The Unspoken Art of Becoming a Writer

Plus a New Section: The Nurtured Writer at The Editing Spectrum

When people ask me, "How can I become a better writer?" I can tell they’re expecting advice about sentence structure, grammar or perhaps even stylistic flair.

But I’ve realized, from years of navigating my own creative journey and editing hundreds of essays, loads of market materials and black lines / manuscripts, that those aren’t the keys to truly finding your voice.

Because to me, voice isn’t about how you sound on the page.

It’s about how you sound inside yourself.

It’s about who is allowed to speak inside your mind to you, about you. To me, the process of uncovering your voice is much less technical and much more biological, spiritual even.

I know this from observing writers who squeeze their hardest to write a second best-seller. I know from thousands of hours of practice in my 20s and 30s, and recognizing none of the writing advice I read or the classes I took ever made me a "better" writer in the way I hoped they would. My words remained technically sound, but something was missing.

The true journey to becoming a better writer isn’t just about perfecting your sentence structure or transitions or adding the most precise through line.

It’s about learning how to be with yourself.

How to sit with your thoughts, your emotions and the often tangled narratives inside you, and let them unfurl.

Becoming a Better Writer Means Learning to Belong to Yourself

Recently, I had the chance to create a series of reflective questions, flashcards and reading prompts for a business owner.

It was a deeply personal process: standing in front of my bookshelves, pulling out just the right book, finding the perfect passage and distilling the questions that I knew had been keys to hidden doors inside me. It was the culmination of years of exploration — asking myself hard questions, following where my curiosity led and learning to listen not just with my mind, but with my entire being.

When we ask, "How can I become a better writer?" what I think we’re really asking is something deeper: How do I belong to myself?

How do I find the stories that are lodged inside me and coax them to the surface, gently and truthfully?

I want to help others find their own answers to that.

Not through grammar exercises, but through a process of deeper self-exploration.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be carving out a new section of The Editing Spectrum to make room for this offline work so it has an online home with you. I’ll be stepping into my role as a guide for writers and creatives who want to dig below the surface — those who want to learn to listen and write, not just with their heads, but with their hearts, their bodies and their whole selves.

Introducing The Nurtured Writer

As part of this new direction, I’m excited to introduce a new section of this newsletter: The Nurtured Writer.

This is where I’m pulling together a lot of my earlier interviews (some of you probably remember my Cave of the Heart series!) and my pieces like Luck Needs a Place To Land and Writing Seasons. In addition to these resources now having a more organized home, I’ll be sharing brand new practices, reflections and prompts that I’ve been working on behind the scenes.

These are the fruit of 20 years of being an editor and writer behind the scenes in a lot of industries and spaces. They’re also the fruit of being a woman who’s masked for most of her life and who’s fought hard to find a sense of inner home and belonging.

I want to share with you what has helped me connect deeply with my own voice, navigate tumultuous life circumstances and find inner grounding even when everything seems to be crashing all around me. Because the writer’s work is never siloed just to the page or a tied newsletter publishing queue — it spills over into each moment of every day of our lives. And I want to start finding a way to give you everything I have gathered from my bookshelves, conversations and decades of fighting to hear myself first and foremost.

In the coming weeks and months, I’m looking forward to sharing with you:

1. A Series Exploring 3 Types of Body-Based Meditation
   As a trained mindfulness awareness meditation instructor, I’ll be exploring the nature of meditation in my life and it’s intersection with writing. And how I used trauma-informed tweaks to help find safety, grounding and accessibility in three separate meditation styles.

2. Somatic Signaling Guide™
   I’ll be introducing regular writing prompts and reflections that weave alongside my Somatic Signaling Guide™. I’ve designed these so that others can tap into their own innate wisdom in moments of decision making and/or overwhelm.

3. Reflective Questions & Prompts
   Occasionally I’ll be digging into my bookshelves and sharing what I’ve gathered over years of exploring my own inner landscapes. These questions and prompts will be designed to help you dig deeper, ask the hard questions and perhaps find the stories that have been waiting to surface.

I know this might be a different kind of journey for some of you, and I want to honor that. If you’re here for pure newsletter strategy support and data insights, that will continue to be available to you each month, and you can simply skip The Nurtured Writer section if it’s not for you.

Control your settings by clicking on your face icon at the top right, then choosing “Manage Subscription,” which should show you this list of options. You can toggle any of these sections of The Editing Spectrum off/on.

But if you’re curious about exploring where strategy meets intuition, I hope you’ll keep The Nurtured Writer section toggled on. Also, here’s a question to consider:

Take a moment to sit with that, and notice what comes up. The Nurtured Writer is a space where I want to explore questions at this intersection — where we can nurture creative momentum, challenge the status quo and approach writing as a practice of both growth and belonging.

Paid Member Strategy Chat:

Curious about this strategy shift in The Editing Spectrum? I’m opening a chat later today to answer paid members’ questions about the “why” behind this editorial change (it’s a long time coming with a lot of factors behind it that come up often in my 1:1 editorial centering sessions. So I want to make myself available to share some of that with you).