Welcome back to B is for Book Coach. I’m B, midwife of big ideas and book development partner for writers and non-writers alike. And for the next few minutes, you are my author.
Don’t worry. That doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.
Today, we’re making space for resistance.
The other day, a colleague posted a thread on LinkedIn about certain things that aren’t as scary as we were led to believe they’d be when we were kids in the ‘90s.
Quicksand.
Razorblades in Halloween candy.
Spontaneous combustion.
I’d like to submit to the record: Resistance.
To be fair, resistance is (probably) more real than the others are.
Anytime change is on the horizon, a not-so-small part of our bodies and brains will do their part to maintain homeostasis—to keep everything the same.
The bigger the change, the bigger the internal effort to prevent it. To resist.
But the creative world has a ‘90s-fear-level relationship to resistance.
It’s somehow around every corner, hiding in every pause, threatening every endeavor.
The first time I went to an editor’s training, we spent half of the day analyzing scenes from books, movies, and even songs. Then we spent time on objective story structure. And we closed each day with a session on business building.
While I had been in the world of content and even books for years at that point, it was the first time anyone had asked me to niche.
By that point, I had just done whatever the gig in front of me asked me to do.
While it was implied that we were supposed to pick a genre as our niche, I remember asking whether mine could be “helping authors through resistance.”
Their answer was no—with the explanation that all editors or guides should be able to help their clients work through resistance.
I spent another several years stuck in that same gig space, until necessity finally forced me to come back to the question of a niche.
This time, I was guided by a former author and branding expert. But once again, I landed in the same kind of problem. I would name something I thought “counted,” and she would tell me that it should just be expected.
“The brilliant basics,” she called them.
Maybe not everyone does everything well, but if an editor or coach is worth engaging, they will do certain things well.
We’re talking meeting you right where you are, bringing your words to life, and yes, helping you through resistance.
She and I eventually landed on the foundational language of “non-writers”—the authors who are writing a book but don’t intend to become a writer by trade. The authors whose larger work in the world takes precedent. Whose books need to bolster that work, not replace it or distract from it.
The further I dug into that identity, separating the non-writer’s writing experience from those who were slowly developing the craft that represented their literary calling, the more resistance changed shape.
It was still there. Still real. Still scary.
But not an artistic urban legend, like razorblades in Halloween candy just waiting to ruin our fun.
More like quicksand: You’ll probably come across it if you’re in the spaces where it exists. And when you do, you’ll get out of it faster if you’re patient than if you struggle.
When I first wrote about the creative process from a non-writer’s perspective, I wanted to take that struggle out of the equation. So I named “the resistance pause” as a normal part of the process.
I had seen the pattern a hundred times before.
A big breakthrough happens, or is on the way, and the author pulls back for a moment. Pauses.
Sometimes we work through it together. And then they return—stronger, on the other side of whatever their brain or body or work needed to integrate.
I pointed to this “resistance pause” for a while, hoping to simply normalize resistance as something to be worked with rather than feared.
Eventually, I began to question the resistance in the pause.
What if we were pausing, yes, but to realign rather than resist?
What if the brilliance wasn’t in knowing how to overcome resistance but in understanding the very basic nature of a pause?
After all, everything has a season.
All of nature ebbs and flows.
And it’s in those pauses that we grow.
Naturally. Without force or fear.
So, I renamed the “resistance pause” to the “realignment pause,” shifting just slightly from tolerance to celebration.
Sometimes, we pause on purpose. We take vacations, we take days off, we set the project down.
Sometimes, our bodies pause for us. We get sick, we burn out, we need rest.
Sometimes, it’s something less physical that pulls the brakes.
We can’t point to a sickness or a choice that justifies the hesitation, but when we sit down to write, the words won’t come. Maybe we don’t sit down to write at all.
Those moments are harder to embrace.
They’re harder to justify.
We notice the pause, but we don’t know how to talk about it.
I think that’s where those ‘90s fears came from anyway.
Something happened that was hard to explain—or someone wanted to prevent something that was hard to communicate—and it was easier to make a bogeyman out of it than to navigate complexity.
And a growing human is nothing if not complex.
So when we find that we’ve paused, we have a choice.
We can invent a monster.
We can make some part of ourselves into a monster.
Or we can navigate our own complexity.
Stop fighting our own quicksand.
And take the opportunity to realign.
To remember why we’re doing this work in the first place.
To replenish the stores that we poured out onto the page or into our larger work.
To recalibrate a pace or process that works for us, not for some other system.
To remind our bodies and brains that this change is chosen.
And to grow into another level of our creative selves.
Hey, thanks for creating this space with me today.
Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you're already doing it.
Be sure to subscribe on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts to catch every coaching moment to come. And when more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.
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