Story Mentor
Story is never just plot.
Youur goal is to write people, not pawns: characters with wounds, longings, and illusions that unravel over time, so the plot, relationships, and even the villains respond organically.
You’ve probably heard “plot follows character” and still been left asking: how?
How do you keep personality, behavior, and emotion consistent across an entire manuscript, so the story starts to write itself?
That’s what we answer together.
The books we can't put down have one thing in common.
When I ventured into contemporary fantasy and romantasy during the pandemic, along with everyone else, I found that the stories that gripped me, and so many other readers, all belonged to authors who could craft consistent characters, characters we love, hate, and mourn alongside. Those characters reflect real human psychological patterns, and those patterns map strikingly well onto the Enneagram.
I've spent the last decade as a certified Enneagram coach, working with real people and their real patterns. It has made it instinctive for me to recognize a character's type and to see where a story could become even more powerful by honoring the nuances within the Enneagram's triads.
Picture a heroine who meets the world with a blade for a tongue. She refuses pity, refuses help, and would rather be hated than be seen as weak. She has spent her life standing between the people she loves and the things that could hurt them, even when they never noticed and never thanked her.
Then trauma or grief breaks her. And instead of raging, she disappears. She locks herself away in a dim, crumbling apartment, numbs herself night after night, and shuts out everyone who tries to reach her. Some might call that a contradiction, might not understand why the fiercest woman in the book is suddenly hiding.
Instead of a contradiction, this shows the pattern of a Type Eight (The Challenger) moving along her stress line toward a Type Five (The Investigator): withdrawing, detaching, guarding what little energy she has left. And when she begins to heal, she moves towards a Type Two (The Helper). She fights for the women training beside her, shelters the ones who have been hurt, and discovers that her strength was always meant to protect.
When an author writes those patterns with intention, a character who could have been merely unlikable becomes one of the most controversially beloved in the series. Hello, Nesta. (A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J Maas)
Who I am
I'm a reader first. I read my first novel at seven, the summer the Bookmobile still rolled up to our hundred-year-old farmhouse, and I haven't stopped in forty-three years. I've spent more than twenty of those years in the same book club analyzing classic literature, and the past few beta reading for writers who wanted their characters to come alive on the page. I'm not an editor, and I won't pretend to be one. What I offer is something different. [Read the full story →]
Your characters aren't the only ones with a story.
Writing a novel has a way of surfacing every story you've ever believed about yourself. Who am I to call myself a writer? Real authors don't struggle like this. I'm not allowed to write that. Those stories shape what you're willing to put on the page, whether you notice them or not.
The same Enneagram lens that reveals your characters reveals you too: your fears, your defenses, and the stories you have told yourself so often they feel like truth. So as I mentor you through your manuscript, you’ll also recognize what might be holding you back from writing in the way you desire.
Two Ways To Work With Me
Each session begins with teaching. We'll dig into one piece of the Enneagram as it applies to fiction: a single type, a triad, stress and growth lines, or how types collide in relationships and romance. You'll leave with a lens you can immediately turn on your own manuscript.
Then we move into live coaching. Everyone in the Zoom has the chance to be coached, whether that means bringing a character forward or bringing forward the story you're telling yourself about your writing. Often the two are more connected than you'd expect. Even when you aren't in the hot seat, you'll learn as much from watching another writer find clarity as you will from your own turn.
This is the most affordable way to work with me. The Story Sanctuary offers tiered, pay-what-supports-you pricing for monthly and annual membership, designed to ensure equal access and grace at every stage of financial ability.
Group Coaching: The Story Sanctuary
One-On-One Mentoring
This is where we go deep. Together we'll look closely at your cast, your manuscript, and the specific places where your characters aren't yet ringing true. I'll help you type your main characters, map their arcs through stress and growth, and make sure every choice they make is one only they would make. Along the way, we'll also tend to the stories you carry about yourself as a writer, the ones that make you hesitate, hold back, or want to quit.
"What you'll walk away with":
A clear understanding of who your characters are at their core: what they want, what they fear, and how they behave under pressure.
Character Arcs: Tools to write growth, stress, and change with intention.
Romance and rivalry readers believe, rooted in how your characters' types attract, provoke, and challenge one another.
Confidence that your characters' surprising choices are true to them, and a way to know when they aren't.
A kinder, clearer relationship with yourself as a writer, and freedom from the stories that keep you small.
