There are three types of clients who find me:
The first loves to write and wants to build a real practice around it.
The second can talk for hours about their ideas but then they freeze up when faced with the blank page.
The third thinks they don’t have time to write. They need someone to ask them questions until all the things in their head become clear enough to articulate.
People come in with a theory about what’s blocking them. But then we start working, and something else emerges. Collaboration generates something we couldn’t have seen alone.
Reclaiming the coach
The “phoning it in” style
Years ago, I did the whole Tony Robbins thing. I reached out and got myself a Tony Robbins coach.
It was the right move in theory, but the experience was underwhelming. The person, I’m sure, just showed up to the call, read what I put on the form, spouted some Tony Robbins boilerplate, and went on. I felt like I was part of a quota.
I spent a few months in the Mediterranean where internet was spotty, and I found myself in the situation where I was loving life and attaining the growth goals I set out to achieve and I really didn’t have anything to discuss with my coach. So I didn’t keep up with our regular call schedule. Disappointingly, that was the period of time my coach was most active. She just wanted to make sure I kept having calls with her. The only thing she seemed passionate about was getting paid.
Finding the right person to collaborate with can be hard, because a lot of coaches are in that line of work because it’s easier to tell people what to do than to do it themselves.
The “better than you” style
Plenty of other coaches fall into the “I’ve figured it out and you haven’t” bunch. They give off the idealized version of a person who has achieved something that YOU WISH YOU HAD TOO, DON’T YOU? And sure, the struggles of actual life get hidden behind the performance of having it all together. But so does the actual joy of creation.
This kind of positioning is a real turnoff for me, and because it’s so loud in the marketplace, it’s all most people think is available. And they’re not wrong for deciding to soldier through it all alone rather than work with some douchebag who believes they need to pretend their life is perfect.
I’m sure plenty of people who could really use support just give up on coaching instead.
The messy middle
TMMW is the place where I write about the woolly, unkempt middle of creative work—that space between “I have an idea” and “it’s actually done”—because that’s where I spend most of my days, both in my own writing and with clients.
Most of my time, I’m either writing creatively (recently wrapped collaborative project Revolt in Steel Meadow and now revising The God Pot) or ghostwriting for CEOs and people who trust me to find their voice in the chaos of their ideas. But here, I write about what happens based on the coaching conversations, the collaborative sessions, the moments when someone realizes they’ve been squashing down their real work for decades.
I’m a writer first. The coaching emerged because I can’t help but collaborate—it’s like I’m constitutionally unable to hear someone’s stuck story without wanting to sit down and untangle it with them.
My clients are smart and talented, but they’ve also either been taught that their real voice isn’t good enough, or they don’t want to spend years honing their writing skills and would rather work with someone with extensive experience wrestling with blank pages and waging war against the voice that says “this is garbage” after every paragraph. My war wounds, it turns out, make me a good coach.
Not because I’ve figured it out. I absolutely haven’t. I don’t want to. I want to create anyway and keep going when the situation is gnarly and hopeless and gallumphigatious. I coach because the best stuff happens in collaboration—when your little idea meets someone else’s off-beat curiosity and eventually something neither of you expected appears on the page. Whether that page holds a novel, a poem, or just a letter about what you really want.
That exchange, which is like a mutual teaching, is what I’m really talking about when I say coaching.
And coaching isn’t right for everyone, which is why I also ghostwrite.
Getting your ideas onto the page
Unless we externalize and shape our thoughts through some creative modality, we’re missing a huge opportunity. Writing thoughts down helps clarify them.
“My writing practice had languished for so long it wasn’t even a practice anymore,” one writer shared with me. Yet within days of structured writing time, “the floodgates of creativity opened.” The block dissolved, and it revealed what had been waiting underneath all along.
However, breakthroughs don’t always happen immediately. We think our ideas are clear until we try to express them. Trying to achieve clarity through writing can make things seem like an even greater mess. But miracles happen simply by trusting the process and collaborating.
“The writing exercises brought ideas and memories out of me that had been hidden or buried for years,” another writer told me. “When answering a question about goals, three pages later I found myself forgiving myself for something I’d done in the past.”
The process of making thoughts concrete, whether through writing or conversation, is both constructive and creative. You literally can start with something half-formed and ephemeral, and if you have trust in the process and the willingness to see things shaped, it will absolutely become something great and durable.
This requires humility, and the openness to see your ideas take form and sometimes surprise you with what they actually are.
How I collaborate
The work takes different shapes depending on what you need.
Done For You: Ghostwriting
You have the ideas, the expertise, the vision, and I create the finished work. Through conversations, bullet points, and your existing writing samples, I write in your voice and structure your thoughts into polished pieces.
From a few questions and loose outlines, you get a piece written in your voice.
Co-Written: True Collaboration
We build together. We’re both in the document, both shaping the work, both discovering what wants to emerge. Your expertise meets mine, your questions reshape my understanding. This is for when the process itself matters as much as the outcome.
Done With You: Coaching & Guidance
I guide while you create your own work, and I hold space for your discoveries. This is for the writer who wants someone to ask the right questions and keep them consistent. You bring your vision and rough drafts, I bring perspective and the ability to help you find what you’re actually trying to say. The work is yours, but you’re not doing it alone.
An invitation to collaborate
You bring your vision, your challenges, your questions, your rough drafts. I bring perspective, a love of the turned phrase, and the ability to hold space for what wants to emerge. That’s the coaching I believe in.
Reach out to me and let’s work together.