Hi, writer!
I’m Rachel Jepsen, an editor and writing coach for non-fiction writers. I have a masters in creative writing and worked in magazines, at tech companies and publishing companies, in classrooms, and as a freelance editor for ten years before starting my business as a writing coach. I’ve talked and worked with writers—from ‘first book’ contenders to bestselling authors, emerging bloggers to successful founders building their brand on the page—for tens of thousands of hours. I’ve taken a lot of notes. I’ve listened to their struggles from outlining to identity, story concepts to self-conception, the ‘cold-start’ problem to ‘never finished’ agony, and guided them to identify and move toward their goals.
In my coaching work, those goals include improving at different areas of writing (of course), as well as answering some big questions—we use writing to understand the self in deeper ways and express the self authentically, to find direction, and to put down burdens. In many cases, I’ve celebrated alongside my writers as they exceeded their goals along both tracks.
The system of my work—Practice, Process, Craft—has emerged from their journeys. I consider it the three-legged stool of great writing.
Practice is how you support your writing. Your journal. The way you take notes. Exercises to stretch your ability and expand your mind. Your reading habits and diet. And how you show up in the world as a writer—honing curiosity, asking questions, practicing perspective, and more.
Process is how you do the writing. Generating, choosing, and scoping ideas, using your ideal reader as a guide, free writing, outlining, figuring out what to include and not include, everything about research and citations, turning an outline into a draft, improving drafts, and editing your own work. Process can also include how you share your work.
Craft is what you do to the writing. Defining your voice and style to help you make choices around language and punctuation, learning your writing patterns (your drafting ‘tells’), setting the tone, how to make cuts and clear sentences, line editing, and understanding how sentences and paragraphs ‘work.’
Some things fall into more than one category — your authentic voice is a craft and a practice concern. Idea generation is a process and practice concern. Form (aka ‘what shape is this thing I am writing?’) is a process and craft concern. When you have a question about something you’re working on, asking yourself which dimension or dimensions are primarily concerned with your question will help you set up the right steps to work through it on your own.
On Mondays, I’ll send out guidance (a lesson, approach, idea, or explanation) and exercises related to practice, process, and/or craft. Enough for you to think about and try out each week.
I’ll start with some big writing topics, like:
The importance of setting ‘writing goals’, and a guide to setting yours
Essential steps to finding your voice
Discovering your ideal reader
How to find the book you’re meant to write
Why I really, really, really recommend journaling
Setting up your basic writing process for more sustainable writing
The basics of line editing and how to create your own line editing steps
How to make writing less lonely
I’ll cover much more specific topics once I’ve got your bases covered, like:
How to deal with multiple competing projects
How to move from freewrite to outline / outline to draft
Why a narrative bio is crucial for your business and how to write a good one (for creators, solopreneurs, and founders)
Deciding what to write about when you’re an idea machine
Setting up a reading ritual to improve your writing
The crucial early steps of the book-writing process
Taking notes to free the creative mind
How my ‘thesis vs. goal’ framework can help you scope projects and write better endings
(And so much more!)
On Fridays, I’ll send a tool for your practice—a generative, exploratory writing prompt, so you have something to inspire a great writing session every week.
Some of the Friday prompts will be fun and easy, and others will ask you to go deeper with yourself, how you think, and what you’ve been through. For me, the way writing can be a place for personal growth and the fact that we can improve at writing are inextricable. We don’t just tackle difficult questions in our writing, we tackle them through it. Even on the level of the line, investigating the word choices in a single sentence can often reveal unexpected things about ourselves—when we have someone to show us where to look, who says also that it is worth looking.
I hope to show you that it is worth it to look—to look farther for the perspectives that will make you a better writer, and to look deeper, to discover more about who you are and how you want to be. The writing problems you have can absolutely be addressed and worked through, and your process can get easier. I never say that writing doesn’t have to be hard—but it doesn’t have to be painful or that lonely.
My ability to guide writers has been made possible by the vulnerability my writers, clients and students have been willing to share with me over the years, and the probing questions they ask. Any success my writers have had is thanks to themselves, first, their own hard work and determination to break through barriers. The system that continues to emerge—the one I’m sharing here—comes from their own risk-taking, challenges, and triumphs.
I want to thank the many people who have reached out to me asking for advice, the writers I’ve worked with over the years, The Long Conversation followers who asked me to keep going, and ‘my writers’—my current coaching clients. I’m really excited to share this guidance with the many of you out there who are struggling with writer’s block, getting a new project off the ground, attracting an audience, or letting your voice be heard.
I hope you’ll involve yourself, too. I have no shortage of things I want to share with you here, but I would love to respond to your needs as you go through your own writing journey—please email me your questions or ideas for future posts at rachel@racheljepsen.com! (Subject: PPC)
Thanks for joining and happy writing 🙂
Rach
thanks rachel, im excited to follow your substack
Found you through a random tweet and I’m really excited to see where this goes!