Shouldn’t this feel easier if it’s truly meant for me?

If you’ve been sitting with that question — if you’ve tried the morning pages and the timers and the habit trackers and the accountability partners and still find yourself staring at the blank page wondering what is actually wrong with you — I want to offer you something different.

Not another productivity strategy.

A reframe.

What if you’re not blocked at all?

What if you’re disconnected?

Because those are not the same problem. And they do not have the same solution.

Blocking is a productivity problem. You push through it. You set the timer. You trick your brain with word counts and rewards and streaks. You treat it like a machine that just needs the right input to produce the right output.

And sometimes that works. For some people. For some kinds of creating.

But for others — and I suspect you are one of them or you wouldn’t still be reading — none of that touches it. Because the problem was never productivity. It was frequency.

Disconnection is a frequency problem. And you cannot push your way back to frequency. You have to tune in.

I paint trees. Giant, energetically charged trees that have been part of my creative life for years. People who have lived with them tell me things shift in their homes. In themselves. I don’t say this lightly and I don’t say it to sound mysterious. I say it because it is my lived experience and I have stopped apologizing for what I know to be true.

I haven’t painted a new tree in a long time.

The last tree I painted was dark and still at first. No leaves emerging. I was guided through it rather than directing it — butterflies appearing on the trunk, transforming into more butterfly leaves. Everyone who saw it said the same thing without being asked. That it felt like death. I showed it to my sister. She felt it too.

The next day she left the planet.

I knew then that the painting had been for her. That it had accompanied her somehow. I kept it because I couldn’t let it go. And then my beloved dog Lucky died unexpectedly, and I understood it was time. I burned it.

And I haven’t painted a new tree since.

Not because I lost the skill. Not because I ran out of ideas. But because something that enormous had moved through the channel and some part of me quietly put down the brush and said — not yet. I’m not ready to open that again.

That’s not a block. That’s reverence.

And I didn’t understand the difference until recently. Until I stopped asking what is wrong with me and started asking what am I actually protecting?

Because here’s what I know about creative people who work intuitively, who create from a place of genuine attunement rather than pure technique:

When we are fully in — when we are truly connected — we are not just making something. We are opening a channel. And channels carry things. Sometimes beautiful things. Sometimes enormous things. Sometimes things we didn’t anticipate and can’t fully explain.

And after something enormous moves through that channel, closing it for a while isn’t failure.

It’s wisdom.

The problem comes when the closing becomes permanent. When we forget that we closed it on purpose. When we start to believe the silence means the channel is gone. When we reach for productivity strategies to solve what is actually a spiritual problem.

You cannot timer your way back to the sacred.

So what does reconnection actually look like?

For me it starts before I create. Not with the brush or the keyboard but with something that brings me back into my own frequency first. I have sound healing forks I’ve barely touched for years that I’m picking back up. Five minutes of tuning before I open anything. Not to relax. Not to be productive. To arrive. To be present in my own body before I ask it to channel anything.

It looks different for everyone. Maybe it’s breath. Maybe it’s movement. Maybe it’s sitting outside with your hands in dirt or your feet in grass. Maybe it’s music that bypasses your thinking brain entirely. Maybe it’s the particular quality of early morning light before anyone else is awake.

Whatever it is — it’s the thing that makes you feel like yourself again before you ask yourself to make something.

The question isn’t how do I get unblocked.

It’s how do I come home to myself first.

Because the creativity was never gone. It’s been waiting. And waiting things go quiet. They conserve. They protect themselves until the conditions feel safe enough to return.

Your creativity isn’t broken.

It’s been waiting for you to stop treating it like a machine and start treating it like what it actually is.

Something sacred. Something that requires presence, not just effort. Something that cannot be forced but can absolutely be invited.

You’re not blocked.

You’re just not tuned in yet.

And that — unlike a block — is something you already know how to fix.

You’ve done it before. You’ll know the feeling when it comes back.

That’s the difference.

And almost every single day of those ten years I have woken up with the same thought before my feet hit the floor.

Who is going to take my energy today?

The kids. The friend in crisis. The family member with the latest drama. The inbox. The house. The laundry that somehow never ends. Always something. Always someone. And underneath all of it, this calculation running constantly in the background — once everyone is okay, once everything is handled, once the list is done, then I get to create.

That was my deal with myself. My system. My logic.

And it felt responsible. Noble even. I was showing up for people. Being reliable. Being present. The creative work could wait because it was mine and therefore optional. Everything else felt urgent and other people’s needs always feel more urgent than my own joy.

So I waited. I created in the pockets. The rare Tuesday when the house was clean and nobody needed anything and the stars aligned. And in the years when nothing felt done and everyone needed everything — and there have been years like that, long ones — I barely created at all.

I told myself I was being selfless.

I was actually just getting it completely backwards.

Because here’s what I understood for the first time today:

The creativity isn’t the reward for when everything else is okay. It’s the thing that makes everything else survivable.

It’s not what I get to do when I’m full. It’s what fills me.

The people in my life who drain me — and there are some, because there are some in every life — they were always going to drain me. That part I couldn’t control. What I could control was what I let refill me. And for ten years I’ve been cutting off the very source that would have made me capable of giving anything at all.

I’ve been doing it wrong.

Not because I’m weak or undisciplined or somehow less of an artist than the people who create prolifically. But because I had the order reversed. I made creativity the end of the equation when it was always meant to be the beginning.

From now on it goes first. Not perfectly. Not for hours at a stretch. But first. Before the emails. Before I check who needs what. Before I calculate what the day is going to cost me.

Because misery isn’t solidarity. Matching everyone else’s energy downward doesn’t help them. It just empties me.

And I cannot give from empty. I’ve tried for ten years and I have the depleted receipts to prove it.

If you’ve been waiting — for the house to be clean, for the drama to settle, for everyone to be okay — I want you to hear this:

They will not all be okay. Not all at once. Not for long enough.

You don’t get to wait anymore.

The creating isn’t what you do when life calms down.

It’s what you do so you can survive it when it doesn’t.

You deserve this. Not when everything settles. Now.

It wasn’t dramatic. There was no moment where I decided to stop being a writer. I just got busy doing things that looked like writing without actually doing it. A podcast. A course. Content. Teaching other people the craft I was quietly backing away from myself.

And the world helped me justify it. Because around 2023 everyone became a critic. Judgment got faster and louder and more public. I absorbed it even when it wasn’t directed at me. I started having conversations with friends about everything wrong with my own published books. I called it self-awareness. It wasn’t. It was something else entirely.

I was building a shield.

Here’s the thing about shields though — and this is the part that cost me years — they don’t just keep out the bad reviews. They keep out the work too.

You literally cannot write from the heart and brace for impact at the same time. The posture is wrong. Writing from the heart means opening up. Protecting yourself means closing down. You can’t do both. I tried and produced a podcast nobody paid me for and cost more in subscriptions than it made me back.

Meanwhile the books — the actual thing, the reason any of it existed — went nowhere.

I found a workbook recently that I’d filled out in 2024. A find-your-style exercise from an artist I follow. I’d written Exciting as my one word for my art. I’d written that when I was drawing well I felt lost in the moment, centered, in flow. I knew exactly who I was creatively. I just wasn’t being her.

That’s what the shield costs you. Not just output. Your identity.

And here’s what makes this era particularly brutal — the noise makes the shield feel like wisdom. Like you’re being smart, being careful, being professional. But you’re not. You’re just getting smaller while looking busy.

This year I found my way back. To my writing and to my drawing, a little more every day. Not perfectly. Not with any grand system or dramatic declaration. Just choosing it, again and again, in the smallest possible moments before the busy work rushes in to fill the space.

If you’re reading this and you recognize what I’m describing — the productivity that isn’t really productivity, the teaching instead of making, the building of proof instead of building of work — I haven’t fully solved this yet. I’m writing this from inside it, not from the other side.

But I know this much: the world being harder is not a reason to make yourself smaller. It’s actually the reason to do the opposite.

Not for perfection. Not even for an audience.

Just because it’s costing you too much not to.

It’s costing you your identity.

Transform Through Story has become...

No More Boring Kids’ Books.

It wasn’t a random decision.

This newsletter is only a few months old, but it already outgrew its name.

Because when people ask me what I actually do, I rarely find myself talking about publishing. Or Amazon. Or marketing.

I always end up talking about stories.

Specifically...

How to write stories children can’t stop thinking about.

When I first started writing, I honestly believed that if I loved an idea, children would love it too. After all, my own kids did.

But after writing and self-publishing sixteen books that sold... okay... I started wondering if something was missing. Because I had plenty of ideas. Some of them were wonderfully weird.

But weird ideas alone don’t create books children ask to read again.

I slowly realized there was another piece of the puzzle.

How to shape those wild ideas into stories that keep children turning the pages... and wanting to come back for more.

That changed everything.

The next seven books I wrote gave me a full-time income. Same author. Same imagination. Completely different results.

And that’s what this newsletter is really about.

Every week I’ll share what I’m learning about writing children’s books that kids genuinely love. Sometimes we’ll talk about story structure. Sometimes characters. Sometimes creativity. Sometimes publishing. And sometimes the writer behind it all... because unforgettable stories come from writers who keep going.

Whatever the topic, it always comes back to one question...

How do we write stories children can’t stop thinking about?

Because every child deserves stories they’ll never forget.

Welcome to No More Boring Kids’ Books.

I’m really glad you’re here.

Elena xox

The traffic cleared. She didn’t move.

More cars came. Cleared again. Still nothing.

I gave a quick toot.

She turned right finally, and as she did, she slowly extended her entire hand out the window and gave me the most deliberate, considered thumbs down I have ever seen in my life.

I laughed out loud.

Not because I wasn’t annoyed, but because it was so careful. So committed to expressing displeasure without actually going there. She wanted me to know she was furious. She just didn’t want to fully commit to it.

And I felt nothing in my body. Not a flicker.

In that moment I realized I would have preferred the finger. At least that would have meant something.

And I thought, that’s exactly what a lot of writers do.

They want to say something real. Something with an edge. Something that might make a reader feel genuinely uncomfortable, or seen, or cracked open in a way they weren’t expecting.

And then they don’t.

They soften the moment, explain the feeling instead of trusting it, give the character an out just when things are getting difficult, wrap the hard thing just enough that no one could object — including the reader.

They give the reader the thumbs down.

And the reader feels it. Not as a strong reaction, but as the absence of one. The sense that something almost happened. That the writer almost went there and didn’t.

That “almost” is where the reader disconnects.

People can feel the difference between a writer who goes all the way and one who stops just short. They don’t always have the language for it. They’ll say it was fine, or they liked it, or something didn’t quite land. But what they’re describing is this. The contained version. The feeling with the feeling taken out.

The full version lands in the body. You don’t have to think about whether it worked. You know.

And here’s what makes this particularly important for children’s book writers.

There’s a myth that because we write for young readers we need to soften everything. Protect them from discomfort. Resolve things cleanly. Make sure nobody leaves the book feeling unsettled.

But children are not fragile. They are extraordinarily sensitive emotional readers who can feel the difference between a story that trusted them and one that didn’t.

When you pull back at the hard moment in a picture book — when you explain the feeling instead of letting it sit, when you give the character an easy out, when you wrap the pain up too neatly — the child feels it. They may not have the words for it. But they put the book down and don’t ask for it again.

The books children return to again and again — the ones they memorize, the ones they bring to adults at 9pm when they should be asleep — are the ones that didn’t flinch. The ones that stayed in the hard moment long enough for something real to happen.

Those books trusted the child to feel something difficult and come through it.

That’s not cruelty. That’s respect.

So here are the questions to sit with about your own manuscript:

Where are you giving your reader the thumbs down? Where did you almost go somewhere true and then pull back at the last second? Where did you explain the emotion instead of letting it sit, or resolve something too quickly because staying in it felt too uncomfortable?

That’s where your reader stops feeling.

Not because your writing isn’t good. But because you stepped away from the thing that would have made it matter.

The woman in the car this morning wanted me to feel something. She really did. But she wasn’t quite willing to risk what the full version would cost her.

I understand that. I’ve written that way too.

But I’m trying to give the finger more often now.

On the page, anyway.

Because here’s what I see constantly in manuscripts.

The mentor speaks. The truth is clear. And the character simply ignores it.

Which means the writer has technically followed the advice — put the mentor in, delivered the theme, pointed at the transformation — and still ended up with a story that doesn’t move.

The problem isn’t the mentor. The problem is what we think the mentor is there to do.

Most writers think the mentor’s job is to tell the main character what they need to learn — the wise line, the insight, the moment where the story reveals itself.

Structurally, that’s not wrong. The mentor moment does introduce the truth.

But that’s not the same thing as delivering it.

Because if the character could hear it — really hear it — the story would end right there.

Think about it this way.

Every story is a line. On one end is the character’s false belief. On the other is the understanding they will earn by the end. That distance between the two? That’s the entire story.

When the mentor speaks, they are pointing to the far end of that line. They are naming the truth.

But the character is still standing at the beginning, and the belief they hold at that point isn’t random. It’s protective. It’s the thing that has helped them survive up until now.

So when the mentor says: “You need to trust people.”

The character doesn’t hear: “Trust people.”

They hear something closer to: “You’re not safe.” “You’re doing everything wrong.” “Give up the one thing that’s been protecting you.”

And of course they don’t accept it. They can’t.

This is where a lot of stories go slightly off. The mentor speaks, the truth is clear, and the character simply ignores it.

But in a stronger story, something else happens.

The character doesn’t ignore the truth. They misinterpret it. They take the advice and run it through their existing belief. They act on the wrong version of it.

So instead of:

Mentor: “You need help.” Character: ignores it.

You get:

Mentor: “You need help.” Character: tries to prove they don’t.

And that’s where your plot comes from. Because every time they act from that false belief, the story pushes back. The plan fails, the stakes rise, the cost increases — until eventually they can’t keep believing what they believed at the start.

That’s transformation.

Not because the mentor said the right thing. But because the story made it impossible to keep being wrong.

This is why mentor advice often feels forced when you write it. Not because the structure is wrong. But because the function of the moment is misunderstood.

The mentor is not there to teach the lesson. They are there to reveal what the character isn’t ready to understand yet.

And the story exists to close that gap.

So if your mentor scene feels clunky, or the advice feels too obvious, or the story seems to be explaining itself instead of unfolding — ask yourself this:

How is my character misreading the truth?

Because that’s not just a craft fix.

That’s where your story actually begins.

In your current work in progress, does your character ignore the mentor’s advice, or misread it? There’s a difference worth looking at.

Most children’s books don’t handle transformation as well as we think they do.

Not because the authors don’t care. Not because the writing isn’t good.

But because transformation keeps getting confused with something else entirely — a lesson clearly delivered, a feeling honestly named, a wise adult who says exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment.

And I’ve written about that last one before, the wise adult speech, and what it costs emotionally when it appears on the page.

But today I want to go a layer deeper.

Because the wise adult speech is a symptom. What I want to talk about is the diagnosis.

Here’s what I know from twenty years of sitting with people as they actually changed.

Real transformation does not arrive as a lesson. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t explain.

It is felt before it is understood. And the body knows it before the mind does.

Which means that when a story delivers transformation as information — as something a character is told, shown, or helped to understand — it’s not transformation at all.

It’s instruction.

Children know the difference. They may not be able to tell you why a book didn’t move them. But they feel it. The book gets put down. It doesn’t get re-read.

So what does badly handled transformation actually look like beyond the wise adult speech?

Three patterns. Read these with your own manuscript in mind.

The told feeling. “Mia finally understood that she didn’t need to be perfect.” The character’s internal shift is narrated rather than lived. We’re told the transformation happened. We don’t feel it happen.

The explained lesson. The truth the character needs arrives clearly and correctly — through a mentor, a realization, a perfectly timed insight. The story has explained itself instead of proving itself.

The quick resolution. The problem existed. The insight arrived. Everything shifted. Three pages later the story is over. The reader’s nervous system never had time to feel the weight of it.

These patterns work sometimes. Especially for very young readers who need clarity above all else.

But if you want a book a child returns to at six and again at nine, one with re-readability and emotional resonance that stays — something different has to happen underneath.

Look at Wonder.

R.J. Palacio never once writes: Auggie finally understood that he belonged.

She doesn’t explain his transformation. She doesn’t deliver it cleanly. She doesn’t resolve it quickly.

She puts Auggie through something. Again and again — the staring, the cruelty, the friend who says the devastating thing, the loneliness of trying and trying and not being sure it will ever be enough.

And the transformation happens in the accumulation of all of it.

By the time Auggie receives his award at the end of the book, the reader doesn’t think: oh, he learned a lesson about belonging.

They feel it. In their chest. Because they’ve lived every moment of the cost alongside him.

The lesson was never stated. But the truth landed completely.

Real transformation — in people and in characters — happens because the cost of not changing becomes too high to keep paying. Not because someone explained something well. Because the story made it impossible to stay the same.

That’s the question worth sitting with when you look at your own manuscript.

Is my character being told the truth by someone else?

Is my story making it impossible for them to keep believing the lie?

Because that gap — between a lesson delivered and a truth earned — is the difference between a book that’s read once and a book that’s kept forever.

What transformation moment in your story are you most uncertain about? I’d love to know.

So when one flew past on our walk last week, he ducked.

Hard.

The bee, for the record, was not interested in him. It had places to be.

My son, however, was now half crouched on a sidewalk, one shoe raised, staring down at something he had very nearly planted his foot directly into.

He stood up slowly.

“I ducked to avoid a bee,” he said, “and almost stepped in dog shit.”

Just like that. Factual. Slightly amazed by his own misfortune.

I laughed so hard I nearly created a similar problem for myself.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Because I’ve watched writers do this exact thing. Except in their version, the bee is self-publishing.

Self-publishing makes people flinch. It buzzes loudly. It sends otherwise sensible writers diving sideways on the sidewalk.

And I get it. I really do.

It doesn’t look like the path they were told to want. It doesn’t have the prestige. It doesn’t come with someone official deciding your work is worthy.

So writers duck.

They pursue traditional publishing instead — the query letters, the gatekeepers, the waiting and hoping and being judged.

Which is a completely valid path.

But here’s what I want you to know.

The bee was never going to hurt you.

I’ll tell you something most people don’t know about me.

I talk a lot about the inner life of stories. Invisible transformation. The psychology underneath the page. That is genuinely what I care about most deeply.

But I’ve also sold hundreds of thousands of books. Without a gatekeeper’s permission. Without a traditional deal. Without anyone deciding I was ready.

I self-published them.

That bee? I walked straight toward it.

Because here’s what nobody talks about.

In ducking the bee, writers stop looking down. And what’s waiting underfoot is the thing they were actually trying to avoid all along.

Staying invisible. Not being read. A finished manuscript sitting untouched because the conditions were never quite right and the bee was always somewhere nearby.

That’s the dog shit. Not self-publishing.

The years of waiting, the decision deferred, the story that never quite makes it into the hands of the people it was written for — it happens so gradually it feels safe.

But it isn’t.

You’re not choosing between risk and safety. You’re choosing between visible risk and invisible risk.

Self-publishing feels risky, visible, exposed. But staying unseen? That happens over months, over years. And because there’s no single moment of rejection — no letter, no email, no official no — it never quite feels like a decision.

But it is.

The thing on the sidewalk only looked like the worst outcome because my son wasn’t looking at it. Once he saw it clearly he just stepped around it.

The bee was never the danger.

It never is.

And at some point, the question becomes:

Which risk are you actually choosing?

Have you been ducking the bee? I’d genuinely love to know.

Are you done yet?

That was why I wrote. Not because I had a strategy or a platform or a content plan. Because there were small humans on the other side of a door who wanted my story more than almost anything else in the world at that particular moment.

I wrote fast. I wrote with joy. I wrote like someone who knew exactly who they were writing for.

And then they grew up.

It didn’t happen all at once. First they stopped waiting at the door. Then they stopped asking. Then one day my son — who had once pressed his whole face against the wood in excitement — suggested, not unkindly, that maybe I should write something different. Something for him now. Something for who he’d become. A grown up.

And something in me went very quiet.

I didn’t understand it at the time. I called it writer’s block. I called it being busy. I called it a lot of things that were easier to name than what it actually was.

Grief.

The specific grief of a reader growing up and out of your stories. The particular silence of a door that nobody is waiting behind anymore. And every time I sat down to write, something in my body felt that silence and closed itself back down.

So I stopped. Not because I had nothing to say. But because I no longer knew who I was saying it to.

I’ve heard other writers describe versions of this. Not always about children. Sometimes it’s a classroom they once taught, a niece or nephew they wrote for, a single child who needed exactly their kind of story. And when that reader disappears, something in the writing goes with them.

So we try to hold on. We write for who they were. We freeze them at eight, or ten, or eleven and keep writing as if they’re still standing on the other side of the door.

But they’re not. And somewhere deep down, we know it.

Because a memory is not a reader. A memory doesn’t get bored. A memory doesn’t put the book down halfway through or ask, even silently, is this worth my time?

A real reader does. And that’s exactly what makes them so important.

There’s a piece of advice I’ve always believed in — write for one specific child. Not all children in the abstract, but one real or vividly imagined reader whose attention you are genuinely trying to earn. That’s what gives writing life and keeps it honest.

But there’s a difference between a specific child and your child.

Your child loves you. The child you haven’t met yet does not. They owe you nothing. They will give your story exactly as much attention as it earns, and not one page more.

This morning I finally understood why I stopped writing. Not because I lost the craft. Not because I ran out of stories. But because the child outside my door grew up and I didn’t know how to write without them there.

The answer isn’t to write for myself. I tried that. It felt small and closed, like talking into a room with no one in it.

The answer is to write for the child I haven’t met yet. The one who is somewhere right now, pressing their face against a different door.

Waiting.

There’s still a child at the door. It’s just not mine anymore.

And I think it’s time I got back to work. For them.

Have you lost your original reader somewhere along the way? I’d genuinely love to know.

In that time I’ve created hundreds of pieces. Scenes. Cute animals. Perfectly rendered faces. Pieces that people look at and say, that’s beautiful, you’re so talented.

And they mean it kindly. But here’s the truth I’ve had to face.

I can make something look pretty. That’s not the same as knowing how to draw.

I never learned the fundamentals. I went straight to the tutorials — the rendering, the coloring, the techniques that make something look finished. Because that felt like progress. It looked like progress. I had something to show at the end of every session.

But underneath all of it, I still couldn’t sketch.

So I’m going back now. Learning from the beginning — shape language, three-dimensional form, perspective. The things that should have come first.

And it’s hard. Genuinely hard. Every session shows me exactly where I am. There’s nowhere to hide in a sketch. No rendering to make it look better than it is.

But something unexpected is happening alongside the difficulty.

I’m actually learning to draw.

Here’s why I’m telling you this.

Writing is exactly the same. And I say that as someone who published their first book ten years ago this year. Twenty-five books later. A decade of writing for children.

I still didn’t know how to write.

Or more precisely — I knew how to render. I just couldn’t sketch.

I knew how to finish things. How to get them published. How to get them into readers’ hands. But the fundamentals? The sketch underneath everything? I was still going straight to the rendering.

And I didn’t fully understand that until I started building my Picture Book and Middle Grade Writing Blueprint course. Because teaching something forces you to see it clearly. And what I saw clearly, for the first time, was the gap between what I was doing and what was actually possible.

The books I’d written were finished. But were they sketched properly? Did the ideas have genuine originality? Was the character being transformed or just moved through events? Was the setting creating pressure or just providing backdrop? Was the point of view held with precision or just assumed?

I started applying what I was teaching to my own writing.

And it was revelatory. Not painful. Exciting. Because now I could see exactly what I was working with and exactly what needed to change.

Here’s the thing nobody tells writers.

You don’t become a better artist by looking at more art. You become better by understanding why great art works — and then practicing the specific skills that create it, over and over, with honesty and attention and a willingness to see where you actually are rather than where you wish you were.

So why do we tell writers to just read more?

Reading more is the equivalent of looking at more art. It’s useful. It’s pleasurable. It shows you what’s possible.

But it doesn’t teach you to sketch.

The sketch in writing is the thing underneath your beautiful sentences and your finished manuscript. It’s the idea that’s genuinely original rather than a version of something already written. The plot that generates its own pressure instead of needing to be pushed. The character who is actually transformed by what happens rather than just moved through convenient circumstances. The setting that corners your character instead of decorating the scene. The pacing that earns every revelation instead of dumping it.

Most writers I work with are rendering before they can sketch. Not because they’re not talented. But because nobody showed them the fundamentals. Nobody told them this was even a thing to learn.

So they write. And they improve slowly. And they wonder why the books they finish don’t quite land the way they hoped. And someone tells them to read more. And they do.

And they still can’t sketch.

I’m ten years in and I’m only now learning to write.

But here’s what I want you to hear in that.

It’s not too late. It was never wasted. Every book I wrote was a session at the desk, doing something, building something, moving through the work even when I didn’t have the full picture yet.

And now that I can see the fundamentals clearly, everything is different.

Not harder. Clearer.

One sketch at a time.

I’m talking about your imagination. And how you can lose it without ever noticing it leave.

We don’t lose our creative lives in one big moment. We lose them in small daily surrenders that feel, in the moment, entirely reasonable.

Someone needs something. Right now. Real need. Real time. And over there, making no demands, is the writing. The story only you can tell, the painting half finished, the chapter that’s been sitting there for weeks.

The choice feels obvious. Real need wins. Because giving feels productive, necessary, justified. Creating — especially when you’re not sure it will amount to anything — feels selfish. Indulgent. Hard to defend when someone right in front of you actually needs help.

So you give the morning away and tell yourself you’ll create tomorrow.

But here’s what I know about tomorrow. It has the same real needs waiting in it.

And each time you choose the urgent over the creative, something happens so gradually you almost miss it.

Your capacity to imagine begins to shrink.

There’s something else that makes this harder that nobody talks about. Once you’re inside the creative space, you want to stay there. The writing pulls you in. And you know that once you leave — once the phone comes on and the messages start — getting back will cost you everything you have. So instead of risking that loss, you do something that seems almost logical. You give it away before you can have it. Better not to start than to start and have it taken. And that decision, repeated enough times, becomes its own kind of damage.

It’s like missing the gym. The first day you skip, you barely notice. You’re still capable. The absence costs you nothing visible. But skip enough days and something shifts. Fitness starts to feel like something other people have. Something that belonged to a previous version of you. And eventually — this is the part that frightens me — you stop missing it. You adjust to a smaller life and call it fine.

I’m okay without it. Aren’t I?

That question. That’s the one to watch for.

That’s what not writing does. Not just to your output, but to you. You don’t just lose the morning. You lose the hunger for it. And then you lose the memory of the hunger. And then one day you look up and realize you can’t remember the last time a story felt alive in you.

And depletion, because depletion always does this, tells you it’s permanent. I don’t think I’ll ever get back to that creative space again. And you believe it, because you’re too tired not to.

But I need you to hear this.

It isn’t permanent. It just feels that way from inside the depletion. The imagination isn’t gone. It’s starving. And starving things go quiet. They conserve. They wait. But they don’t die easily.

I also want to say something about the guilt, because I know that’s underneath all of this for most of us. Protecting your creative time feels selfish. Real need in real time feels more legitimate than words on a page that might go nowhere. I understand that feeling completely because I have lived inside it for years.

But here is what I know to be true. Every day you don’t write, you have a little less to give to others. The advice gets thinner, the presence dims, the generosity becomes mechanical because it’s coming from empty. Whereas the writer who protects her morning — who finishes the chapter before she answers the messages — shows up to everyone else fuller. The giving gets better when the creative self is fed first.

Protecting your creative window isn’t taking from others. It’s the only way you ever had anything real to give.

So when did you last protect it? When did you last say — this morning belongs to my creative self, and everything and everyone else can wait?

The imagination doesn’t come back dramatically. It comes back the same way it left, slowly, one protected morning at a time. Finding its way home.

I stop looking at the illustrations.

Not because they’re badly done. Not because I’m distracted.

But because at some point, they stop giving me anything new.

The words tell me what’s happening. The pictures confirm it.

And my eyes stay on the text.

When I catch myself doing this, I go back and look properly, and almost every time, I find the same thing.

The illustrations are showing me what the words already said.

In a picture book, that’s not a small issue.

It’s a structural one.

Picture books are not books with pictures in them.

They are performances.

They are designed to be read aloud, which means there are always two audiences in the room experiencing two completely different things at the same time.

The adult is reading the words.

The child is looking at the illustrations.

They are not having the same experience.

They are having two parallel experiences that are meant to come together into something neither the text nor the image could create alone.

When a writer understands this, everything changes.

When they don’t, they try to carry the entire story in the words.

And the illustration ends up confirming what the text already said.

And the child stops looking.

So what is the child actually looking for?

Children are looking for what the words didn’t say.

They are natural detectives. They want to find things.

The mouse nobody mentioned in the corner of the page. The expression on a secondary character’s face that tells a completely different story. The detail that makes them laugh, gasp, or nudge the adult reading to them.

They are looking at faces.

Long before children can read fluently, they read expressions with extraordinary accuracy.

Which means the illustration is where they go to understand how a character truly feels.

And if the text has already told them that… the illustration has nothing left to reveal.

They are looking for more story.

Not the same story illustrated.

More.

A parallel story unfolding in the pictures that the words aren’t telling.

The relationship between background characters. What’s happening just outside the frame. A world that continues beyond what’s been said out loud.

And they are looking for discovery.

The private satisfaction of noticing something the reader doesn’t know is there.

That’s why children return to the same picture book again and again.

Because there’s still something to find on the fifth reading.

The tenth.

The twentieth.

When illustrations are doing this, the child leans in. They become active. They participate in the story instead of just receiving it.

When illustrations are simply confirming the text… there is nothing to find.

And a child with nothing to find eventually stops looking.

So here’s the question I want you to sit with.

Turn to any page of your manuscript.

Read the text.

Then ask yourself:

What does the illustration need to show here?

If your answer repeats what the text already said… that’s your diagnostic.

The text told the story.

The illustration confirmed it.

And somewhere in a read-aloud… a child’s eyes drifted away.

Your illustration should show what the text couldn’t say. The feeling underneath the action. The detail that extends the world. The expression that reveals what the character isn’t admitting out loud.

The thing only a child paying attention would find.

That’s what they’re looking for.

Give them something they can discover without you.

It was created by a woman named Christine Frazier, and the deeper I got into her work, the more absorbed I became.

Christine analyzed three of the biggest bestselling novels of the last few decades: Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and Twilight. Beat by beat. Chapter by chapter. She was looking for recurring structural movements that might explain why millions of readers didn’t just enjoy these books, but became completely obsessed with them.

And she found them.

Not vague storytelling advice. Not broad “hero’s journey” concepts. Specific patterns appearing again and again across three wildly successful novels with completely different voices, genres, and audiences.

Once you see them, you can’t unsee them.

I took detailed notes. I saved everything I could.

And then one day, Christine Frazier disappeared from the internet.

I’m not exaggerating.

Her website vanished. Her social media went dark. The research became almost impossible to find. No explanation. No forwarding address. Nothing.

To this day, it remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the writing internet, and I say that with complete sincerity. I hope she is somewhere living a peaceful, wonderful life, completely unbothered by any of this.

But the research itself?

Almost entirely gone.

Except I still have my notes.

Now, I want to be clear about something upfront. Christine’s research focused on middle grade and YA novels, not picture books or younger chapter books. These are bigger stories with more room structurally.

But when I started testing her findings against the children’s books I loved most -books like Matilda, Wonder, and Percy Jackson, I noticed something remarkable.

The same structural rhythms were there too.

Because young readers are still readers.

They still crave tension, curiosity, emotional movement, escalation, surprise, momentum, and payoff. They still want stories that pull them forward and make them need to turn the page.

And once I started adapting Christine’s research for younger formats and children’s fiction specifically, a lot of things in my own writing suddenly clicked into place.

If you’re writing middle grade, this kind of research is incredibly useful because it gives you something practical to test your manuscript against.

Not as a formula.

As a diagnostic tool.

Christine’s work explored entire novels - openings, turning points, midpoints, climaxes, all of it. The full breakdown is extensive, and honestly, I wish the original research were still publicly available because I would happily send every writer I know straight to it.

But one of the most interesting parts was her analysis of opening chapters.

She discovered recurring structural movements appearing consistently across all three bestselling novels. Consistently enough that she could map the same underlying shape across completely different stories.

And we all know how much hinges on an opening chapter.

When I started analyzing middle grade novels through that same lens, I began seeing those same movements everywhere.

Then I mapped them against my own middle grade series, The Faren Chronicles.

That was an uncomfortable experience.

Some elements were already working. Some absolutely weren’t.

And understanding the specific job each structural movement was doing changed revision completely for me. I stopped randomly rewriting scenes hoping things would magically improve, and started understanding what the story was actually missing.

That’s the real gift of Christine’s research.

Not formulas.

Understanding.

Understanding why certain openings pull readers in so deeply. Understanding why some stories create momentum almost effortlessly while others struggle to hold attention. Understanding the invisible architecture underneath stories that work.

And once you understand that, you can apply it to your own writing in your own voice.

Inside my course, The Picture Book & Middle Grade Writing Blueprint, I share Christine’s original framework, which she called The Better Novel Project, along with the research spreadsheet I preserved all those years ago and my own adaptations for children’s fiction.

It’s honestly one of my favorite things I teach.

And given that the original research is now almost impossible to find online, I’m glad it found a home somewhere it can still be used by writers.

If you’re working on a middle grade novel and want to explore this properly, you’ll probably love this part of the course.

Christine figured all of this out years ago.

I’m just glad I wrote it all down.

Elena Paige is the author of The Faren Chronicles middle grade fantasy series and the creator of The Picture Book & Middle Grade Writing Blueprint, an online course for writers who want to write brilliant children’s books and build a career doing it.

That’s not wrong. But it’s not enough.

Because a setting that’s just a location, no matter how beautifully described, is a setting that’s standing there while your story does all the work. And when that happens, you feel it. The plot starts to strain. Conflict has to be manufactured. Scenes don’t build the pressure they should. The story stalls in places you can’t quite explain.

And you keep trying to fix the plot. But the problem isn’t the plot.

It’s the setting.

Here’s the reframe.

Setting is not backdrop. It’s not atmosphere. It’s not the descriptive layer you add once everything else is working.

Setting is force.

It’s the thing actively working on your character — cornering them, limiting their choices, forcing them into situations they can’t avoid and can’t escape. Creating pressure they have no choice but to respond to.

When your setting is doing that, your plot becomes almost inevitable. It doesn’t need to be pushed. It unfolds. When it isn’t, you’re doing all the work yourself. And it shows.

So how do you know if your setting is actually doing its job?

There’s one question I come back to again and again when I’m working on a story.

Could this plot happen anywhere?

Sit with that. Take your story as it is right now — the conflicts, the problems, the impossible situations. Could they happen in a completely different place? A different town, a different school, a different world entirely?

If the answer is yes, your setting isn’t working hard enough.

Because when a setting is doing its job, it generates problems that could only exist there. Pressure that comes directly from the nature of that world. Not added on. Built in.

Harry Potter cannot happen anywhere other than Hogwarts. Not because Hogwarts is beautifully imagined, though it is. But because the rules, the structure, and the dangers of that specific place create the exact problems Harry has to face. Remove the setting and the plot collapses. They are the same thing.

The Hunger Games cannot exist in a safe, comfortable society. The entire story is generated by the structure of Panem — the control, the spectacle, the violence that is both punishment and entertainment. The setting doesn’t support the plot. It creates it.

That’s the standard.

So run the test on your own story. Could your plot happen anywhere?

If the answer is yes, your setting and your story aren’t fully connected yet. They’re existing alongside each other. And that’s a structural problem. Because a setting that could be swapped out is doing decoration work instead of story work. And decoration, no matter how beautiful, cannot carry a story.

The good news is this is fixable.

Often the setting you’ve chosen is right. It just isn’t activated yet. Other times the setting itself needs to change because it isn’t creating enough pressure for the story you’re trying to tell.

Either way, this question will show you exactly where the gap is.

And once you find it, the way you build stories will never quite be the same again.

The writer is feeling everything.

And I’m not.

Not confused. Not disengaged. Just outside it. Like I’m looking in through glass.

I can feel how much it matters to them. The weight of it. The intention behind every word.

But it isn’t reaching me.

And that gap, between what the writer feels and what the reader receives, is one of the most important and least talked about problems in writing.

Here’s the part nobody tells you.

The feeling you have while you’re writing, that tightness in your chest, that sense of this matters, sometimes even tears…

That feeling is yours.

And if you’re not careful, it stays yours.

I’ve worked with writers at every level. First-timers sharing a page for the first time. Authors with shelves full of books. Writers who’ve poured years into a single story because it means everything to them.

And I see this pattern over and over again.

The writer feels everything. The reader feels nothing. And the writer has no idea why.

In almost every case, the reason is the same.

The writer is still inside the experience. They’re not shaping it yet. They’re expressing it.

And those are not the same thing.

One is for you. The other is for your reader.

There’s a principle in acting that changed the way I think about storytelling completely.

If the actor cries, the audience watches. If the actor holds the tears back, the audience cries.

You see this in the work of Meryl Streep again and again. The most devastating moments aren’t when she falls apart. They’re when she’s trying not to.

The jaw set against grief. The breath held a second too long. The eyes doing everything they can to hold it together, while something inside has already broken.

That restraint creates space.

Space for the audience to enter. To bring their own memories. Their own grief. Their own version of what that moment means.

The moment the emotion is fully released, that space disappears.

Now we’re watching someone else feel.

Instead of feeling it ourselves.

The same thing happens in writing.

Hemingway called it the iceberg theory. Most of the meaning sits below the surface. The reader feels what isn’t said as much as what is.

But this matters even more in children’s books. Because you don’t have the same space. Fewer words. Less time. A reader who is still learning how to read between the lines. Which means every single word has to earn its place.

And in picture books, it becomes incredibly precise.

Because there isn’t just one storyteller. There are three.

The text. The illustration. And the person reading it aloud.

Text and image should never be doing the same job.

If the illustration shows your character curled up in the dark, eyes wet, body folded in on itself, we already know she’s devastated. We can see it. We can feel it.

If the text then tells us she’s sad, you’ve closed the space. You’ve explained what the reader already experienced. And in doing that, you’ve pulled them out of the moment.

The text needs to do something different. Show us what she’s thinking. Move the story quietly forward. Say something unexpected. That contrast is where the depth lives. That’s where the feeling lands.

And then there’s the third storyteller. The one almost no one thinks about.

The adult reading the book aloud.

A picture book isn’t just read. It’s performed. The parent’s voice is what carries your words into the child’s body. It slows. Softens. Catches, in response to what’s on the page.

But only if there’s space.

When every feeling is named, every beat explained, every emotion spelled out, there’s nothing left to interpret. The reading becomes flat.

But when the text is restrained, something else happens. The parent’s voice shifts naturally. It softens. Sometimes it catches. And the child feels that. Not because you told them what to feel. But because you left room for it.

That’s what makes a child say, “read it again.”

There is no higher praise than that.

When you write from a deeply personal place, you are not reading the same book your reader is.

You’re reading the story and everything underneath it.

The memory that sparked it. The reason you needed to write it. All the versions that came before this one.

Your reader has none of that.

They have the page.

So when you read your own work and feel your throat tighten, you’re not just responding to what’s written. You’re responding to everything it represents that isn’t there.

And here’s the deeper truth.

Often, when your own writing moves you that much, it’s touching something unresolved in you.

Something you needed to say. Something you needed to feel. A part of yourself that finally, in the writing, got to be seen.

That is where powerful stories come from.

But it’s not where they finish.

At some point there has to be a shift.

From feeling it — to shaping it.

Because when you are still inside the experience, you are writing for yourself. And that’s valid. Necessary even. But it is not the same as writing something that will move someone else.

Your reader doesn’t need your raw emotion. They need something they can step into. Space to feel their own version of what you’re trying to say.

That’s the difference between deeply personal writing and writing that actually transforms the reader.

It’s not about feeling less. It’s about writing from the other side of the feeling. From the place where you’ve sat with it long enough to build something that can hold someone else.

Until that shift happens, you’re offering your reader a window into your experience.

But what they need is a door into their own.

This is where craft comes in. Not as something separate from feeling. But as the thing that allows feeling to travel.

When a story truly lands, a few things are almost always true.

The moment is earned. We see what it costs the character to get there.

The resolution is restrained. Something is left unsaid. This is the held-back tear. This is Meryl Streep’s jaw.

The emotion isn’t explained. It’s shown through behaviour, small choices, specific detail.

And the feeling is actually on the page, not just in everything the writer knows behind it.

So if you finish a scene and feel deeply moved, pause.

Not to celebrate yet.

But to ask yourself honestly:

Is this feeling coming from what’s written? Or from everything I know that isn’t?

If it’s the second, your reader isn’t there yet.

Go back in.

Let me leave you with this.

If your book makes you cry every time you read it, are you crying for your reader? Or are you crying for yourself?

Both are real.

Only one of them will move the person holding your book.

The goal isn’t to feel less.

It’s to feel it first and then build something that allows someone else to feel it too.

Hold it back, just enough.

Leave room.

Let your reader step in.

That’s where the story starts to live.

And they gave you feedback.

It was kind. It was thoughtful. It said things like:

“Lovely writing.” “Great concept.” “Maybe tighten the middle a little.” “The character could be more likeable.”

And you said thank you. And you meant it.

Then you sat back down at your manuscript and felt exactly the same as before. Lost. Unsure. Knowing something still isn’t right but unable to name what it is.

The feedback wasn’t wrong. But it was answering the wrong question. It was trying to fix the drift — the symptoms showing up in chapter four, chapter seven, the ending that doesn’t quite land — without ever going back to find where the drift began.

And the drift almost always begins in the same place.

Your premise. That one sentence that describes what your story actually is.

Not your plot. Not your character’s name or their problem or the funny thing that happens on page three. The deeper thing underneath all of that. What your story is really about. What it’s trying to do inside the child who reads it.

If that sentence is even slightly off, vague, or pointing in the wrong direction, everything that follows will drift. And no amount of tightening the middle will fix it. Because you’re not fixing the compass. You’re rearranging what came after it went wrong.

So here’s what I want you to do before you touch another word of your manuscript.

Go back to your premise. Write it in one sentence. Not a summary — a compass. What is this story really about? What does your main character believe at the beginning that turns out to be wrong? What do they understand by the end that they didn’t before?

Sit with that sentence. Read it slowly.

You’ll feel it, if it’s off. You already know. You’ve known for a while, actually. You just didn’t know what you knew yet.

And the person who gave you that feedback? They felt it too. They just didn’t have the language to hand it back to you.

That language exists. And once you have it, you’ll never look at a manuscript the same way again.

Remember transformation in a story, and in a writer, doesn't happen by accident. It happens by design.

Read the manuscript. Think about it. Think about what I thought about it. Then spend another hour working out how to write the feedback in a way that was useful, honest, and didn’t leave the writer feeling like their story had been quietly dismantled.

It took hours.

And it always felt slightly off.

Not wrong exactly. More like something essential was getting lost between my real, lived experience of reading their story, and the feedback arriving alone on a page, without me there to hold it.

I spent nearly two decades as a therapist before I became an author. And I know what gets lost when the conversation becomes a document.

Everything that can’t be written down.

So one day I asked a client a question.

How would you feel if I read your story with you, live, and just told you my real experience of reading it? Not what I thought about it afterwards. The actual moment-by-moment experience.

She said yes.

And something shifted.

Because what I gave her wasn’t a verdict.

It was a witness.

I told her the exact moment I got confused. The line that pulled me clean out of the story. The place where I stopped feeling. The sentence that didn’t quite land and why, as best as I could tell in that moment.

And then something happened that I didn’t expect.

She started to trust herself more than she trusted me.

Right there, in real time, watching me read her work, she began to know, before I said anything, what needed to change. She was reading it through my eyes and through her own simultaneously.

The writer in her was waking up.

Then came the part I love most.

I’d make a suggestion.

She’d push back. No, I did it that way because…

And I’d push back too.

Neither of us were exactly right. Neither of us were exactly wrong. And the truth wasn’t in either of our positions.

It was underneath both of them.

We’d stay there, in that uncomfortable, alive space between my reading and her intention, until we found it.

Usually something small. A missing line. A broken connection between what she meant to create and what I was actually receiving as a reader.

And when it landed, it really landed.

Not because she did what I said. She rarely did exactly what I said.

It landed because she found her own way through, with someone present who could say “yes, that’s it,” the moment it arrived.

That’s what written feedback can never fully do.

It delivers a conclusion.

It cannot be there for the discovery.

I’ve been thinking about why writers are so frightened of feedback.

I’m a writer too, so I know the feeling from the inside.

There’s a quiet, slightly shameful hope that the work is already good enough. That you won’t have to change it. That the person reading it will simply confirm what you already sensed was true.

And when that doesn’t happen, the fear shifts.

I don’t know how to make this better. Maybe I’m not capable of this.

Those thoughts aren’t about the story. They never were.

But what I watch happen in these live sessions is something completely different.

Writers don’t become perfect.

They become clearer.

They improve within their own range, at the level they’re at right now, while keeping their intent completely intact.

Which is all any piece of writing ever needs.

Not perfection. Not someone else’s vision imposed on the work.

Just this draft, moved a little closer to what it was always trying to be.

Because here is what twenty-five books and twenty years of sitting with people as they changed has taught me:

Writing isn’t about creating something technically perfect.

It’s about creating something true.

True to the writer. True to the child who will read it one day. True to the quiet, knowing part of you that chose to write this particular story in the first place.

That part already knows what the story needs.

It just needs the right conditions to say so.

I don’t know if other coaches work this way.

But if you’ve ever received feedback that left you more confused than when you started, or more defeated, I want to gently suggest that what was missing probably wasn’t the quality of the feedback.

It was the conversation around it.

The chance to say, but here’s why I did it that way.

The chance to be heard, not just assessed.

The chance to find your own answer, with someone genuinely alongside you.

That is where the real growth lives.

Not in the verdict. In the discovery.

I offer live story coaching for picture book and middle grade writers. If this way of working speaks to you, you can find out more at ElenaPaige.com

That’s not where it happens.

The ending is where the change becomes visible. Where the consequences play out. Where we see who the character has become.

But the transformation itself happens earlier. In a much quieter, less obvious moment.

And most writers miss it, or move past it too quickly. Because it doesn’t look dramatic from the outside. It doesn’t announce itself.

It looks like a decision. A small one, sometimes.

But internally, it costs everything.

I know this because I wrote it once, in my own book, and I almost didn’t stay long enough to find it.

In Evie Everyday Witch: Secret Magic, my protagonist Evie has one desperate wish. Not to defeat a villain. Not to win a competition. Just to be normal. To be a regular girl at a regular school, instead of a witch. She spends the entire book hiding who she is. Wearing black instead of her beloved pink and orange stockings. Pushing away the one friend who loves her exactly as she is. Lying, performing, shrinking herself into something acceptable.

And then comes the moment.

Stripped of most of her power, about to lose everything, Evie doesn’t reach for a clever spell. She doesn’t fight her way out. She makes a choice.

She grabs her friend’s talisman, holds it tight, and chants quietly:

I’m proud to be a witch. I’m proud to be a witch. I’m proud to be a witch.

That’s it.

Six words. Three times. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just a choice that costs her the one thing she's wanted her whole life. The chance to be normal. To fit in. To belong somewhere.

And in that moment of choosing herself, everything changes.

This is the moment I could have easily rushed past as a writer.

Her colorful clothes come back. Pink and orange stockings. Purple skirt. Green top. Glitter sneakers. The black dress disappears.

The outer transformation follows the inner one.

That is the moment the story changes. Not when the villain is defeated. Not when the problem is solved. Those things happen after. They’re the consequence of the transformation, not the transformation itself.

The transformation is that quiet chant. That impossible choice. That moment when Evie could have kept hiding, and didn’t.

Here is the part most writing advice misses, and the reason this is so hard to write:

Your character’s transformation moment is almost always connected to something in you.

The fear they have to face. The truth they have to admit. The choice they have to make at enormous cost.

You will feel it before you can fully write it.

And if you leave the work too early, you’ll never quite reach it. The story will work. It might even be good. But it won’t change anything. Because transformation doesn’t come from what happens in your story.

It comes from who your character becomes in the moment they could have stayed the same, and chose not to.

That moment is quieter than most people expect, but it’s where everything happens.

If your character hasn’t been forced through experience to become someone new, the story hasn’t transformed anything yet.

In my work with children’s book writers I use something called the Character Transformation Line, a tool that shows you exactly where that moment needs to live in your story and whether it’s actually landing. I go deeper into this inside the Picture Book and Middle Grade Writing Blueprint.

Where in your story is the moment your character could have stayed the same, and didn't?

Not a real smile. The kind you wear when you’ve made peace with something that should never have required making peace with.

We were at a writing event. She was warm, generous, clearly talented. She told me she’d been writing for ten years. Three picture books. Hundreds of critiques. Conferences, industry editors, manuscript assessments, kidlit events. She’d paid for feedback from people at the big publishers. She’d done everything right. Everything she’d been told to do.

And she was close now. She had to be.

Then she said it.

“After all, we know there’s no money in publishing. But it would have been worth it.”

Worth it.

I smiled. I nodded. I said something warm and encouraging because she deserved that.

But inside I wanted to overturn a table.

I’ve been turning that word over ever since. Because I think it points to something deeper than rejection or waiting or how long publishing takes. It points to the story writers are given about what this is supposed to be.

That this is noble. That the years of trying, the money spent, the hope offered and withdrawn again and again, are simply the price of loving something pure. And if you struggle with that price, financially or emotionally, perhaps you didn’t want it badly enough.

I don’t think that’s a story we examine closely enough.

Let me tell you what I actually heard in that conversation.

I heard a talented woman who has spent ten years and thousands of dollars being assessed, critiqued, evaluated, and rejected by the very ecosystem she’s trying to enter. I heard someone who has shown up again and again, paid for access, paid for feedback, done the work, and is still waiting for the door to open. I heard someone who has been told so often that money shouldn’t matter that she can no longer see clearly what this has actually cost her.

Ten years. Thousands of dollars. Three manuscripts.

And a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

There’s something that rarely gets said out loud at these events, in between the panels and the pitch sessions and the casual “it takes ten years” conversations said with a laugh, as though ten years of your life is just the charming nature of the thing.

There is an entire structure around publishing that functions on paid access. Conferences are paid. Critiques are paid. Manuscript assessments are paid. Editors who work within the system often offer feedback alongside it.

And the writer is the one consistently paying. Year after year. Without meaningful movement toward the thing they actually came for.

Over time a quiet narrative takes hold. That writers are supposed to struggle. That waiting is part of the identity. That being considered is something to be grateful for. That caring about money somehow compromises the purity of the work.

It’s a compelling story.

And it can keep people in place for a very long time.

I’m not saying feedback is worthless. The right feedback at the right moment from the right person can genuinely change a manuscript.

But there is a difference between feedback that serves the writer and a circuit that keeps the writer circulating.

And when I see someone who has spent a decade and a significant amount of money moving through that circuit without getting closer to publication, I don’t immediately think they need more feedback.

I think something needs to be looked at more honestly.

I spent nearly twenty years working in psychology. I sat with people who had placed their trust in systems that were supposed to help them and hadn’t.

What I learned is that the most insidious kind of harm is the kind that comes wrapped in the language of care.

We’re helping you get ready.

You’re almost there.

This is just how it works.

It will be worth it.

Those phrases sound supportive. But they can also keep someone in a loop without ever inviting them to step back and ask a harder question.

Is this actually working for me?

I think about that woman often. Her smile. Her ten years. Her three picture books that deserved to exist in the world years ago.

I think about the room full of writers nodding along when someone said ten years as if it were just part of the deal. As if patience were the same thing as progress.

It isn’t charming.

And it isn’t something you have to accept without question.

You are allowed to want a path that moves. You are allowed to care about what this costs you. You are allowed to decide that your work has value now, not only after the next round of feedback, not only once the right gate finally opens.

She said it would have been worth it.

I’m not sure she ever stopped to ask what it was costing her.

Your work deserves that question.

We tend to fall into one of three types.

I’ve seen them in my clients, in my students, in my colleagues, in my dearest friends. And I’ve seen them, more honestly than anywhere else, in myself.

This is what I’ve come to understand about all three.

The Injured Creative

She makes from the wound. She needs to be seen to feel real. Every piece of work carries a quiet question underneath it: does this prove I exist?

She is deeply talented. Often the most talented person in the room. But the making is exhausting because it is carrying something too heavy. It was never just a painting or a story or a song. It was proof of worth. Evidence of the right to take up space.

The making never quite fills the hole it is trying to fill.

I know her well. I have been her.

The Deserving One

She has done the work. She has waited her turn. And now she knows it is her time and she is going to claim it.

There is a confidence here that looks healthy from the outside. But underneath there is still a grasping quality. A hunger dressed up as self-worth. She tends to take more than she realizes. She can drain a room without knowing it, because she is still, quietly, making everything about what she needs back.

I know her too. I have been her also.

The En-Joyer

She is the one I crave to be. The one I think we are all trying to find our way back to.

She makes what wants to be made. Not for the audience. Not for the algorithm. Not for the legacy.

She creates from a child-like place, the place that existed before anyone said that making things needed a reason, a market, a strategy, a point.

Not what performs. Not what proves. What is alive.

She is genuinely not waiting for approval. Not because she is cold or indifferent, but because the joy is already complete inside the act of making itself. The painting, the story, the song, it was whole before anyone saw it. Another person’s opinion of it changes nothing.

She is in joy while she creates. Not performing joy. Not documenting joy. Inside it.

En-Joy.

But here is what nobody told me about her. Here is the thing I have had to face honestly, in myself, after all of it.

The En-Joyer terrifies me.

Not because she is difficult to understand. But because she operates entirely outside the approval economy. She makes and it is enough. And somewhere very deep, I have not always believed that is possible.

So I test it.

I make something that felt pure and alive in the making of it, and then I check the numbers. And the moment I do, the child disappears and the wound rushes back in.

My own approval of what I make is not enough. Somewhere underneath everything, I still want someone else to find worth in it. To say it is great. To confirm that it matters.

And that voice, the one that says the child is never enough, that joy alone is too small, too frivolous, too self-indulgent to justify taking up space, that voice is the whole problem.

It is what keeps pulling me back to the wound or the grasping. It is what makes the En-Joyer feel like a luxury rather than a birthright.

But here is what I now know to be true for me:

The En-Joyer is not the top of the ladder. She was never a destination to work toward or an achievement to unlock. She is the ground underneath it all.

Every time I have made something truly alive, every piece of work that surprised me, moved me, felt like it came through me rather than from me, she was already there. She was always the one doing it.

The ego just kept taking the credit.

And this is the version of me I keep finding my way back to. It is also the version of you your most powerful stories are actually waiting for.

I will not stay her permanently. I will slip back into the wound or the hunger. I will have a week of pure making and then wake up one morning checking my stats, feeling the familiar pull. And it will have happened so gradually I will not have noticed the slide.

That is not failure. That is me being human.

The point of naming these three is not to shame myself out of the first two forever. It is to have a way back. So that when the creating feels desperate rather than alive, when I am exhausted and grasping and making from lack, I can look up and recognize where I am.

Oh. I am here again. I know this place.

And then, without punishment, without drama, without turning the noticing into yet another wound to heal, I find my way back to her.

Because here is what I know to be true, from the inside out, after everything.

Without her, nothing is worth making. No matter how much money or success or recognition it might bring. None of it means anything without her.

She is not the reward for doing the work.

She is the reason for it.