Before you spend another dollar on writing or marketing skills…
Before you invest another hour into the hot new social media platform…
Get clarity on how you want your writing career to serve your life.
You didn’t become a writer to feel miserable, stressed, and frantic. None of us did.
So let’s build something nourishing that will last for the long-term. Let’s reclaim our author careers together.
We are not here to destroy ourselves in service to our writing. Our writing is meant to serve our humanity.
You are not the number of books you’ve published or your sales numbers.
You are not the average star rating of your catalogue or the awards you’ve received.
You are not even a writer.
So who are you?
You’re something much more complex and fascinating.
You are a human being who has 100 years on this planet, max.
You are also someone who is lucky enough to have found a passion in writing.
That’s where we start from and where we stay focused: on you, the complex human being, who is passionate about writing and wants to stay that way.
The Liberated Writer course is designed to help you reclaim your passion, joy, and life so you can continue a sustainable love affair with storytelling.
The approach
This course is created and facilitated by me, Claire Taylor. I’m a certified Enneagram coach and have been helping authors envision and build creatively and financially sustainable careers since 2018. This course will rely heavily on the Enneagram framework to facilitate deep self-knowledge and reconnection to our values, passion, fears, and desires. Only then will we know how to filter all the things we could be doing in this career to find what will move us forward in a fulfilling direction.
Enneagram teaches us that a myopic or imbalanced life deprives us of much, much more than it may claim to offer. In many ways, it’s the antithesis of hustle culture. That’s why I love it. Hustle culture is alluring, sure. It promises riches, status, and cheap identities to adopt. But the idea that we were born to “rise and grind” is pretty icky when you stop to think about it, right?
Publishing offers so many pointless “hustle” games for us to play. Some days, we feel like we’re winning, some days we feel like we’re losing. And because those feelings are based on external results, we give up control over how we feel while doing this thing we love.
We try to control the things outside of our control (results) and forget to tend to the things in our control (what we think, feel, and do).
This leads to unflattering behavior, burnout, regret, physical and mental health crises, and so much more.
Our approach will flip that dynamic, reminding you what you can control and how you can make the changes necessary for fulfillment. And we do all that through Enneagram learning.
What is the Enneagram?
If you’ve found this page, there’s a good chance you already know a little bit about the Enneagram, but here’s how it’s defined by David Daniels, M.D. and Virginia Price, Ph.D. in their book The Essential Enneagram:
The Enneagram is a powerful and dynamic personality system that describes nine distinct and fundamentally different patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. […] These patterns determine what individuals of each personality type pay attention to and how they direct their energy and behavior.
The Enneagram is not some woo-woo test a marketer made up to sell their latest product or service. Instead, it’s been developed over centuries (some claim millennia), and more recently has been refined by psychologists, social workers, and medical practitioners across cultures around the world.
By learning your Enneagram type, you begin to notice patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that have run your life without you realizing they were at work. By noticing these patterns, we recognize that we have been viewing life through a specific “lens” that has only let particular information through, limiting our understanding of ourselves and others, and keeping us trapped in the same cycles.
However, if you want different results, you must try different patterns. And if you want to live a rich, wholehearted life, you must broaden your lens.
The Enneagram framework is our map for doing that.
Why this course exists:
The purpose of this course is to re-evaluate and refocus your writing career so that it supports what you truly want out of life. Then you can achieve that every single day.
No waiting for a finish line that never comes because you keep pushing back. The satisfaction of reconnecting to your passion is motivation enough, trust me.
Over my years in this industry, I’ve watched as so many bestselling authors that others praised and admired rose to the top of the game only to disappear seemingly overnight.
Burnout will do that.
These illustrious authors played a game they thought they could win, thought they were winning, and they forgot to check in with the person playing it to see if they could continue on.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this rise and fall could happen to any of us.
Some of you signing up for this course may have already experienced it. And to you, I say: Don’t worry. It’s not a personal failing. And there are steps we’ll take over these five weeks to make sure you don’t have to go through that rollercoaster of emotions again.
The trick to longevity in this industry is simple: stay in it.
And the only way to do that is to stay connected to your writing and yourself so that you learn the signs of burnout and cultivate the knowledge, self-love, and boundaries to make the changes necessary before that happens.
A happy writing business is a sustainable one. All the rest is details.
The Liberated Writer 5-Week Course
Dates: April 29-May 30, 2024
Learning processes:
Written lessons
Deep-dive videos
Writing reflections
2x/wk live group calls with Claire - Mondays & Thursdays @ 3pm Central
Access to recordings of group calls
Live Group Coaching
This is open to all students each week and takes place on Mondays at 3pm Central. We’ll spend 90 minutes together via Zoom to reflect on a weekly prompt and talk out some of the writing-related struggles you’re having. Those who offer up their questions and those who listen to the discussion around them will gain insight to move their careers forward.
Note: If the call times don’t work for you, there will be replays available!
Betweens
This is the time when participants will be asked to read the material and watch the accompanying video on that week’s topics. While I know we all live busy lives, folks will be best served doing this between Monday and Thursday of that week to keep pace with the class and use the live calls to the maximum extent. Expect the reading portion to take about 30-60 minutes to complete. Videos range from 5-20 minutes each.
Reflection questions will typically take 15-60 minutes to complete. Reflections are designed to deepen understanding of the concepts and tie them into your writing career. They’ll also help you formulate questions you may still have to ask in the live Q&As.
Live Q&As
After you’ve gone through the course material and started relating it back to your own career through the reflections, you might have additional questions. These will take place on Thursdays at 3pm Central. We’ll spend 90 minutes together via Zoom going over those in these Thursday Q&A sessions. Participants can “raise a hand” through Zoom and be added to the line. We’ll go in order of who raised their hand first and get through as many as we can in the allotted time. Additionally, I’ll answer any questions submitted by students who are unable to attend live.
Ready to build an aligned author career that will last for the long term?
About me
Some know me as the owner of FFS Media and a fiction strategist. I was also the host of the Sell More Books Show, a popular weekly publishing podcast, for nearly three years. Or you might’ve seen me on stage somewhere, talking about the Enneagram for authors.
First and foremost, though, I'm a fiction author with 40+ books across multiple pen names.
My passion lies in telling a story that sticks with readers long after they finish the last page. And that amazing feeling compels me to help authors hold onto that passion and unlock a love for their gifts.
Once I started incorporating the Enneagram framework into my writing and author strategy, it all clicked for me.
This! This simple-yet-complex personality typing system was what I'd been looking for!
Now I help other authors learn about themselves through their Enneagram lens to better understand their deepest motivation and avoid burnout by building a sustainable career path to inspire joy, adventure, passion, and healthy curiosity for years to come.
I’m a Certified Advanced Instructor of the Enneagram Spectrum Method and an Integrated Enneagram Accredited Practitioner, both of which are accredited by the International Enneagram Association (IEA). I host virtual workshops and masterclasses, teach courses (like this one!), and present at live events on how authors can use the Enneagram to improve their career and lives.
When I’m not writing my own fiction, this is what I love to do.
(It’s not all I do, though. I also spend my days playing soccer, making pottery, hiking, reading, and gardening. Having a writing purpose is good; having a writing purpose and a life outside of it is better, I’ve found.)
There are plenty of forces in this world trying to crush our creative dreams, and it takes a lot of support, wisdom, and rebellious joy to pursue what we love in this one life.
I’ve designed this course so the insight you gain from it will guide you toward purposeful and passionate engagement with your career for years to come.
The only thing that can stop you from writing is you. You’re also the only thing that can keep you writing throughout the coming days, weeks, and years. This course shows you that path forward.
