This is K.M. Island and you are listening to the 427th episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast.

I was super excited to learn that Helping Writers Become Authors had been named one of Writers Digest's top 101 websites for the fifth straight year.

I always prize this particular acknowledgement, and especially this year since the site was named

Best of the Best in the writing have two section.

Once again, my very humble thanks to all of you who emailed in a nomination for the site.

It means a lot that the site has been impactful in the lives of so many writers.

I feel very honored and blessed to get to share my own writing journey in a meaningful way.

And so thanks for walking alongside me.

And now I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast.

Five Lies Writers Believe that Hold them Back.

Stories are a lie that tell the truth. I think the reason most writers get a perverse chuckle out of that last idea is because as humans we are hardwired to have a complicated relationship with the truth.

We crave it, we need it, sometimes we even want it,

but like those green beans I was supposed to eat when I was four

and instead shrewdly dropped under my brother's chair.

We also exercise an incredible amount of creativity in avoiding the truth and then denying

we're avoiding it. This is exactly why stories are such a sneaky and

effective way of sharing truths. We mesmerize readers with entertaining fictions

until they don't even realize we're doing that mom trick of sneaking

the greens into the strawberry smoothie. But actually it goes deeper than that.

After all, it's not like getting writer stamped on our foreheads has somehow magically made us wiser and more truthful

than all those poor schmoes who only know how to read stories. The real magic is that sometimes when we're writing we don't even know we're getting past our own defenses by lying our way to truths, we otherwise do our best to ignore.

These are the good kind of lies.

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