The Unspoken Art of Becoming a Writer

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 and 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 broadening the focus of this newsletter, The Listening Field, to reflect this journey. 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 write, not just with their heads, but with their hearts, their bodies and their whole selves.

Introducing the Being With Yourself Practice

As part of this new direction, I’m excited to introduce a new section of this newsletter: the Being With Yourself Practice. This is where I’ll share the practices, reflections and prompts that have been the fruit of 20 years of finding my way to a sense of inner home and belonging. 

These practices are what allow me to connect deeply with my own voice, navigate tumultuous life circumstances and find inner grounding even when everything seems to be crashing all around me. This work inevitably spills over into how I write and what I’m able to give to the world.

The Being With Yourself Practice will offer gentle invitations to explore three different areas:

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

2. Somatic Signaling
   I’ll share exercises and prompts based on my proprietary somatic signaling flashcards (we’re talking to a trademark lawyer soon! These are a key part of the book I’m working on!). The flash cards offer a simple way to relate to outer messaging (from experts, from a family member, even from meditation instructors) and tune into your body’s reaction to what it experiences. This is a practice that helped me uncover what my mind alone couldn’t quite reach.

3. Reflective Questions & Prompts
   Questions and prompts that I’ve gathered over years of exploring my own inner landscape. They’re 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 my personal stories, those will continue to be the core of this newsletter, and you can absolutely opt out of the Being With Yourself Practice if it’s not for you. But I do believe it’s worth exploring, because there’s something powerful in learning to belong to yourself — and that’s what I want to share with those who are open to it.

Continuing to Share My Own Writing Journey

For those of you who have been following along for my personal writing, don’t worry — none of that is going away. Sharing my reflections and stories has been a lifeline to me, and I’ll continue to bring you along on my own journey. What I’m introducing now is a way of showing how I was able to write in this way, and how you might find your own path to doing the same. It’s an invitation to not only read my words but to engage with the practices that help me find my voice.

This shift isn’t about teaching you how to write; it’s about helping you reconnect with your own inner voice, the one that knows the stories you need to tell. 

I’m excited to walk alongside you as we explore what it means to belong, to listen deeply and to bring forth the stories that have been waiting to be heard.

Thank you for being here, and I can’t wait to share this new chapter with you.