I Wrote a Novel

The story of how I found craft and became an author.

I wrote a novel. It took me two years to get a first draft on the page. I hired a consultant to look at it, but she didn’t want to deepen what I had on the page; she wanted to change it into something else. She didn’t think it had enough of an external engine. She was the expert. I was a novice. I started down the path she recommended. It was interesting, but suddenly it wasn’t the book I wanted to write. I wanted it to be about female friendship and for the meet-cute between the two women to be enough to drive the story. But at the time, I didn’t know how to articulate that; I just knew in every part of my body that what this woman was recommending to me was not the book I wanted to write. I reverted to the original rough draft.

And then a friend gave me a gift. She is the first friend I made from my son’s daycare. She is also a single mom by choice and a writer. Every Saturday we’d go to the playground and talk or try to talk while we navigated our kids learning how to play without hurting themselves or others. This friend told me the plan she had to finish her memoir. And as she described her plan, she sounded like the teacher in Charlie Brown. The words muffled, and yet I desperately wanted to understand her. I was like, what do you mean you’re looking at every beginning and then at structure and pacing? What are those words, or are they action? Why don’t I know them? I’d written an entire novel and still knew nothing. A vast open space opened before me in the slow discovery of everything I do not know.

So, in between harrowing moments of saving our children from themselves, she recommended I check out a woman named Suzanne Kingsbury and her Gateless Method. I looked at Suzanne’s website; it made absolutely no sense to me. It had a good vibe though. And maybe if I walk into the gate, I’ll enter a magical land of knowing.

I emailed her. She got back to me and then didn’t. And then I chased her. It felt like converting to Judaism. I needed to knock at the door a thousand times to show I was ready to show up. I’m desperate to do the work. I just need to know what the work is. Besides, maybe she could tell me if my book is good.

In reality, I don’t think this was any sort of hazing ritual. She was likely just busy. But she read my first two chapters, told me the pages had genius in them, and invited me to The Academy. I wanted to see what she saw. To know for myself and not just trust someone else’s opinion. I was hungrier than a hippo for exactly what Suzanne teaches.

The goal of her work is to give writers agency in both drafting and editing, to discover craft in our writing and others’ writing, and to use the Gateless Method to open my entire being up to creativity.

She went into a spiel about brain science. And how shining a light on what works and using craft as the basis of the conversation can help achieve my goals on the page. Critique isn’t part of her vocabulary other than letting us know that it doesn’t happen in her spaces.

And so I joined, and I went through the program. I wrote, I read aloud, I got compliments, I got excited. I wrote more, I tried to compliment with craft, realized I didn’t know how to articulate craft, and so read. I read as if my life depended on it. I knew I felt craft, but I needed tools to articulate it. I took the seminars. During it all, a lot of life happened, including leaving my home due to fires and moving across the country. I got lost. The year was over and somehow, through all of that, I started to get it.

I started to recognize other Authors’ genius. The interiority inside Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear and her magnificent line-level writing, the specific characters and perfect pacing of Jenny Jackson’s The Shampoo Effect, the tension of Julie Buntin’s Famous Men all built inside a character’s psyche.

It was like the lights turned on. I was out of the matrix, and I could see the many dimensions of the written word as if the fabric of the universe came to life. And I started to layer these dimensions into my work, draft by draft. My reading continued as obsessively as my writing. It felt so good, so alive. I am savoring every moment.

May 2025, I wrote my query letter, and then I sent it and sent it and sent it, resulting in five full manuscript requests, two passes, three meetings, and an agent. My book is meant to be read, and I chose to work within the system to share my work with the world. I want traditional publishing. I want a book to stack in the library or bookstore alongside my many teachers.

I worked with my agent for six months. She stayed on the page, in craft, continuing the method that lights me up. As of July 1st, that novel is on submission. That means it’s been sent to acquisition editors at publishing imprints.

Despite my little critter-y critic stopping by each day to say hello, I kind of know that one or a few of the acquisition editors reading my book will see the craft I put into my writing and make an offer. It’s not a guess, or a wish. It’s the work. It’s craft. And it’s on the page.

In the last year, I joined the Gateless Academy a second time, on the alumni track. During that time, I drafted my second novel, which I edited and am getting a Gateless beta read before I dive in and edit some more.

And a new story is nagging at me. The scenes haunt my world while taking walks and showers. I feel the pressure building, readying itself to channel through me as a giant Care Bear stare, rainbows from my inner psyche directly to the page.

See, writing is quantum. It’s multi-dimensional. It’s a gift, and I’m so honored to unwrap it every day. I’ll never rely on a machine built with binary code to draft a single word. It cannot create without the mystery that is our brain, the neurons connecting, the brain science behind craft.

It’s cute really, those little machines pretending to be human. And it’s sad the humans giving away their agency to them, thinking it might know better. It doesn’t. Craft isn’t something a machine can learn. It’s not a single pass at text. It’s a layering, a building, that happens over time, to create a story that’s sophisticated enough to connect to the multi-dimensional human psyche.

I love AI. It’s the future; I even made LitComps.com using Claude Code so I can find more books to read. But AI is not for writing. It robs too much from us. I was tempted for a time, and I thought the AI slop was good enough. But it wasn’t. Not even for short works. It robs so much from us. It disconnected me from you, my reader.

Gateless Writing was my yellow brick road. It took me on a journey from living in black to technicolor. I hope anyone who wants to write finds their way to craft.