Meet Taylor Smythe

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Taylor Smythe. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Taylor below.

Taylor, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?

It has been a journey to find, but the foundation of my purpose is my deep, personal faith in God. When I was younger, the conversation was always: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I think as kids we answer that question with whatever seems fun and cool to us at the time, like being an astronaut or a firefighter (or for me, a farmer or a cowboy). But as I grew a clearer sense of my identity—of who I wanted to be when I grew up and who I was made to be—a clarity in my purpose followed. I’ve always known that I had a bent toward creativity and art, but I always just saw that as a sort of side hobby.

As I prepared for college, I was at a crossroads, wondering what area to major in. There were so many options; how could I settle on just one? Thankfully, a wise person in my life pointed me to a quote about our calling from an author named Frederick Buechner. He said: “Vocation is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” In other words, what are those things that I enjoy doing (and that I’m naturally good at) that can meet a need in our world? That’s where my purpose and calling can be found.

Nearly everything I’ve done (vocationally and creatively) has flowed out of my purpose, whether I realized it at the time or not. It certainly hasn’t been a super-linear route, but through many experiences dabbling in various interests and jobs, I can look back and see that each piece of my journey has added more clarity to that purpose: to create beautiful things that bring people together.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I would describe myself as the epitome of the “multi-hyphenate creative;” I’m grateful to get to work as a graphic designer by trade, but I also pour significant time and energy into music, screenwriting, and novels.

One exciting thing on the horizon this year is the release of my forthcoming novel, Nightmare Array, which will be the third book in my Magic City Wonders science fiction/fantasy series. This book continues the story of a woman named Donna Locke, who develops the power to turn things to gold just by touching them. But she quickly finds out (in book one) that all that glitters isn’t gold.

While it’s the third in the series, Nightmare Array will be the tenth novel I’ve released overall, which feels kind of insane. It’s my longest book yet, and represents some of the best storytelling I’ve shared. I can’t wait for readers to enjoy it.

Leading up to that, I’m also pleased to share that the first two books in that series, Goldie and The Dream Team, just got overhauls of their cover designs, which now feel very fitting of the tone, genre, and vibe of the stories.

And then further out, I hope to share some new music that I’ve been working on over the past year or so. This solo work will veer in a bit of a different direction than the sound of The Transient Friends, my previous collaborative project with good friend and fellow creative David Urbinati. There’s a lot of work to do still, so I’m not ready to share much more than that yet, but stay tuned.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

The most important step in my creative journey was coming to terms with my own story, learning how to be vulnerable, and knowing that I am loved enough to be able to take risks and fail without jeopardizing that reality. If you’re constantly living in fear of what others will think of you, you won’t be able to create from a true and honest place.

A second aspect or area that was crucial to my creativity was learning to just begin. I can let ideas float around in my head forever, but learning to take the first step was so vital. There’s a great quote from Ira Glass (a segment often titled “The Gap”) where he basically says there’s a gap for creative people between our good taste and the actual good creative work that we have the potential to create. His solution is to just create—make lots of stuff, get better as you do it, and eventually you’ll close that gap.

Finally, my creative journey wouldn’t be complete without a community in which to create and share my art. Whether that’s getting feedback, finding a collaborative partner, or just having another person to experience the raw emotion behind a song I’ve just written, I think art and creativity are most enjoyable and meaningful when done with other humans.

My advice to those on this journey is to start somewhere. If you haven’t found a community yet, get involved in a group, be part of a church, audition for a local theatre or improv troupe, form a band—the important part is to start. If you’ve been creating, I encourage you to find even just one person to share your art with.

Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?

Currently, in my creative journey, one challenge I’m facing is that I am a finite person with a finite amount of time. It seems like I have a new story or concept on a weekly basis that I add to my (very long) list of future project ideas. I love thinking about the future and the potential of what ideas could become, but it often frustrates me when I remember that there are only so many hours in a day. I also hold that in tension with a high value for rest and overall well-being, which keeps me grounded. Still, I deeply relate to the line from Hamilton: “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?”

I think my solution to this problem is to do my best to treasure the small progress I make on a story; even adding a couple bullet points to an outline counts as progress toward turning my idea from just an “idea” to a real, tangible artform that others can experience. I always say that any progress is good progress. It all adds up to parts of the whole. What matters most, then, is to be diligent in continually chipping away until the whole is revealed.

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Taylor Thomas Smythe

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