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Working with Marilyn 1:1 has been a life-changing experience for my writing. Before working with Marilyn, I’d spent years floundering on a draft of a memoir. While I’d made some progress, I needed support with the overall structure of the book and the motivation to keep going. With Marilyn’s guidance, I was able to solidify a working draft of the structure, which allowed me to move forward with the story. After previously working on a draft for more than six years, with Marilyn’s guidance, I completed a full manuscript in six months.

Marilyn is truly gifted when it comes to seeing the truth of the story and helping to bring that truth to the page. Throughout the process, Marilyn’s encouragement and insightful feedback have been invaluable. She’s helped take this story to deeper levels by identifying the heart of each section and chapter. The final manuscript will be much fuller and far beyond what it would have been without her guidance.

As I head into the revision process, I look forward to applying Marilyn’s thoughtful comments and suggestions as I continue working with her. She is an absolute joy to work with, and I’m immensely grateful to have her guidance on this writing journey.

Before I started working 1:1 with Marilyn on my memoir, I had been writing almost every day and met weekly with a wonderful writing group (all fiction writers). But still I was going in circles. I’m not an MFA graduate. I’m a 60-year-old nurse, and I didn’t know the difference between scene and narration, the arc of my narrator, where my story began, or where it would end. Unclear about my memoir’s larger point, I wandered the pages with multiple metaphors, unrelated backstories, and a lot of frustration. But I didn’t understand why. Then I met Marilyn. Fierce in her devotion to my work, Marilyn asks incredible questions to get to the heart of every scene, and she helps me bring my narrator’s emotional truth to the page. Within the safe container of her coaching style, my writing voice emerges more courageously. Incredibly organized, she remembers small details of scenes and recalls them for me as I move forward. When I receive Marilyn’s comments on my writing packets every other week, I have a “date night” with myself. I pour a glass of wine and then I pour over her insights, thoughtful questions, suggestions for revision. In between our coaching calls, I share my ahas, craft questions, successes, and frustrations in my 1:1 classroom. She responds with love, compassion, and support. In less than a year, I finished the first draft of my memoir. I know how my story begins and where it ends. I understand my protagonist’s inner desires, her obstacles, fears, and her arc of transformation. I will continue to work with Marilyn on my first full-length memoir revision. Personally, I have excavated aspects of myself I had long hidden away. I did not know when I began my memoir that I was writing a story of reclaiming my Soul. Now that I do, I am a better person, a more aware spouse, a better writer.

After I finished the first, messy draft of my memoir, I spent more than a year letting it gather virtual dust on my hard drive. I knew that the manuscript had a lot of weaknesses, but I was overwhelmed by the scope of the work that needed to be done and I wasn’t sure how to move forward with addressing the manuscript’s biggest problems. Working with Marilyn through the manuscript evaluation process has been a revelation. With clarity and kindness she quickly identified the core threads of my narrative arc and helped me to see more clearly the work that needed to be done in revision to strengthen the memoir. I was left with fresh insights including new ideas for the opening and closing scenes of my memoir and my first real understanding of how to utilize the (many) scenes of backstory that I had drafted and then lumped all together at the front of my memoir. In addition to these insights, she left me with a clear list of next steps which have allowed me to tackle the next phase of my revision with confidence. In the months since, I have come back to her manuscript evaluation letter again and again, reading and re-reading her words to help keep me oriented to the truth of my memoir whenever I feel myself starting to wander off course.