and a career, and that's why writing is sometimes described as a long game.
Not because success necessarily takes a long time, though sometimes it does, but because writing asks you to stay engaged with your work long enough for the right projects, and opportunities, and readers to slowly find their way towards you.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
