The Book You're Afraid to Write Is Probably the One You're Supposed to Write

A Write To Rise reflectionThere’s a particular kind of full-circle moment that happens when one of the women you’ve been guiding through her book sits you down on her own platform and starts asking you the questions.That’s what happened this week. Magali Mathieu — a brilliant business coach who’s been working with me for the past year on her book — invited me on for a live conversation on her Substack. Magali helps women build companies without burning down their nervous systems in the process, which is fitting, because that’s exactly what brought her to me in the first place. She had a book in her body. She just couldn’t see the shape of it yet.We talked about a lot — voice, publishing, the somatic side of writing, Substack as a testing ground — and I wanted to share the parts I keep coming back to. If you’ve been carrying a book around, some of this is for you.How we found each otherMagali found me the way most of my authors do: through another woman. Her friend Lauren had just birthed her book into the world, and when Magali messaged her on Instagram saying she’d always dreamed of writing one, Lauren told her I have the perfect person for you.This is how Write To Rise has grown. Not through funnels. Not through ads. Through women telling other women.Magali came in already journaling, already on Substack, already writing weekly. What she needed wasn’t permission to write — it was help finding the shape of the book inside her. She had too many stories. The arc wasn’t visible to her yet. That’s exactly the kind of work my early sessions are built for: I ask questions until the framework emerges. Then the stories start to flood in faster than she can catch them — which, if you’ve ever written through this process, you know is the exact thing that happens.“Just start” is not advice — it’s the whole secretMagali asked me what I would tell women who want to write a book. My honest answer: just start.I see so much online content about the five tricks for finding your voice. Your voice unlocks when you start using it. That’s it. That’s the secret. You don’t need the special journal. You don’t need a new app. You don’t need to wait for the certification or the perfect pen. You need to sit down before you consume anything else in the morning and put words on the page — even if it’s two sentences. Some days, two sentences become the spark for an entire offering.There’s real research behind pen to paper. It activates parts of the brain that typing doesn’t. You don’t have to write your whole book by hand — I’ll come back to this — but the morning pages, the channeled-message moments, the times something is trying to come through from underneath, those want to be written longhand.Why women’s writing is different (the hill I die on)This is the conversation I have over and over, and I’ll keep having: the writing process is not the same for women as it is for men.I can hand a man an outline, and he’ll hand the book back. There are entire programs built around Write Your Book in 90 Days, and some people can do that. But women carry an ancestral lineage of being silenced for speaking. Women writers whose books were burned. Voices buried by force, not by choice. That history lives in our bodies, and it shows up as procrastination, throat tightness, the urge to soften every sentence until it disappears.A lot of what I do isn’t strategy. It’s holding the space — being the permission slip a woman didn’t know she needed.The other pattern I see constantly is a woman starting a book as one person and finishing it as someone else. The writing itself heals her. Mid-draft she’ll say I think this book is something different now — I think I need to write a new one. And my job is to gently rein her in. Finish this one. The next one is coming. But the woman who needs this book is the version of you from three years ago — and she’s still waiting.The publishing conversation I refuse to sugarcoatMagali asked me about traditional vs. self vs. hybrid publishing, and I didn’t soften it.My first book — The Perfectly Imperfect Pumpkins, a children’s book — came out of me during the worst of my burnout. I was working 80-hour weeks as a cardiac nurse, sick enough that I could barely move between shifts, and that book poured through me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I had acceptance letters from a few traditional publishers, but the timeline was three years, and I needed it to be real sooner than that, so I went hybrid.Fifteen thousand dollars. No marketing. Something that should have felt sacred ended up feeling stripped of its meaning. The book did well anyway — because I have a strong network and because I showed up at pumpkin patches and libraries and schools and read it to kids — but the magic was in those rooms with those children, not in anything the publisher did.So here’s where I land now: self-publishing has come a long way. Dave Ramsey — Financial Peace was a self-published book that became an empire. When you self-publish, you keep 100% of the say over what your book becomes. And the Amazon bestseller badge so many people chase? What does it actually give you? You can’t reach those readers. You can’t thank them. Maybe it’s an ego boost. It’s not a connection.If you go traditional, know what you’re signing up for: a multi-year timeline and a publisher with a say in what version of your story sells. Most people don’t realize traditional publishing means you pitch a proposal — your book gets shaped by the publisher’s marketing plan before it’s even written. If you go self or hybrid, do real research. None of these is wrong. They’re just different agreements about who gets to hold the pen.Substack is your testing groundThis is the part I tell every author in week one: get on Substack and start sharing the journey.Not the polished final book. The journey. The half-formed thoughts. The excerpts. The behind-the-scenes. If you really want a book that impacts other women, you can’t write it in isolation and hope. You need data. You need feedback. You need to know — before you’ve spent two years of your life on a manuscript — which stories make people lean in.Amy Porterfield’s first book came from her highest-performing newsletter. She knew people wanted it because they’d already told her, week after week, what landed. That’s not luck. That’s listening.In Magali’s world, they’d call this an MVP — minimum viable product. Test before you invest everything. So many of the women I work with sit on an idea, polish it in private for months, finally release it, and then discover it didn’t quite land. The fix is almost embarrassingly simple: share earlier, share rougher, let your future readers tell you what they actually need.Magali is launching her first paid Substack excerpt the day after we recorded. She’s starting with the hardest story. She told me she’s already dreamt about people reading it, already wanted to unschedule it, already manufactured a whole drama in her head. She’s going to hit publish anyway. That’s how this works.Picking which bookOne of the women in the chat asked the question I get constantly: I have so many ideas — a biography of my dad, a fiction book, others. How do I know which one is the book?Morning pages. Stillness. Whichever story is closest to your heart and ties back to a message someone else — just one person — needs to hear right now.Magali added something I loved: when you keep flipping back and forth between options, that’s the mind talking. The heart tends to know. And — this is the harder truth — the story you’re a little afraid to tell is usually the one with the medicine in it.The somatic side of writingThe thing that makes my program different from most is that I don’t treat writing as a head practice. I treat it as a body practice.My walk-with-intention method is exactly what it sounds like: I outline a chapter, put the questions I want to explore in the notes section of my phone, and go for a hike. I let my body answer. Clarity, for me, comes through movement. This isn’t something I invented. Yoga classes have been doing it forever — movement first, journaling second. Eastern medicine has known this since time began. We just forgot.For Magali, it looked different. She’d come to our sessions and just talk — like therapy — and we’d transcribe everything. Then she’d read it back and notice where her voice changed, where she got emotional, where the truth was. That’s where the chapter lived.If you’re stuck in writing, try moving. A walk. A shower. A real conversation with a friend. The clarity is rarely going to come from staring harder at the screen.The body’s resistance is informationMagali told me about her Hashimoto’s — about her conviction that years of not speaking her truth is part of what made her thyroid sick. I didn’t flinch because I see this constantly. The body protects you from what it perceives as a threat. Don’t speak. Remember what happened last time. The throat locks up. The queasiness comes. Some of my clients realize, mid-program, that the thyroid issues they’re carrying are entangled with a voice they’ve never let themselves use.The intervention is not to push through harder. It’s to give yourself a contract: I will show up at this time, in this space, even if I have nothing to say today. That’s how trust gets rebuilt with your own body. Most of the problems in our lives come from the moment we stopped trusting ourselves. Writing — done as a practice rather than a task — is one way back.Story medicineThe phrase I left Magali with is the one I want to leave you with.Picture two women walking into a room. One looks perfect, presents only the polished surface, tells you her life is great. The other says I’m having a hard day, I’m cramping, I thought I was pregnant. Which one do you lean toward? Which one makes you exhale?That second woman — that’s what makes a book breathe. AI can write a beautiful book now. It really can. But it cannot make a reader feel you. The rawness, the vulnerability, the texture of a real life — that’s the part only you can write. And that’s the part that becomes medicine for someone else.Find MagalieMagali Mathieu coaches women building or scaling businesses without burnout, and she’s launching the first excerpts of her book through her paid Substack now. If you’re carrying a book in your body — or building a company you don’t want to burn down with — find her. She’s exactly the kind of voice I started Ho’ala Publishing House for.And if you’re carrying a bookWrite To Rise is the home I built for women who have a book inside them and don’t know where to start. If you’re on the fence, the only advice I have is the same one I gave Magali: just start. Move through whatever resistance comes up however you can. Your voice will unlock the moment you commit to using it. This is a public episode. 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