Telling A Story vs. Delivering A Message | Pastor & Fiction Writer Zac Cannon

0:00What do you want? Like, what do you want for what you're desire? And I don't think anybody had ever really asked me that. That is Zach Cannon. He is an award-winning storyteller, filmmaker, and novelist who is also a pastor. In this conversation, I wanted to ask Zach how and if, the intention of storytelling changes between fiction and spirituality. I'd always wanted to write up story. I'd always want to write a book. Like, well, can you just do something because you want to do it? In service to nothing else, besides your own creativity. You don't have to tie spirituality into it. You don't have to tie. You don't have to tie any. It's just what do you want to say? We also talk about the difference between compelling an audience and manipulating one and how to communicate strong convictions while still honoring and leaving ring for curiosity. Oh, I say this without getting in trouble. This is Uncomventional Leader, Zach Cannon. Where do you usually start with developing a concept

1:11or an idea? Is it the emotional but truth that you're wanting to convey and you find a story to wrap around that? Or dislike? I know Rob Bell talks about his characters visiting him and his sleep. You know what I mean? And then the theme kind of comes from that. Where do you start? I asked my wife, she has read things that people will never read. So I said, hey, I'm kind of in a space. I'm kind of struggling. What do you say I write about? And she kind of thought for a second. She was like, you write about relationships. And so I kind of chewed on that a little bit. So the thing that I've at least tricked myself into believing is that I need the relational hook first. So this is going to be a story about this person and these people and their relationship. And then all the other plot points then just become, well, what would be either the most interesting scenario to put them in or the most difficult scenario to put them in. But it has to be relational.

2:14It has to be, again, it has to be human. And then for me, I've realized that in some way, at least all the fiction that I've written that's been published is always about being a dad. At some stage and whether that subconscious or not. Why is relationships really important for you? There's the surface level answer, which I would just say, that's all we have. There are the first stories, my story between my parents and me, my story between my brother and me, my story between my spouse and me, my story between my kids and I. And then how those stories get broken, how those stories get repaired. I think that at a fundamental level, we're looking for that connectivity and those threads. And so I think as meaning-making creatures, finding that within relationships is the easiest thing for us to do. And it's the thing that we also, that's like we're all of our life's, I think, I believe, life's biggest joys come from relationship, life's biggest surprises, our most intense emotions

3:17and physical experiences come from relationships. But also the exact opposite of that, our greatest disappointments, our greatest hurts. They're generally rooted in a relationship. I think in creating imaginary relationships, I get to play at either the restorative things that I wish were part of these relationships. Or sometimes if I'm writing from a perspective, and I need to get a character in a place where they need to do something challenging, oftentimes, well, ask myself, what scares me? What would I not want to face? And then how can I take that up to 11 and put this character in this situation? But it's still me processing that fear through that character. So on the one hand, relationships are really the beginning of the tapestry of human lives. And on the other hand, it's a way for me to respond to the good and bad relationships I've had. And then some way to use them as play things

4:21to work out my own neuroses or trauma or maybe even imagining love and writing stories about things like that. You went to sound school, right? Tell me about that and what you learned. Oh, it was a long time ago. No, I think what I learned and that I continued to come back to is collaboration. Making a film, making any larger creative endeavor, building a business, operating a church, you need a vision. I'm of the opinion that a single visionary can think and get tricky. And so I'm much more interested in, like, how do we discern the vision together? So when that comes to filmmaking, it's like, all right, we have these people that perform these different roles. But it's in service to this story that we want to tell. And everyone's going to collaborate with their gifts, their expertise into this. And some people are going to have more power, at least in that system than others do.

5:22But every single role is important in order for that vision to be brought into life. And then I've taken that into pretty much everything I do leadership-wise is, yeah, I might have in this system, I have certain decision-making power. But in no mean should I not listen to you or collaborate with you. So finding a way for us to say, well, where are we going? And how are we going to get there together? To me, is a better answer than, this is where I want to go. And you're going to help me get there. So I think that's the most lasting thing that I've kind of taken from film school. So at some point, you decided to not go the film route. You wrote screenplays and then transitioned into writing novels. So how long were you in the film space and what led you to kind of leave that you're shaking your head up? Yeah, no, no, no, no. It's just a longer stretch than I thought.

6:23So while I was in film school, I was also experiment, taking my kind of first experimental steps into ministry. And let's rewind. I'm born and raised in southwestern Virginia in a little town and steeped in kind of well-intentioned cultural Christianity or lack of a better world. You kind of just marinate in it. It's part of it. There's not a lot of other people besides Christians. They just all go to different flavors of churches. And we were in and out of church as a kid. My parents divorced when I was younger. And they pick and choose when they thought it would be necessary for them to attend. And I kind of got old and long. But it never really kind of became a part of my rhythm. Fast forward to I was 19. I was delivering pizzas. And I got held up at gunpoint in a trailer park.

7:25And the scariest moment of my life. And I can only laugh at it now because it was tremendously terrifying. It's probably one of the three full events of my life so far. And when you're 19, you begin to ask a lot of big questions. And the only place I knew to go for those questions was the church. So I befriended a guy who was in training to be a preacher at the new job that I took after leaving the delivery business. And he was just a great friend. And he kind of led me down the first couple of steps of my face, spiritual journey. Fast forward to California. He would not assume that would be a high on my list of priorities and going to film school and being in my early 20s. But I found this group of people that wanted to invest

8:26in me. And again, well-intentioned. I felt at home. I felt like I belonged. And parallel to film school was this what would this look like type of conversation. And so finally, about halfway through film school, it became a genuine question of, do I want to pursue this thing or do I want to go into ministry? And by the time I finished film school and kind of wrapped up kind of the post film festival kind of year, I was full in on ministry. Was that the best decision? It was the decision. There's no regret. I've made peace with, I mean, it sounds really harsh when I say this. And maybe there's some harshness to it.

9:28I've made peace with that version of me. Thought the best thing for me was to limit certain aspects of my desires or interest in order to serve this other thing. I did get to use a lot of my things I'd learned in film school and service to that community. And in some ways, the broader community that we lived in. But it took a while for me to realize, like, how much of myself am I actually showing up in this space with? Which is, I think, a continued question throughout my entire life. This, how much of you does this community actually want? And so by the end of that time there, I definitely felt like the you that was trying to show up in the spaces,

10:29by then I'd been asking a lot of questions about a lot of things. There was not room for me. So I think, again, I'll use the word well intentioned. The beginning of the journey was the best decision I thought I can make at the time, at the age that I was, with the influences that I had. And they definitely were formatives. And without them, I would not be where I am or who I am. But there were underlying symptoms that evolved during that as part of my story as well. The reason I was asking you about that is, and I know it's all hindsight now. It's like, I like how you said, well, it was the decision. And I love the understanding of that version of you because I immediately went into ministry school and ministry full time and didn't go to college and didn't pursue all my, you know, I was really big into church drama.

11:30And I was like, I want to go into film or media or whatever and ended up going to ministry school instead and using my talents in the church, which again, that's wonderful experiences and hard experiences. But now at almost 40, 40 in a few weeks, there's big reflection time of, you know, not necessarily regret, but also to like what, just what you said, what parts of myself as a communicator and a storyteller, a performer, have I hid or muted or whatever. And it felt like it needed to be through the lens of an agenda or something, you know, ministerial, or going to impact the world, and I do want to impact the world. But it's interesting trying to kind of tease out like that for me that need to like be a minister and just let myself be an interested creator. Yeah, and it's still there. That little voice is still there very much.

12:33How do you wrestle with that now? Yeah, so it's interesting. I was doing a spiritual direction program around the time I was turning 40. So there's some life things there, I think. I won't call it a crisis, but I'll call it a monster. I remember in that direction class, a ton of my much beloved cohort members were wrestling with so many things. I can't even, I don't even want to say them, but they were deeply personal, tied to all these different things. And I was just like, well, I don't have this thing. And it was right at the, you know, we kind of start like 2021ish right the end of COVID or things are wrapping up at least. And I just remember at some points, one of our leaders asking like, what do you want? Like what are you long for? What's your desire? And I don't think anybody had ever really asked me that

13:35that way before as far as like, hey, if you just had to sit with yourself for a while, what is something that you long to do? How you long to show up in the world? And I'd always wanted to write a story. I'd always want to write a book. And that's kind of where the, it began to break down for me. It's like, well, can you just do something because you want to do it in service to nothing else besides your own creativity? And that was unfortunately at almost 40 at that time, that first big leap of like, oh, yeah, you can just do it. And you don't have to tie spirituality into it. You don't have to tie, you don't have to tie any, it just what do you want to say? And then just letting that see where that took you naturally and see what story came out of that. That was the first time I'd ever written something without an expectation of who would read it or how it would be received from pastor's act. There was a term you use the other day when we were talking self-permission.

14:38There's a level of permission you gotta give yourself to do that. You have a lot of other responsibilities and people needing you in a log like on your personal life that permission to sit and feel and wrestle and create something. And I would even argue, you know, be able to create something without it needing to be anything. And it just being a piece of work you want to create. How did you kind of walk through the permission element? Still struggling with that, you know, just released a book last week that I'm getting some feedback from people that I know that are reading. It's, I was having this, I mean, I know everybody has this kind of crisis of like, I wrote this thing and I want everybody to read it but I don't want anybody to read it, that type of situation. But that story and parts of other stories I've written of like, can you let the story tell itself without dictating where it's gonna go? I think that's true of anybody that's ever written fiction.

15:39But then apply that to your life. Can you just let, can you trust your instincts? Can you trust what's gotten you so far that's made you who you are? Can you lean into your values enough that you're gonna make the decision that you should make in this situation? Now, are you gonna make the right decision? Every time, absolutely not. But like giving yourself permission to trust that you're gonna show up in the space as yourself. And be able to reliably just be you and not have to be a version of yourself. That's something that I'm still very much trying to figure out as a creative and as a human being of how much do you want of the real me? And on the page, you're gonna get as much as I can give you. But like in real life, there's very few people outside of the people I live with that know, know me as fully that way. And so those are the two ways I would kind of look at it.

16:40It's like, you know, can I just be, can I just be me? I think we're all trying to figure that out as we figure out who we are at the same time. How do you not get stuck in one identity, especially when you're a pastor? Oh, let's say this without getting in trouble. I don't think that that's my main identity. I feel like I am naturally inclined to lead in a particular way. But the I kind of shirk, like be even being call pastor, because I recognize that, you know, administratively, there's things I have to do behind the scenes, whatever. But in a space on a Sunday morning, I'm showing up with my gifts, which just happen to be that I can communicate reasonably

17:44of well in certain situations. And I'm gonna recognize that everybody else is gonna show up in their giftedness. And hopefully together as a community, we're gonna be better by the time we leave this space. Same thing if I'm doing some type of pastoral care, I'm not showing up as the person who has all the answers. I wanna sit, I wanna listen with you, I wanna cry with you, I wanna hear your story. So I kind of don't like the idea. I'm trying to be Zach, and all these other things are underneath of it, that's just part of who I am. And that's really hard when you exist within a system that kind of had a social contract for like what the pastor is supposed to do. And what the pastor is supposed to say, and the roles and the functions, the pastor's supposed to do, but I still bristle a little bit at that. Because I also think there's a lot of systemic like baggage

18:46to pastors and spiritual leaders. And I, yeah, there's a power hierarchy often times. And that makes me a little bit icky still. And I'm trying to figure out what to do, what to, what all to do with that. Because you can't really get around it. I've never asked anyone this, but I was curious with you specifically, if you think about the duality of being a creator in the fiction world, where you're having to go really deep with relationships and dynamics in these scenarios and so forth. And I allow, like you said, these characters in this world to evils without you trying to control it. And then you marry that with this idea that you are in ministry and leading all these folks from a spiritual perspective and probably have strong convictions or I don't think you'd be in that space.

19:47And what I think is interesting is as a creator, I know my acting coach always told me she said, never judge a character ever. Because the moment you judge them, like you're not able to ever really play them, you have to find the human in all characters and be able to see that other side. So this is messy, but I think I was like, isn't it interesting to think about being a writer where you need to be able to empathize with characters and not judge them and let the story take you, where it wants to take you all while having very strong convictions and point of view in this world. And so like as a leader with strong convictions, but then as a creative, it's host a whole things listly with open hands. How do you wrestle with those two worlds? That's an excellent question. And so I had this conversation a couple days ago where a person came up to me and said, you have to be fill in the blank as the pastor. And I listened to them for about 20 minutes.

20:49And what they had to say, I resonated with a lot. But I went home thinking if I was only that thing, then I couldn't be everybody's pastor, everybody. And so the way that I'm sitting with that right now is I'm talking about therapists about this. I see my role as the fundamental, like the storyteller of our tribe, of our community. I'm gonna be the one that hopefully can tell the story that roots us in the most compelling, healthy, dynamic way and invite people to participate in that story through ritual, through symbol, through song, through creativity. Hopefully encouraging them to explore the story themselves, right? So that's how I'm approaching you right now. I'm gonna be the holder of the fire that is this story and I'm just gonna keep saying it. And hopefully in ways that are not familiar, oftentimes, in order so you can hear it,

21:50in ways that you haven't heard of before. Over the past year, being more, in a more consistent role over the entire community, it has opened me up to being people as the whole person and not just as I knew this person functions in this system this way. And this is how they're gonna orient themselves to me. And we might never get past that on a systemic level. There's gonna be people that their natural way of showing up is to be the encourages all the time. No matter what I do, they're gonna be my biggest cheerleaders. There's gonna be people that show up and their role is gonna be, they're gonna push back because that's how they're wired. And so I'm trying to look past that and say, why does this person, what does this person's need, what does this person's desire, why does this person show up here? What is there why behind being in this community?

22:52Because some things attracting them here, they're still here. And I think the unfortunate reality is that we all suffered a very large loss, communally this year. And that has softened a lot of my story and their story so that there's permeability between we're not just showing up as the roles we play on Sunday morning or on Wednesdays or whenever we're here together, but we're showing up as people. And I've received that, I feel that. And I know that they've done the same thing. And so that's kind of my goal is, I'll tell you what I'll do is, I'll keep trying to tell this story the best I can. I'll keep inviting you into this story, but I kind of want to keep knowing your story. And also acknowledging like, we're not going to live the same life. We have a fairly dynamic community with some divergence in a lot of ways. And I'm learning to be gentle

23:53with where I'm pushing my convictions as well. And say, instead of saying, this is where we're going to go, or this is why I think this way, say, let me invite you to see it from this perspective. And hopefully they will have the permission to give me some feedback and give me their perspective and we'll find something more whole that neither one of us thought about. Yeah, I've been on the kick lately. I can't remember if I've told you this or not. The other day when we talked, but it's called unconventional leaders, but I interview creative folks. And I get so many, because I get all these pitches from like these corporate leader people, like, hey, you have a leader? And I'm like, you are, but we're talking about unconventional leaders. An unconventional to me is like the creative, the storyteller, because there is so much leadership and so much impact we can make through the stories we tell. And one of those is, I think it diffuses communication in a way that people can jump on board

24:54and I'll get hung up on language or terms or whatever, because if there's metaphor, we can all feel like internal truth and so did that. And so to your point, like a gentle way of inviting people, it's also interesting to think about, like what you said earlier, not putting a agenda or outcome or control on a story with your fiction writing, you know, when the purpose of story within the context of spirituality is usually pointing to some kind of truth, capital T truth, but in fiction writing, tell me if I'm wrong, I'm don't do fiction writing. These will pressure needs to be like some big moral lesson in it, or how can you kind of loosen that a little bit? The still water trace, the book that we put out last week is probably has, is the least subtle book that I've ever, ever written lethal story, as far as like what it's trying to point at, but at the same time, that's been a really interesting thing

25:56because like the me that wrote that book a year and a half ago, whenever we started writing that, and then we put it out, you know, has changed so dramatically, but even with that, the point of all good storytelling is to resonate into half catharsis, have some type of emotional release at the end. So if you get to the end of the story, whether you agreed with point A, B, or C, hopefully you've at least experienced the humanity of it, I never go in to a story with an agenda, I try not to give my characters agendas, but they do develop on their own, sometimes more than others. In my first two published books, the self-published ones, there are two characters, or is the character in each that has a little bit of something to say about spirituality, but it's part of them as a character, it's not a theme.

26:57So I like to kind of set this tone, set this stage, and then see the characters I'm going to populate my story with are going to be, not necessarily for, they're going to come from me, they're going to be people I've known, you know, amalgamations of people I've experienced, and so they're going to say things and do think that are familiar or antagonistic towards the way that I see the world. So I think in that way that the storytellers' point of view is always going to come out somewhere, but I don't think that's the same thing. It's an agenda, you can't really get rid of yourselves all the way, no matter how much you try to disappear behind the curtain. He said in another interview that your streak as a storyteller is flooding, just for the sake of the story, but for the emotional curvature of the story, and I had no idea what emotional curvature of the story

27:57meant, so you got to educate me. Just the arc, like, you know, just, so I know what you're referring to there, and I think that's one of the lasting things from film school that I'm slowly weaning myself off of, which is in the years in between, I would write scripts or write outlines, and my bread and butter was like, oh, I know how to plot this thing. I know where these beats need to go. Now I'm learning to trust that the characters are going to take me where I need to go, which is a little bit scarier. But for me, it's like, I know I have my main character. They're going to be the one on the biggest journey, and I don't want it to just be a physical journey. It needs to be an emotional journey, so I need to start them somewhere, and I need to know how to get them to where I need to get them at the end. And so normally I have a really good idea of what that looks like at the beginning, at least who I need them,

28:59who I know that they are, that they don't know that they are yet. And so they need to learn that along with the audience. And so I have a pretty good idea of how to gauge that, but then with this new book, for the first time I introduced other character perspectives, and then I found that, okay, well, now these people need arcs too, and learning how to find those along the way was probably the greatest thing that I learned through writing this new book. But again, it's like, okay, well, who does this person, I know who they are, and what journey can I take them on so they can discover who they are? If they're wounded, how do I, I might not heal them all the way, but where do they find some sense of reintegration at the end of the story? If they're a bad guy, how do I make them worse? How do I take them on a journey that's gonna make them, like not like them, they can really embrace their dark side.

30:01I think I know how to do that fairly well. It comes pretty naturally to me. I know when I'm writing, and I hit an area where it's like, oh, it's time for this to happen, this needs to happen right here. And sometimes I'll work towards those scenes, sometimes I'll draft those scenes in advance, even if I have to change them later on, because I want to kind of, I wanna know where the emotional level that I need to get to. So if I'm starting here, and I know where I need to get to, I need to know how subtle or how direct to make that progression. I don't know, the big puzzle. So what makes you good at it though? What are you asking yourself? What are you asking yourself? What do you consider? I don't mean to suck it in a braggie way, but like you're just in an honest way. If that comes natural to you, and there's somebody listening who wants to get better at developing, watch the emotional curvature of the character.

31:04I know, I was good. How would you advise them? I resonate with stories where the character's inner journey is as important, if not more important than their outer journey. And I think that's a preference. I think it's important to storytelling, but if you have 300 pages, there's some very easy beats that you can match along the way to make sure you're hitting those things. It all comes down to your basic three acts structure, but also what's happening to the characters along that time. So my daughter's getting into stop motion animation and storytelling. She did film school for the first time for a week this summer. And so she's like, I want to talk about story dad. And I'm like, well, I want you to go watch these movies. And at this time, watch for these scenes.

32:06So, well, it's 25 minutes, halfway through all these things. So teaching her like the beats of story structure, and then making sure to map the characters, emotional journey on top of the beats of the story structure. So we want to find them at an area. We're going to have to bring them down in order for us to lift them back up if that's the way they're going to go. So how gradual is that descent going to be? And then how are we going to get them, you know, if it's something very subtle, then it's a slow moving cozy curve. And if it's something like a dramatic drama over the course of a year, it's going to be more up and down. But just finding those things along the way, paying attention to them, making them interesting. Also, that's the hard part is you want to keep turning the page too. Now you had success, I have sunflower, I believe, that you and the awards for the screenplay. What drew you to doing novels now?

33:10I had written screenplays before. And so I was like, well, I can write a screenplay. I know how to write a screenplay. And so that was during COVID, with a little bit of free time, every else I think had a little bit of free time. And so I wrote sunflower, and then did the festival stuff, had a couple conversations with producers, didn't end up going anywhere. And then that sat on my desktop for a couple months. And I said, well, I really like the story. Maybe I'll just self publish it. And so that, that novella reads a lot more with the clip of a screenplay, because I did as little as I needed to do to embellish it rose wise, so that it had a reasonable enough page links. And it even has three short stories stuck in the end, just to kind of pump it up a little bit. But after I finished that,

34:10and I was like, oh, people that I had no read this, and they're like, oh, I didn't. You know, it's one of those things where you're like, hey, I wrote a book, and people are like, okay. And will you read my book? And you're like, sure. And then even now people won't read the books that I send them until, you know, I'm like, can't you read my book? And then they're like, oh, yeah, I was actually good. I'm like, thank you. After sunflower, I was determined like, okay, I want to write, I want to publish a novel by the time I turned 40. And so I think that was a two year gap between the time that I published the novella version of sunflower, and my 40th birthday. And so that was just the challenge of, I've always wanted to do this. I have a timetable. And so slant wise came out November 12th, not to dox myself, but two days before my 40th birthday. And now I'm just kind of addicted to what I think. How is storytelling in this format internally,

35:16not externally, but internally different in telling stories on a pulpit for your community? I still think there's a level of artifice and disappearing into character in this format storytelling. So I'm not my perfect. What is artifice? Artifice, sorry. So like, even if it's due to these big ass terms, man. So this idea of like, this isn't really fully me. Like I'm not this character. I'm not that character. There's pieces of me in here. But I want to show up on a Sunday morning, completely honest and completely vulnerable. And there's going to be no, I'm not going to show up in a way that I'm hiding anything or and I don't want to show up in a way that while I might be trying to communicate something in a compelling way, I'm not manipulating you. Versus in a novel, I am attempting to manipulate people.

36:18I want them to turn the page. I want them to feel a certain way. I want them to get mad. I want them to feel sad. And I want to turn all the screws to make that happen to the best of my ability versus on a Sunday morning. I kind of want to, I want to be able to say, this is me and we're here together and let's explore our big story that we've come here to explore together. So I think that's for me, that's what it is. There's no, I'm not trying to hide behind a character on Sunday morning. I want to show up as vulnerable and as honestly as I can. As opposed to storytelling where I'm like, okay, yeah, that, I don't, I don't necessarily believe that, but that person, that character can, can say that thing, that character can do that thing. So you just made me kind of rethink my question earlier because I was saying earlier about kind of the agenda base, letting go of the agenda base storytelling in fiction. But the way I just heard what you said is that really it should be opposite

37:18where there's no agenda base stuff in storytelling with spirituality. And there is an agenda with fiction storytelling. Yeah, there's at least the agenda to be compelling, right? Like you want people to read. Like that's the only thing I ever wanted was, I said, I want to write a book that if you pick it up in the airport, you won't want to put it down while you're on the airplane. That's it. I don't think that I'm a literary genius. I just want to make it to where you have an enjoyable flight versus, on a Sunday morning, like I want the way that we tell the story together, I want our liturgy, I want the structure of our time to can tell us all, so hopefully orient towards this bigger story. That, I mean, that, I guess that's an agenda, but I don't want to do it in a way that is manipulative. I would rather just, how much, how much beauty can we bake into this hour so that we all leave here wanting to make more beautiful things

38:20come to be in the world? Mm-hmm. In this latest book, what is the internal issues that you're addressing here? Yeah, so the protagonist in this book, he's named Mac, and he starts off very wounded, very broken. He doesn't really know who he is anymore. He is a former Army Chaplain and former pastor. And so his internal journey is not the same as my internal journey through my own kind of deconstruction, and there's other issues at hand, as far as socially, racially, and all these things, but for me, Mac's internal journey was always to understand that the thing that made him a protector and a lover and a secret of justice

39:22was not tied to the things that he had, the forms that he had found along the way to give him structure to that part of himself. And so rediscovering that in order to face the underlying plots of the story along the way, and there's family stuff there, there's internal stuff there as well, and just recognizing who he is as a man in the face of starting off the story very much thinking that everything that's ever given him a sense of identity either wasn't enough or let him down. And so that's what we're working with when we meet our man, Mac, I could be getting a water trace. And then we throw a whole bunch of stuff at him. What did he teach you about yourself and your own journey? Yeah, so Mac's, he's fairly angry,

40:23and I don't think it's a spoiler to say, when I got to the end of the book and I was writing the last word that I said, this is an angry book, and I actually had somebody who texted me a couple of days ago, you were going through some stuff when you wrote that, huh? And so I think Mac gave me an outlet to be angry at some things and say them out loud. And not that they are that in naming them or addressing them in a public way, like writing a novel has done anything to erase them. From the zeitgeist or what's happening in our world, but at least let me go on a journey where I could have this fictional kind of, I could release everything that I wanted, say everything I wanted,

41:24sometimes over the top because of the world of the story. And now that I'm on the other end of it, I feel like I am facing some of those same issues or at least their real life counterparts in parallels with a different heart. I'm not as mad anymore as much as I am. I know there's things that need to be done so how do we mobilize to see them happen? Cause just staying an anger is not gonna be the best case. And I think Mac gets to that point towards the end of the story too. I think he realizes what is required in order to do the thing he can do against everything else that as it gets Tim in order to see those he love come out on the other side.

42:28I was watching a, I'm not a swifty people. I was just like, hey, it's all this in Taylor Swift. But I love listening to her interviews. I think she's brilliant. She's brilliant writer and one of the things in her songwriting class she talked about getting very micro and into certain words in the way they sound and like the meaning behind them. And just very similarly to what it sounds like you do in your writing process is just like getting really, really in tune with certain feelings and emotions, even the way that a word hits you. And I was thinking about how interesting it was the duality between like hypersensitivity and awareness and diving in deep to deep emotion, while still keeping her head above water and throwing the ball forward and making sure things get across the finish line and you hit publish and you actually finished stuff and breaking cooking macaroni and cheese for the kids. And then you probably have to call with a church, you know what I'm saying? And so this space that it takes to dig in deep

43:29and also be remains sensitive, you know what I mean? To be able to hear, muse here, you know, these ideas, how do you do that? Structures really important. And so I carve out time to write until it gets the hold on me enough that it takes completely over every ounce of my life. So normally I write Friday, Saturday on something that's not church-related. And then on a larger project like this, once I've got enough word count and I realize, okay, this is gonna become a thing then we'll start covering out more time during the week to work on it. But music, writing, being with people, reading, it all has to come from from somewhat, for me at least, it needs to come from somewhere real. And so whether, I mean, there's things in this book

44:30and the other books where I've just cribbed from my own life or a version of that. And it is hard, especially if you're in a character's headspace that you don't like, I feel like it is hard to not stay in that headspace or to try not to stay in that headspace too long. So if I'm writing a character that I don't particularly think is a good person, then maybe go watch something fun. But just lots of walks, lots of different music and try to turn it off when it's time to turn it off. So, you know, Fridays, my heavy writing day, Saturday morning, I'll probably work on what, finishing up whenever I started on Friday and then trying to think about it too much until it again. Eventually, if it's something it's going to come out, it will take up considerable more time. But right now I'm managing something smaller and it's not as much of a beast.

45:33Still water traces will be linked up in the show notes. I have an Amazon link here. Is that the best place for folks to go or do you want to direct them somewhere else? Yeah, you can definitely get the Kindle or the paperback from Amazon. I also have some signed copies on my website. Oh, cool, very cool. That'll be linked up in the show notes. Very last question for you. There's this young man who decided to go to film school and he was writing a bunch and stories and characters captured his heart and there's been a lot of ups and downs and changes and pivots along the way. And I think you're just getting started with it. I'm curious though, if you were to go back to him and give him a piece of advice or something you wish, he would have known back then that you know now, what would that be? Yeah, I would just tell him to trust himself. Like that's the biggest thing is lean into what you already know and trust that it's gonna take you where you need to go and that's the biggest lesson is don't listen.

46:38Listen to, I mean everybody says don't listen to your heart but I think we know. I think there's just something in us that knows. So trust yourself. Zach, it was cool meeting you. Thanks for your time today. Thanks for having me. It's fun.