🧭 The 12 Pillars, Pillar 1: Clarity

Finding Your True North as a Writer

On why “just be more disciplined” has never once worked — and the gentler question that actually points you home.

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Let me start with a confession, because that’s how we do things around here.

For years, I thought the reason I wasn’t writing consistently was that I lacked discipline. That there was some sturdier, more serious writer-self I was supposed to become — one who woke at 5am, hit her word count without complaint, and never once got derailed by a shiny idea or a bad fibro day or the sudden, urgent need to reorganize an entire kitchen cabinet. I thought if I could just force myself into that shape, the writing would flow.

So, I tried. Over and over. I downloaded the apps. I made the color-coded schedules. I set the alarms with the motivational labels. And every single time, within a week or three, the whole scaffold collapsed — and I’d sit in the rubble telling myself the oldest, meanest story there is: See? You’re just not disciplined enough. Other writers can do this. What’s wrong with you?

Here is what I know now, after a lot of collapsed scaffolds and a lot of hard-won healing:

Nothing was wrong with me. I was building on the wrong foundation and for a brain that wasn’t mine.

I was starting with discipline — with how much and how often and by when — when I hadn’t yet answered the only question that actually holds a writing life up.

Not how. Not how much.

Why.

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What “True North” Actually Means (and What It Doesn’t)

When people say “find your why,” it usually comes out sounding like a motivational poster — vague, a little preachy, the kind of thing that makes those of us with a healthy suspicion of hustle-culture want to quietly close the tab.

So let me make it real and unglamorous, the way I like things.

Your True North isn’t your genre. It isn’t your five-year plan or your sales goal or the number of books you want on the shelf. Those are destinations — and destinations change.

(Mine have changed about nine times, and I stopped apologizing for it.) 🤣

Your True North is the deeper reason the writing matters to you — the thing underneath the thing. It’s the answer to: when the writing is going well, what is it actually giving me? And when I’m not writing, what specifically am I missing?

For one writer, it’s “I write to make sense of what happened to me.” For another, it’s “I write because building whole worlds is the only place I feel truly free.” For another, it’s “I write because there’s a reader out there who needs this exact story, and I’m the only one who can tell it.”

None of those is more correct than the others. That’s the whole point — and it’s the first place I part ways with most of the writing-advice internet.

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Why I Don’t Teach This as “Gospel”

I need to be honest with you about who I am as your guide, because it shapes everything I’m going to share across these twelve pillars.

I am not a guru. 🐻

I’m a fully-flawed, actively-healing life survivalist who has learned most of what she knows the hard way, and who believes — down to the bone — that what works beautifully for one writer can be completely useless for another. I’ve watched brilliant, sensitive, creative people break themselves against systems that were never built for their brain, their body, their nervous system, their life — and then blame themselves when the borrowed system didn’t fit.

So, I’m not going to hand you my True North and tell you to adopt it. And I’m not even going to pretend that the True North you find today is the one you’ll have forever.

Here’s the truest thing I can tell you about a sustainable writing life: what works for you right now may not work for you in six months — and that isn’t failure. That’s just being a living, changing human.

The goal was never to find the One Perfect System and lock yourself inside it. The goal is to learn the framework for building your own — and to give yourself full permission to rebuild it, gently, as many times as your one wild life requires.

That’s what these twelve pillars are. Not a cage. A compass. You’re still the one walking. 🧭

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🔏 This is where it gets real. Below, I’m going to tell you the whole story of the years I lost my own True North completely — the season I quietly learned it wasn’t safe to write at all — and how I found my way back. Then we get practical: the exercise for finding your own North, the one small piece of tech that makes it stick, and your prompts. That part’s for the folks walking the whole framework with me. 🐾

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