I’ve been writing novels since I was 8 years old. In Spring 2024 (many, many years since I was 8 years old), my debut novel is coming out with a dream team of passionate advocates at Random House Canada and Dutton in the US. The book deal was officially announced this week. I’m so proud of this novel and so grateful to be here after decades of keeping the faith, doing the work, failing and failing and failing better, learning how to be not just a writer but the writer I wanted and needed to be. 

But my deep relationship with the creative process and my understanding of myself as a writer have emerged not from this week’s shiny book deal pinnacle but from those decades of quietly, invisibly learning how to show up for and stay with my writing.

And even though it sure is nice to be able to point to that book deal as evidence that I know a thing or two as a writer and coach, I’m just as proud of those decades of faithful apprenticeship that looked, at the time, a lot like failure.

It’s in those decades that the First Draft Novel Coaching Program is rooted. 

You might relate to some or all of my experience: 

I spent years pushing myself hard in my writing, judging every word as it appeared on the screen, my need to succeed so high that writing two sentences could take an hour. 

I spent more years in a pendulum swing in the other direction, following my intuition with no plan, nurturing my perfectionist self through the discomfort of learning to let go of control, but ultimately wandering in a lot of aimless circles with no engine to drive my novel attempts forward.

Complete freedom on the page can be as immobilizing as writing from a judgy analytical mind. For me, creative liberation and successfully completed novels have come through the middle path of freedom within a framework.

That, combined with getting conscious about psychological blocks (for me, those included self-doubt, insecurity, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of letting go) has created powerful transformation in my creative life.

It does the same for the writers I work with now. 

In the First Draft Novel Coaching Program, we write a raw, fast first draft of a novel with gentle awareness and conscious shifting of the doubts, fears, and limiting beliefs that might have been standing in the way until now. 

And we use the same 4 creativity-sustaining principles that enabled me to finally claw my way out of struggle on the page and into ease and flow: 

Freedom within a gentle framework supports creativity.

The subconscious is where your meaningful material lives, and getting out of analytical mind is what allows you to tap into it.

Focusing on process rather than product frees you to write with vitality, presence, and flow.

A consistent creative practice is the bedrock of a flourishing writing life and will sustain you through the creation of your novel.

With those 4 principles, and within the supportive container of the 12-week coaching relationship, we’re able to nurture and sustain an ecosystem where creativity can flourish. 

It isn’t magic, but sometimes it feels like it.

If you’d like to know more about how this novel-writing process works and what a coaching relationship feels like, you can learn more here. 

You’ll also find a link to book a discovery call with me here. I’d love to talk with you about your writing, your novel idea, and whether coaching could be the right step to help you finally write the novel you’ve been trying to write for decades. 

Because even though I believe my path was the one I needed to be on, I don’t believe learning how to write a successful novel has to take as long as it took me. I created this program so that, for you, it doesn’t have to.

Photo by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash.