Meet the Author: Matt Hill

How does writing a book change you? Bringing a book (or a story or a poem) into the world where it didn’t exist before is a powerful and transformational act—magic in its truest form, as I often say.

In today’s Meet the Author interview, I talked with Matt Hill about the book he wrote and the ways writing it has changed him.

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Matt Hill is a coach and the author of A Starry Night (affiliate link*). He helps individuals and organizations navigate change and growth. You can learn more about Matt on his website, follow him on Instagram, and connect with him on LinkedIn.

Tell me about your journey to writing your book. Who is it for? Who should read it?

This was a winding road, for sure. I mean, my entire life, I've enjoyed writing and creating. I was a journalism broadcast major and then when I graduated school, writing died on the vine. I just stopped writing and got into the corporate world.

I had a story in the back of my mind that said I was not creative until I was about 37 and then I started writing about my life, just to try to understand my story a bit more. I didn't think that was going to be for the public.

Over those couple years of writing, it started becoming a book. I thought maybe this would be interesting for others to read.

The book is a long night of the soul where I, the narrator, sit in a cabin with two other people, Ram Dass and Alfred Adler, two people that I've read a lot of their material and have been influenced by. They sit with me with a cup of tea and around a fire and just unpack my story and allow me to step into and accept more of the mystery and the uncertainty and unknowns of life.

And so we discussed all kinds of different things. Pain and shame and religion and all kinds of fun things. Anybody that’s in a place in life when they are in a big shift, maybe they're going through a divorce or a lost job, or maybe they've had a plant ceremony ceremony, or whatever. They're doing a big shift in their life and asking a lot of questions around, like, what is all this about?

It's a great book for someone like that. The book just sits with them and allows them to feel and experience.

What were the mindset challenges or shifts or breakthroughs that you had to experience to be able to write this book?

I think my writing started with not believing that it was going to be for someone else. So that allowed it to be messy and allowed it to be just for me, which, as you know, opened more of the creative flood gates.

I allowed myself just to put things on paper, and then from there, it started becoming a life of its own, where it didn't feel like it was mine. That's what then allowed me to let go of what was there. So that was a big piece of, I didn't feel like it was a performative thing, of, “This has to be something that will impress or be for someone else.” This just exists.

So many people say, “Oh, I don't have a creative bone in my body.” How did you kind of make that leap to be like, “No, actually, I am creative”?

It's such a good question. I think that was the story that was writing itself. I was writing about a person that was so certain about all these different stories and beliefs and ideas about himself and life and God and all of these things. I just allowed myself to not know.

I think that's where my writing went. And I think that's what creation is. I always thought of it as self-expression. I no longer think of it as expression so much as self-revelation. The words show up. The words showed up for me, showed me what I actually believe and who I'm actually becoming and not just the stories I practiced for decades.

That felt really good. Creation helped me stay alive, stay awake to life in a sense, and turn my experience into meaning, instead of letting it rot into regret. That's what I started loving about the writing process, is how messy can I be? That was fun.

I've got things on my computer that I don't think we'll ever see the light of day, but it’s messy, raw, and it's just fun, just to play like that.

How did you approach building a writing practice? What did you enjoy about working on the book?

I had different themes that would come up. I would write how I felt. I would write geared towards certain emotions that were feeling really good to me.

What did shame want to say in my mind? I imagine sitting around a dinner table with my emotions, and then everybody had a seat, and everybody had something to say. It was really fun for me to share what everybody had to say. Shame and regret and anger and sadness and happiness, joy, love—they all had things to say.

It gave my inner experience a voice and then it was a lot easier for me to then to give that voice a character like Ram Dass and Alfred Adler and these people in the book. I gave it a person then. The story took off from there. What was fun was just writing what I felt.

From there, I'd create very specific folders: this is my shame folder, and this is my sad folder, and this is that folder. That was a way for me to organize it. Organization has never been a strength of mine.

That's what really scared me in the process. As I started thinking, “Oh, this actually may be a book,” I was like, “I need to get organized here.” What did I say there? What was that line?

After I had splashed down probably 50,000 words or so, work really began, where I started mining these folders in these different areas and themes, and where it started becoming a story.

Writing this book feels like the key to an entire self I didn't know necessarily existed.

It was almost like as soon as I gave this book—because I talked to a lot of different publishers and different folks—as soon as I gave the manuscript to a publisher, it was like, I had 10 other book ideas. It was like this creative waterfall that broke through this dam.

It was like an identity shift where I became a writer, and I allowed myself to become that, to feel that. So it was wild, what energetically shifted in me. The moment I gave it to somebody, something shifted in me where I started thinking, “Oh, I am a writer, and I don't have to compare myself to anybody else to be able to say out loud, I am a writer.”

I'll never forget, even if I write 10 other books, I will never forget this book. It felt like a key to a part of myself that I was so desperate to unlock, a room that I was so desperate to be in and to explore for this book in that way.

What has it been like to go from working on this book, thinking of it as just for you, and then realizing you needed to publish it?

It doesn't feel like mine, and it's almost like a person that I'm looking forward to meeting. As I say that out loud, I don't want to go back and work on this book anymore, because this book is done.

I'm eager for the next thing that I'm going to write now. It really does feel like I'm just eager to meet this person or this thing, and now it's my job to do right by the book and make sure it's in the right people's hands. The way I market it, and who I trust with it, the publisher I work with, and those types of things. That's where it feels like my responsibility to the book is now.

I don't think it feels quite real. It's really exciting.

How are you thinking about marketing for your book?

You know, I've always been in sales, and I always thought I was a good marketer, and I've now realized there's a lot of gaps in my marketing. What seems to be clear to me is not necessarily how others hear it and see it.

So I speak and think very poetically in how I market and, and that doesn't necessarily resonate. I'm learning clarity right now. How I talk about the book—even now I use a lot of words to say very few things, and that's why I love my writing, because my writing feels clear. When I speak, I feel like I'll use a lot of words.

I think this will be a book that I'm comfortable with being a slow burn for years to come. I don't have a large platform, and I think that has been a deterrent for me to have imposter syndrome, to say, “Well, who am I to write a book? Who am I to publish anything? These types of books are already out there.”

What I'm trusting is this is the right book for certain people, and so the way I'm marketing is through Instagram, with a very small platform of a couple hundred people right now. LinkedIn is where I built a professional network, and so I'll be promoting it there as well, and then having more of these conversations.

One person hears this and this interview and wants to pick up the book, and then they tell three others, and they tell three others, and that's what I'm trusting more than anything. Word of mouth and one book being passed to the next.

What’s next for you creatively?

I think two things. One, I've got a real passion in the coaching space, and I've got a real passion for building in-person retreat offerings and creating spaces where people feel safety and freedom for their stories to be seen. I've got a real passion for helping people tell their own stories, and so that's a big thing.

I've got a retreat coming up here, which will have already happened when this interview comes out. My wife's family has a couple thousand acres in the mountains of Virginia and so to host and have people come here, and have storytelling be a big piece of that.

That's one thing I'm passionate about, is helping people understand their story—and these days, thresholds, portals that we walked through that may not make sense in the moment, and we just want to get through it white knuckle. But actually that's our gift, is those portals and gates that we walk through.

I think that's likely going to be a second book that I'm going to be really excited to write towards the end of the year. Sharing these gates and the stories of other people and how I see their lives transform through walking through these gates. I think that's going to be the next project that I'm really excited about.

Writing a lot of poetry is another thing. I write a lot that I haven't really done much with. I play with it on Instagram some. That’s another main creative effort that I'm looking forward to.

If you had to give a piece of advice to another writer, what would you tell someone?

​The Artist’s Way (affiliate link*) was helpful for me in that I just got to spend three pages a morning going through that process of writing.

Being really comfortable with the standard advice, being very comfortable with not feeling like you're a good writer, because you're not going to be initially. You’re learning to do it.

The act itself is healing in creating and writing. Allow yourself to write what you feel, and allow each of your emotions to express itself.

The most creative centers for me are shame and anger and sadness, those three. I've had a couple very sad, intense seasons, one of which was the beginning of this past year.

I find happiness and joy to be really fun emotions to feel, but they don't have as much to say from a creative standpoint, not for me at least, but sadness, anger, shame—they have so much to say. They love expressing themselves.

With allowing them to be my muse in that way, and the most powerful five words that I've learned to say that I create from is “I can be with this,” and be with shame. I can be with sadness. I can be with anger.

Nobody puts baby in the corner. Nobody puts those emotions in the corner anymore. That's my shame, that's my anger, that's my sadness, you can't have it, get your own. Reorienting that relationship I have with my emotions and seeing them in the storm clouds, and when they rain, I just catch the water, and that's what I feel like the creative process really is.

Everybody feels those viscerally, and the more I think we create from there, I think the more we would love to serve the world around us.

One of the things I've learned in the creative process is, it seems Hallmark-y until you live and experience it, but you really do become something in the creative process. You're creating yourself. You're creating the next version of yourself in the creative process.

I wrote the book, but the book was not by me, it was for me and through me. That's how I experienced the book. I love the person that I became while writing this book.

For most of my life, I was someone that had a lot of ideas and started a lot of things and didn't finish them. And what this book allowed me to become is someone that started and finished something that mattered to me, which is why I'll forever be indebted to this book.

The scariest thing about the creative process is not that we'll be good at it, it's that this world that can be harsh and judgmental and dark, won't be able to hold and care for the most precious thing that exists in us that we want to express.

It feels a lot safer to keep it inside instead of to trust it with a world that can be very harsh. If I would share anything with anyone that's wanting to write that book or wanting to create anything, a song, a picture, anything, is that there's probably something you're being prompted to create.

Trust that the world needs it.

When I finished the book, I became someone that could be trusted with the sacred, with something precious that mattered to me. And that's what I think then opened up the floodgates to all these other things that I want to create.

It was almost like God, Source, the universe, whatever you call that said, “Oh, we've been waiting for you to become this person that could be trusted with the sacred. Try this on for size.”

I think it becomes a snowball in a sense. If I could say anything, I’d say just create something. One page. Give it to somebody else, give it to a fire, give it to something, and then just see what comes up after that.

That's why I think the work that you do is so powerful and so needed in this world. The majority of the problems that we have in the world is that we lack the ability to express ourselves. We live in a very repressed world and society. I think the key to a lot of the problems that we see in the world is through expression. I love that you help people unlock that part of themselves and break through the limiting stories.

What is the best book that you've read recently?

I just got done with this. I loved it. I will read it often. Rollo May, The Courage to Create (affiliate link*). I found it and deeply resonated with the core message that it truly is an act of courage to create, because in the act of creation, you are bringing into the world something that does not exist currently.

That is going to be misunderstood, and people will not even know that it's even needed. There's a lot of different types of courage, and Rollo May does a great job of explaining the different types of courage, and then what creative courage looks like and feels like.

Meet the Author interviews are lightly edited for clarity.

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Matt's reflections on the power of following through on a creation—and the creative surge that can follow it—was one of my favorite parts of our conversation. What was your biggest takeaway from the interview?