We recently connected with Claire Taylor and have shared our conversation below.

Claire, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

Learning how to write is learning how to think, feel, and act. It’s also learning how other people do that. It’s learning who you are and who you are not.

So yes, I went to college and studied creative writing, and I learned a few tips and tricks here and there for writing fiction, but that’s not how I learned to write. I was writing stories before that, and I’ve forgotten half of the “rules” I was taught by now anyway.

More valuable than my college education were my jobs as a teacher and editor. I taught English lit and filmmaking at various times, and having to explain things in a way teenagers can understand forced me to boil down all the jargon into basic concepts. What is a story? What are stories about? What do they do for us? Why did we evolve to think in terms of them?

Working as an editor taught me what kind of writer I am not just as much as what kind of writer I am. People write all kinds of different stories all kinds of different ways, and there is ALWAYS a reader out there who needs exactly what you want to create. That’s something a lot of writers lose sight of. Your stories are a reflection of your worldview. If you’re trying to make them someone else’s worldview, you’ll run into problems.

But I think the most essential skill for being a writer is to learn about people. In the end, that’s what matters in the story: the characters. That’s where I usually turn to my training with the Enneagram to create characters that are THEM, not ME. We often blend the two without realizing it because we don’t recognize who we are and who we are not.

The biggest obstacle to learning is just experience, or rather a lack of it. My writing has improved the more I’ve written and the more lived experience I’ve gained. Because of that, the only way I could’ve sped up my process would be to write more and live more. But if that was possible, I would’ve done it. I had a lot of mental obstacles keeping me from living life fully for a long time. I was doing the best I could with the tools I had. But once I started Enneagram work (and therapy!), I was able to access parts of life I didn’t know existed and free myself from fears that were limiting me. My writing has grown since then, which is why I spend so much time helping other authors seek out that same liberation.

Claire, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a fiction writer, a story and career consultant for other authors, a certified Enneagram instructor, and the owner of FFS Media. That sounds complicated, but it boils down to this: I’m a storyteller.

As soon as I learned to type at around nine or ten years old, I started writing fictional stories on the family computer. I would fill notebook after notebook with (admittedly structureless) fantastical adventures, and spend hours alone losing myself in my stories.

I continued writing for the pleasure of it through high school, where I completed my first novel, but hardly considered it a feasible future profession (though I always deeply hoped I could be). The problem was that there was nothing else I really wanted to do, so I kept studying writing and film through college, hoping that some professional pathway for it would reveal itself.

After college, I taught English and filmmaking, worked as an in-house editor, and write a few more novels along the way. It was all important experience, but looking back, it feels like I was essentially biding my time until I could find that path forward to not being the teacher of writing or the editor for writers, but the professional writer herself.

In 2015, one of my friends from a fiction critique group (who is still my editor today) introduced me to the world of indie publishing. I attended a small conference, met a bunch of respectable people who weren’t waiting around for someone else to publish their work, and knew immediately that this was the route to making my dream of being a novelist a reality.

My natural mode is to write irreverent humor with lots of swearing (only one of my professors didn’t look down on me for this), so I knew from the start that the odds of a publisher taking a risk on my work was low. As someone who enjoys the auteur approach to every creative endeavor (translation: I’m a control freak), indie publishing was the absolute right fit for me. So, off I went.

The rest of my fiction career is pretty much history and now includes 4 pen names, each in a vastly different genre, that make me a solid living. It was definitely not like that at the start of my career, when I worked as a freelance editor to keep the lights on until my royalties grew, but it was a fine way to experience the freedom of working mostly for myself, so I didn’t mind it. I highly recommend swapping skills with other authors to start your writing career in a low-budget way.

As for the other half of my career, the author consulting and non-fiction, that started back in 2016, when I joined a mastermind group with six other indie authors. We started learning about our Enneagram types together as a way to differentiate advice that might work for one person but not another. I took a test to see which of the nine personality types I fell into, and when I read up on mine, it was very much one of those moments where you want to call 911 to report an attack. The type fit me like a glove, and it helped me make sense of so many patterns I kept falling into that I didn’t understand.

The Enneagram became a language in that small group, and eventually it dawned on me to begin applying it to my fiction. Then, when my author friends would call me for story help, I found myself saying, “You might want to read up on the Enneagram type 8. It sounds like that’s what this character is, and it might help you understand how she would react in that scene.”

Once I realized the value I was delivering in those calls (it took me a while, let me tell you), I created a product so that more authors could take advantage of it. That was (and still is) called the Story Alignment, a one-hour video call with me where we work through whatever story difficulties are tripping up the author and get things back on track. Not only do we use the Enneagram framework, but I also use my years of experience teaching, editing, and writing to help brainstorm solutions. We all need a sounding board from time to time.

It wasn’t long before my mention of the Enneagram for characters on these calls turned into authors asking the obvious question of “What type do you think I am?” and “How do I use that for my career?” Because I’d been having discussions of this nature in my mastermind for years at that point, I was able to help out. That’s how the Author Alignment calls came to be. Those are one-hour video calls with me where we look at the author’s strategy and discuss how the unique lens of their Enneagram type can be leveraged or expanded to build a personalized and flourishing career that’s right for them.

The release of my book *Reclaim Your Author Career: Using the Enneagram to build your strategy, unlock deeper purpose, and celebrate your career* is a culmination of all this learning in an easily digestible way that shows authors how to stop dismissing their gifts and instead lean into them.

Authors come to me when their writing careers aren’t meeting their expectations. Maybe something just feels off, or they’ve tried all the “pro tips” and none seem to move the needle. Often, they’re on the edge of burnout from our fast-paced industry and are desperate for some intervention. Enneagram work can help with all those things. It’s helped me, and now I’ve seen it help countless other authors.

Indie publishing is not the same game in 2023 as it was when I started back in 2015. It’s tough out there. But the only thing that can take an author out of the game is themselves. I help authors build sustainable careers that will weather the ups and downs and keep them connected to their writing for the long haul.

This year, I’ve launched my Liberated Writer brand, which leans much harder into supporting authors who want to stay in this long term without sacrificing their health or all the other parts of a rich existence that make life worth living. My first in-person retreat has sold out, and my 5-week Liberated Writer online course is now enrolling and will run from October 16-November 16 of this year.

I love helping authors because I know how much writing means to all of us. If we only cared about money, we’d be in finance or real estate, not publishing. I want to help as many people as I can stay creatively energized as they build their business along with a happy and fulfilled life, and that’s why I do what I do.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

This might sound counterintuitive, but I built my reputation in the market by not trying to build a reputation. Instead, I got to know myself, my values, and then I went and lived by them. I admit, going about it this way means it takes longer for the word to spread, and I’ve had to learn the skill of simply telling people about my offerings, but its important to me that my work speaks for itself. I’ve never done paid advertising for my courses or consulting business. Instead, I put my head down and created products that I was qualified to create and that filled a need for the community. Once that was done, I told my friends about them and offered the products and services to beta groups for free. I let word of mouth, and the occasional social media post and email to my subscribers, do the rest.

There were opportunities and partnerships along the way that could’ve made me quick cash but that I turned down because they didn’t align with my values. I didn’t do that for reputation. I did that to continue staying connected to myself. When we compromise our values, it chips away at our connection to ourselves. The Enneagram reminds us that we can only feel as much deep connection to the world as we do to ourselves, so you can imagine why no amount of quick cash is worth losing that.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My company’s guiding values are Connection, Honesty, and Joy. That’s what I want for every author.

All communication is a bid for connection, so when I look at writers, I see people who are desperately seeking connection with others. I can relate to that. Loneliness is something everyone struggles with, now more than ever, and it’s killing us. But connection isn’t as easy as being in the presence of someone else. You can only connect to others as deeply as you can connect to yourself, so the Enneagram work I do is my mission to help authors connect better to themselves. When I think about a bunch of storytellers being liberated in that way, I then imagine all of the readers who can be positively impacted through those stories, and that gives me hope that maybe we can move the needle of humanity in a positive direction over time.

Honesty is more than bluntness. It’s about being honest with yourself about who you are and learning to love and accept that. It’s about letting others know that they can be honest. In my fiction, I like to call out the messy truth of being human so we can have a laugh at it and not feel so scared by it. In my consulting, I remind authors that authentic living requires honesty with self before asking it of others.

Joy is the most undervalued virtue in society today, and that’s a damn shame. It’s treated as a luxury when we know that it’s biologically necessary for a thriving life. Joy is also the first thing to be sacrificed when authors are trying to make a living, but in the end, that’s what takes them out of the game. Why do this if there isn’t joy in it? Also, I see joy as an act of rebellion, and we need a little more of that.

Liberation is a major concept of the Enneagram, and at the end of the day, that’s what keeps me going. I want everyone to feel free to love themselves, understand their needs in a healthy way, and allow others to be free as well. So I do that through the only method that has ever been effective in changing people’s hearts and minds: storytelling.  

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ffs.media
• Instagram: @ffs.media
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ffsmediatips
• Other: www.liberatedwriter.com