When you practice your craft from a heart-centered place, it makes a whole world of difference in the collaboration. I was graced today with the opportunity to have a book client run late. Of course, normally we don’t want clients to run late, but in this circumstance, I was open enough to see this as an opportunity to get real quiet about the direction of the work we were going to do. Prior to her text of tardy, I was on my own phone arranging my Google calendar for the 16th time that morning while simultaneously subscribing to a Pat…
Author: Kim O'Hara
Kim O'Hara
Prior to launching her business A Story Inside as a book and story coach, Kim spent her adult life as a producer and screenwriter of independent film, developing countless projects from script to screen. On the never-ending quest to know more about writers and writing, she has taken short fiction, satire and screenwriting classes at UCLA, Stanford Writers’ Lab and San Jose State. To hone her skills in comedy and collaboration, she survived an Improv Intensive at IO West. She was also the Editor of a prominent food journal, charged with the task of making subjects like antibiotics in meat a riveting read. She is passionate about intuitively and mindfully connecting women entrepreneurs to their hidden greatness and help them achieve their unrealized dream to write a book. Her children are the root of her existence, her true teachers.
Here is the danger of polling people and the difference between polling and constructive advice. If you are in the middle of writing a book or a screenplay, you don’t need advice. You are on the hot seat. In the fire. You don’t need someone to tell you that you should be reading other books or scripts to “see how they did it” while you are in the middle of gutting your soul to write. It is important in the creative process to not make yourself susceptible to doubt because it blocks you from trusting your heart. It’s important to…
Pain points for my author clients are time, accountability, consistency and pure exhaustion. They occasionally have a moment where they doubt the writing is any good, but for the most part, they are confident in their writing. They don’t have any time to not be. I have been told I am like a “nice drill sergeant” in the 90 days they write their first draft with me. I have been equated to the Jillian Michaels of book coaching (trainer on The Biggest Loser). One client told me, “Writing the first draft is like taking a big hard poop.” Another client…
I’ve started dating my authentic voice and I am pretty darn stoked about it. Let me tell you about how we met. It came like a boom of thunder on a clear sky night. I was in one of my favorite “safe” spaces – an evening drop-in writing workshop – and had just admitted to the group that since I had stopped screenwriting, I had been floundering around voiceless in what my style was. Sure, I had been vomiting fear into my journal every morning but it’s gooky stream of conscious stuff that is supposed to free up the writer…
Twenty years ago I would have given my left breast to sit in a room with an Oscar winning screenwriter. I desperately wanted someone who had figured out the system, with incredible talent, to tell me how I could be as good and connected as them, and win the golden statue. I didn’t think about them as people, or even wonder if what makes them tick wasn’t just slogging away every day in an office for eight hours. I didn’t think that they had a deeper understanding of life, which was fundamentally what made them successful. How could I? I…
Oh yes siree, it sure is. Marketing fear can stop you in your tracks from being an effective business owner, selling your artistic talents, and believing that what you have to offer today is beautiful, organic and real. Yes, we need to market ourselves, but time and time again, when I get caught up in the paranoid frenzy that I do not have the ultimate traffic-driving SEO system in place for my web site, or the perfect email chain funnel for my services, I have to take a step back and breathe. Then I find clients the old fashioned way….…
A client signed up with me to finally fulfill her dream of writing. At our first session she prefaced every writing exercise with a criticism or disclaimer about her work. I told her I was a guide, not a judge, and she was courageous to write at all. Period. At the end of the session, despite the freedom and joy she clearly experienced with her creative expression, she balked at meeting weekly. “How about every two weeks,” she said. “I am very busy with work, and my kid, and this is just a hobby.” I knew from the way she…
I always love and am attracted to people who have been in one particular career for a long time, maybe half their adult lives, and then they just change. One day, they wake up, and say “I’m not happy” and they move on. Next thing you know, they’ve founded a cookie crisp empire, or are testing guava plants all over the world for the perfect hormonal juice. They have a work-life balance they have always wanted, and are seeing life through a new lens. They courageously move into another career area that inspires them and thrive in that second career…