This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the 526 episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode.

Are you growing as a writer?

Here is the only way to tell. Do you want to grow as a writer? I know you do simply

because you are a writer. I know because you're here listening to this episode,

either because you subscribe to this podcast

and others like it as a way to mainline writing knowledge

on a regular basis, or because you stumbled onto it in a search

through the jungles of the internet for the answer to one of the many, many writing questions

that pressed down upon us all. Many of those questions and the

available answers are craft-based. How to write a story, how to write a good story,

how to craft convincing plots, characters, theme, dialogue, narrative, action, romance, mystery, you name it.

We seek to further our growth as writers in part to abate the

misery of our own inadequacies in the face of such a complex art form and in part because we are fascinated by the

patterns and techniques of stories just as much as we are the stories

themselves. I don't believe this type of craft focused growth

ever finds an end, but it does, after a time, create a relative mastery. So what then?

Where does the true and deep growth come from then?

A few years ago, I shared an episode

in which I talked about four levels in our climb up the writing mountain.

And in it I talked about how I felt I had reached the stage in my own journey where I quote

knew what I knew.

I shared that episode with a certain amount of satisfaction of course, but deep in my heart I also

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