Meet Brooke Adams Law

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brooke Adams Law. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brooke below.

Brooke, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

I recently heard Elizabeth Gilbert quote the Bhagavad Gita: “You are entitled to your labor, but not to the fruits of your labor.”

That sums up my relationship to writing.

When I graduated from college, I moved home to live with my parents and, like all good liberal arts majors, got a job at Starbucks. I was pretty embarrassed about this at the time – that I didn’t have a larger PLAN – but the job gave me something really important: time, and mental space, which I used to start a novel.

Not that I called it a novel at the time. I was so terrified of it that I would trick myself into writing by thinking, “This might someday, potentially, maybe in a long time, be a novel.”

I wrote a draft of it over about two years. It wasn’t very good – I knew I could do better. I came across an ad for an MFA program that was situated in Mystic, Connecticut – a town that I’d lived in for a semester during college, and which I loved. I applied and got in and about three weeks later was there for my first residency.

All in all, it took me seven years to write my first novel, Catchlight, including the two years I did at my MFA.

Then it took me another SIX years to get it published. I just kept thinking, “I love this book, and I believe in it, I’m going to keep taking chances on it.” Finally, it was chosen as the winner of the Fairfield Book Prize in 2019 by guest judge Phil Klay, a National Book Award winner. Catchlight was also named a Best Indie Book of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews.

But here’s the thing: I had no indication during those first 13 years that the book would come to anything. I was simply relentless in the writing of it, and in the publishing of it. That relentlessness was maybe part personality trait but also part sheer love of what I was pushing myself to create.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I founded Writing Brave, which is a book coaching and hybrid publishing company but also a MOVEMENT, in 2019. I especially love working with intuitive writers. There are a lot of us out there – basically, we are the opposite of plotters (folks who can plan out their books ahead of time). I teach writing craft, but also tools to help writers listen to their intuition and channel the books that want to be written. I believe deeply that books exist somewhere in their entirety, and they choose us to channel them, and usually they are far beyond what we are capable of writing when we first set out to answer the call of writing them.

I’m most well-known for teaching the Writing Brave Mastermind, a six-month, potent small group coaching experience designed to build folks’ writing skills & confidence so they can write what wants to be written… with power & ease. The mastermind starts in early January 2025: https://www.wearewritingbrave.com/mastermind.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I think the three qualities / skills that have served me best are relentlessness, commitment to growth, and my QuickStart learning style (on the Kolbe scale).

Advice for folks who are early on their journey:
Don’t compare your beginning to other people’s middle.
Cultivate your mindset and tools to work with your brain. The biggest obstacles I face, in writing and in entrepreneurship, are absolutely mental blocks – mostly my brain telling me I’m washed up, will never make another sale, am a total fraud, blah blah blah. My brain tells me those things often; I’ve just learned not to listen to it.
I’m a QuickStart on the Kolbe scale and this mainly means I prefer to jump right into a project and figure it out as I go. Sometimes it’s a disaster, and sometimes it turns out brilliant, but I ALWAYS learn from it.

Looking back over the past 12 months or so, what do you think has been your biggest area of improvement or growth?

My mom died quite suddenly last December, three days after Christmas. This year has been, obviously, quite difficult emotionally. I’ve had to learn to slow WAY down. Our culture does not make room for grief. But my body and my emotions insisted I make room. It has been intense practice at swimming against the tide, at choosing and discerning and choosing again what I need in any given moment – and dealing with the mental flood of chatter that comes when I need to choose rest, or self care, instead of work – again.
This year has pushed me to hire more help than I thought I needed. Professionally, it’s been interesting because I’ve worked less than I ever have. I set a goal when the year started that if I could just match what I did last year, revenue-wise, I would be thrilled. At the time of this interview (12/6/24), I’m $11,000 above last year’s revenue. Plus, I got a new idea for a book in February and finished a first draft of it in November. (Typically a first draft of a book takes me a couple YEARS.) And yet, I’ve spent many hours tending to my body and my spirit. I don’t know how this works, at all.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.wearewritingbrave.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wearewritingbrave
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@wearewritingbrave

Image Credits

Daniel Silbert