In this blog, we talk about what it actually means to be a writer
This week on the show, I sat down with two fellow Utah writers—Tom Farley and Rio L. Barney. It became three people trying to make sense of how to stay creative while raising kids, managing demanding careers, fighting stubborn imposter syndrome, and carving out a solitary space to make something that matters.
Finding Time to Write When Life Is Loud
One of the first things we dug into was the simple, practical question of what writing actually looks like in our daily lives right now.
Tom writes in the quiet pockets—late after his kids go to bed, or during those rare, fragile moments when the house isn’t exploding with noise. He admitted it takes him fifteen or twenty minutes just to shift gears and get into the headspace, meaning if someone interrupts that initial window, the whole session is essentially shot.
Rio writes late at night too, but her household operates at an entirely different decibel level. She homeschools three boys, manages a full-scale household, and describes her daytime schedule as an absolute free-for-all. When everyone finally crashes at night, she closes the door to her writing room, lets her brain settle into ten minutes of actual silence, and stays up way too late hammering out pages.
Listening to them, I felt an immediate flash of recognition. I’ve tried writing when my family is awake around the house, and it turns me into a version of myself I genuinely dislike—frustrated, impatient, and irrationally angry at innocent interruptions. It took me years to accept that I don’t just need quiet to write; I need isolation.
It isn’t really about having ironclad discipline. It’s entirely about protecting your environment.
The Marketing Monster
Eventually, we stumbled into the conversation every modern writer dreads, yet loves to vent about: marketing eats your entire life.
Rio put it bluntly, saying she often feels like “a writer who doesn’t write anymore” because so much of her day gets swallowed up by posting, scheduling, and trying to stay visible to an indifferent algorithm. Tom echoed that frustration, noting that he didn’t sign up to be an influencer; he signed up to tell stories. Yet here we all are, dancing for digital platforms that couldn’t care less about our actual art.
I’ve felt that exhaustion deep in my bones, too. Even when you’re writing regularly, you end up feeling more like a tired marketer than an inspired creator.
But as we talked it through, we hit on a reassuring truth: in-person events actually work, while social media mostly just burns you out. Both Tom and Rio noted that their book sales genuinely spike after local craft fairs, markets, or physical book signings—never after a random post on Instagram. Rio calls it “boots on the ground,” and Tom pointed out that talking to a human being face-to-face is the only thing that reliably moves the needle.
It’s slow, unglamorous work, but it builds real readers instead of passive digital followers.
The Struggling Artist Trap
We got into the weeds on imposter syndrome, too. Tom opened up about how completely overwhelming it felt when he first switched from screenwriting over to writing prose, which felt like learning an entirely foreign language. He initially thought he needed every single plot point and rule figured out before he could type page one.
Of course, he didn’t. He just had to start.
Rio talked about the daily battle of losing her voice in her own work—getting bogged down by rigid sentence structures, worrying her dialogue sounds too heavy, and reading chapters out loud just to catch what’s clunking. Sometimes she even has her son read her work back to her just so she can hear it through someone else’s ears.
That, right there, is the real struggling artist trap. It’s not poverty, and it’s not obscurity or a lack of free time. It’s the quiet, paralyzing fear that you simply aren’t good enough to justify keeping going.
And yet, somehow, we all keep going anyway.
Identity: When Do You Call Yourself a Writer?
This part of the conversation caught me off guard.
Tom still instinctively introduces himself as a software engineer. Writing is his true passion—something he pours his energy into and wants to do full-time—but he doesn’t yet feel confident enough to lead with it in casual conversation. Rio, on the other hand, owns her identity as a writer without a second thought or an ounce of hesitation.
It made me reflect on my own path. I admitted to them that it took me years and multiple published books before I could casually say “I’m a writer” out loud to strangers. I was terrified people wouldn’t respect it, or that they’d think I was delusional, or that I wasn’t “legit” enough to claim the title.
The hard-won truth I’m finally learning is that you become a writer the exact moment you decide you are one—not when some external gatekeeper or sales milestone decides it for you.
AI, Creativity, and the Future
Naturally, we had to veer off into the mandatory AI tangent.
Rio isn’t a fan; she feels it has zero place in creative writing, mostly because she has way too many original stories trapped in her own head to ever outsource them to a machine. Tom takes a slightly more philosophical view, arguing that AI will never truly replicate authentic creativity, and that a massive artistic counter-culture boom is coming because human expression will be the one thing machines can never genuinely automate.
I sit somewhere in the middle. I’ve seen people use AI as a clumsy crutch to break past a blank page before throwing it out and rewriting the whole thing themselves. I’ve seen terrible AI-generated books flood the market, and I’ve seen plenty of panic. But at the end of the day, authentic human creativity always wins out. Tools don’t replace real voices.
What I Took Away From This Conversation
Sitting across from Tom and Rio reminded me of a simple fact I constantly manage to forget: we are all just trying to build creative lives right in the middle of everyday chaos, and none of us feel like we have it completely figured out.
We’re writing late at night, after exhausting shifts, between homeschooling lessons, balancing day jobs, fighting algorithms, and second-guessing our own sentences. We’re doing it anyway.
And maybe that’s the entire point. You don’t escape the struggling artist trap by finally becoming a bestseller or achieving some arbitrary level of success. You escape it by refusing to let anyone—including yourself—stop you from creating.
Tom Barney: https://www.myguardianninja.com/
Rio L. Barney: https://riolbarney.ampbk.com/
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