104. Stuck on Your Novel or Memoir? It's Patience or Focus (Not Discipline)

If you're a novel or memoir writer who isn't finishing your manuscript, this episode is for you.

Most stuck writers assume they need more discipline — more willpower, more consistency. But after sitting with dozens of manuscripts as a developmental editor, I've found that's almost never the real issue. What's actually getting in the way is one of two very specific problems: a patience problem or a focus problem. They look similar. They feel similar. But they have completely different causes — and completely different solutions.

In this episode, I walk you through both, including how to tell which one is running the show for you right now, and what to do once you know.

If you've been spinning your wheels on your novel or memoir, feeling stuck, frustrated, or like you're somehow falling behind other writers — this episode will help you finally name what's happening and move forward.

Topics covered:

• Why stuck writers misdiagnose their own problem
• What a patience problem really looks like in your draft
• What a focus problem is doing to your creative energy
• The key questions to help you figure out which one you have

The Whole Writer podcast explores what it means to write from a place of wholeness — nurturing both your craft and yourself.

🎙️Find more on Nicole Meier here.

Transcript

THE WHOLE WRITER Ep 104 - Patience vs Focus

[00:00:00] Nicole Meier: You are navigating one of the most quietly complex things a person can attempt, building an entire world from nothing sustaining that world across months or years, and doing it while life is happening all around you. Whether you need to slow down and trust the process, or whether you need to close some tabs and come home to the one story that's been asking for you the most, both of those things take courage.

[00:00:27] Nicole Meier: Both of them ask you to give up a certain kind of control. The control of moving fast or the control of keeping all your options open. But books are not written in the presence of control. They're written in the presence of commitment. Commitment to the story, to the time it needs to, the depth it deserves.

[00:00:54] Nicole Meier: Welcome to the whole writer. A place where we talk about what it means to show up as someone who's grounded in their voice, in their community, and in their creative path. Even when the world tells them to hustle, compare, or conform. I'm Nicole Meyer, a multi published author and book coach who believes that nurturing the person behind the page is just as important as refining the words on it.

[00:01:19] Nicole Meier: In each episode, we'll explore the terrain of writing life with honesty, warmth, and practical wisdom, creating space for you to write from a place of wholeness rather than depletion. Whether you're drafting your first manuscript or publishing your fifth book, you'll find conversation and companionship for the journey here.

[00:01:41] Nicole Meier: So settle in, bring your questions and your curiosity, and let's discover together what it means to write and live with authenticity and purpose.

[00:01:54] Nicole Meier: Hey, listeners, before we begin, I wanna share an opportunity. We're still in early days of 2026, but I've already sat with dozens of manuscripts this year as a developmental editor, and I can tell you I've started noticing something. I was giving the exact same feedback over and over again, regardless of genre or experience level, it's not a talent issue.

[00:02:16] Nicole Meier: It's that so many writers arrive at the revision phase without a clear grasp of structure, without a way to diagnose what their draft actually needs. Without a plan for moving forward, so instead of turning this into a standalone workshop, you'd have to wait for, I'm happy to say that I'm bringing this content to my substack membership as a four-part series called Before You Revise.

[00:02:43] Nicole Meier: It's workshop level craft and revision guidance designed to help you strengthen your draft before you spiral, I'm covering story and scene structure, how to diagnose your draft. Which essential layers you should be adding and how to think about your next steps. So if this sounds good to you, if you'd like to participate, head over to Nicole Meyer writes.substack.com.

[00:03:09] Nicole Meier: That's Nicole Meyer writes.substack.com. The four part series is up now and it's ready for my paid subscribers. So if you'd like to join, I'd love to see you there. Okay, now on to today's topic. I want you to think about the last time you sat down to write and felt that pull, not towards the page in front of you, but away from it.

[00:03:33] Nicole Meier: Maybe it was the pull toward the finish line, toward the query letter. You've been half redrafting in your head toward the acknowledgements page. You've imagined writing toward the version of yourself who's already a published author holding the finished book, or maybe it was a different kind of pull altogether.

[00:03:50] Nicole Meier: The pull towards that other story idea, the one that's been whispering to you from the corner, the shiny new story or the revision. You keep thinking you should probably start, or the outline you told yourself, you just sketch out quickly, then found yourself three hours deep in two very different feelings, two very different writers, but here's what they have in common.

[00:04:13] Nicole Meier: Neither of them is finishing the book. They need to write right now. Oof. That's hard, right? So I wanna talk about something that I think gets misdiagnosed constantly in the writing community. And the misdiagnosis is costing writers months, sometimes years when novel or memoir writers come to me, stuck.

[00:04:34] Nicole Meier: Maybe they're not finishing, or they're spinning their wheels, frustrated with their own output. The instinct there's, and often the internets is to reach for some explanation. I just need more discipline or I just need to sit down and do the work. And sometimes, yes, that's true, but a lot of the time what's actually happening is one of two very specific and very different things, and they require completely different solutions.

[00:05:03] Nicole Meier: The first is a patient's problem, the second is a focus problem, and I wanna be really clear about this because I think writers conflate them. When you apply the wrong solution to the wrong problem, you don't get unstuck. You just feel worse about yourself. So let's talk about the patient's problem first.

[00:05:22] Nicole Meier: Starting with patients, because this is deeply tied to something external, the publishing world, the culture around it, and the story we've absorbed about what it means to be a real writer, a patient's problem looks like this. You're writing, but you're rushing. You're moving forward on the page technically, but you're skimming, glossing, summarizing where you should be inhabiting.

[00:05:46] Nicole Meier: You write a scene and it feels thin, but you tell yourself you'll fix it in revision and move on. You skip over the emotional interior of your character because getting into that feels slow. It feels indulgent, and there's this voice in the background that keeps saying, just get to the end. Just get to the end.

[00:06:03] Nicole Meier: Underneath that voice, if you listen closely, is urgency. The urgency of wanting to be published, the urgency of watching other writers announce their deals and their agents and their book birthdays on social media. The urgency of feeling like you started this writing journey a long time ago, and you should be further along by now.

[00:06:25] Nicole Meier: Here's what I wanna say about that urgency. It's understandable completely. Good grief. Have I been there myself? The desire to be published isn't vanity. It's the desire to be read, to connect, to have your work matter to someone outside of your own head. That's a beautiful thing to want, and I'm not here to shame anyone for wanting it, but when urgency drives the draft, that draft really suffers.

[00:06:51] Nicole Meier: And here's the painful irony. Rushing through a book to get to publication actually delays publication because what you end up with is a manuscript that's often both structurally unsound. This comes from learning StoryCraft and sometimes emotionally hollow. This comes from getting quiet enough to understand your story message and no amount of line editing will be a quick fix for this.

[00:07:16] Nicole Meier: You can't line edit your way to resonance. A patient's problem is really a trust problem, a lack of trust in the process in yourself, and the story's ability to be worth the time it's asking you to give it. When writers rush, they're often trying to outrun their own doubt. Ooh, I'm gonna say that again. It hits hard when writers rush.

[00:07:37] Nicole Meier: They're often trying to outrun their own doubt. If they finish fast enough, maybe they won't have time to realize the book isn't working, but the book always knows and eventually so do you. The work when you have a patient's problem is to slow down deliberately, uncomfortably slow. Go back to the scenes that feel thin.

[00:07:58] Nicole Meier: Not to rewrite them endlessly, but to inhabit them. Ask yourself, what is my character actually feeling here? Not what am I telling the reader they're feeling? Sit in the uncomfortable question of what this scene is really doing. Let the story take up the space it actually needs. This is not wasted time.

[00:08:18] Nicole Meier: This is the time the story requires, and the writers who honor that time are the ones who end up with something that lasts. Okay, let's move on to the focus problem. Let's talk about focus, because this one looks completely different on the surface, but it's equally powerful in its ability to keep a book from getting finished.

[00:08:38] Nicole Meier: A focus problem looks like this. You have too many creative projects alive at once, and I don't just mean you're thinking about other ideas. I mean you're actively working on them. You're drafting one book and revising another and outlining a third, and every time you sit down to write, you have to figure out which one you're even showing up for today.

[00:08:57] Nicole Meier: Or maybe it's a little subtler than that. Maybe you're technically only working on one manuscript, but you keep pausing to jot down notes for the next one. You keep pulling up that other document just to look or just add one thought. And slowly and visibly your energy and attention have divided themselves across multiple stories.

[00:09:17] Nicole Meier: None of them is getting the full version of you. Here's what I understand about writers with a focus problem. You are almost certainly a deeply creative person with a rich, generative imagination. That's amazing. Ideas come fast, and they come often in, they feel urgent in their own way, not in the publication urgency we talked about before, but the creative urgency of not wanting to lose something alive and new before you've had the chance to catch it.

[00:09:46] Nicole Meier: And I do wanna honor that. I do. But I also wanna be honest with you, every book you're writing right now is a book that isn't getting the depth of attention it deserves. Story isn't just a sequence of events you arrange. It's an immersive act of sustained imagination. You have to live in a story to write it well.

[00:10:05] Nicole Meier: You have to carry your characters with you. You have to think about them in the shower and wake up knowing something about them you didn't know the night before. That kind of intimacy cannot be divided evenly across three projects. It just can't. When your focus is split, your drafts stay thin, not because you're not talented, but because you haven't given any single story the chance to fully take root in you.

[00:10:30] Nicole Meier: You're planting seeds in multiple gardens and watering all of them, just enough to keep them alive when what a story actually needs is for you to dig in, tend to it, and let it grow. The uncomfortable question for writers with a focus problem is this, which story is asking the most of you right now? Not which one feels safest, not which one you've already put the most time into, not which one sounds the best in a pitch?

[00:10:56] Nicole Meier: Which one is genuinely pulling at you? Which one are you a little bit afraid of? Because that fear is usually a sign that there's something true in it, something that requires more of you than a clever premise, and that's exactly why you keep looking away. The work when you have a focus problem is to choose consciously, deliberately, maybe even reluctantly.

[00:11:20] Nicole Meier: Choose name the one story you're committing to right now. Not forever, not exclusively for the rest of your writing life, just for this season. And then close the other documents. Not delete them, just close them. Give this one story, the full version of your creative self and see what it becomes when you actually show up for it without reservation.

[00:11:42] Nicole Meier: Okay, let's move on. I now wanna talk about which one you have. So patience or focus. I wanna help you figure out which one of these is actually at work for you, because I know some of you are sitting here thinking, honestly, it might be both, and for some of you it is, but usually one is louder than the other.

[00:12:02] Nicole Meier: Okay, so ask yourself this. When you think about your writing right now, where does anxiety live? If the anxiety is about time, about how long it's taking about other writers moving faster, about whether you'll ever finish. That's pointing towards a patient's problem. If, however, the anxiety is about attention, about feeling pulled in multiple directions about the guilt of all the other projects, waiting about not being able to settle, that's pointing towards focus.

[00:12:32] Nicole Meier: Okay. Here's another question. When you imagine finishing your current manuscript, what's the first feeling that comes up? If it's relief that the struggle will be over, that's often patience. You're exhausted by the pace you've been setting for yourself, and the finish line is the only thing keeping you going.

[00:12:50] Nicole Meier: If it's something closer to grief or resistance, like finishing this one means you have to let the others go or like you're not quite sure you want to arrive. That's often focused. Part of you is protecting the other stories by not fully completing this one. Neither answer is wrong. They're just information and information is what allows you to actually move forward in a way that's sustainable and honest.

[00:13:17] Nicole Meier: I wanna close with this because I think it applies to both kinds of writers today. You're not failing, you're not broken. You are navigating one of the most quietly complex things a person can attempt, building an entire world from nothing sustaining that world across months or years. And doing it while life is happening all around you.

[00:13:39] Nicole Meier: Whether you need to slow down and trust the process, or whether you need to close some tabs and come home to the one story that's been asking for you the most. Both of those things take courage. Both of them ask you to give up a certain kind of control. The control of moving fast, or the control of keeping all your options open.

[00:14:00] Nicole Meier: Books are not written in the presence of control. They're written in the presence of commitment, commitment to the story, to the time it needs to, the depth it deserves. So go figure out which one you're working with, and then do the one thing that's actually being asked of you. Alright, thank you so much for spending time with me today.

[00:14:21] Nicole Meier: If this episode landed for you, if it helped you name something you've been carrying around without quite knowing what to call it. I would love if you could share it with a writer friend who might need to hear it. Please share light comment, leave a review. It genuinely helps other writers find this podcast.

[00:14:38] Nicole Meier: Take good care of yourself writers and I'll see you next time on the whole writer.

[00:14:46] Nicole Meier: If you want to check out my coaching programs for fiction writers. Visit Nicole meyer.com. That's M-E-I-E-R. And if you like this episode, I'd love you to take a minute to leave a rating and review for this podcast. This will help more writers like you to discover the show and to get going on their writing journey.

[00:15:07] Nicole Meier: Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, happy riding everyone.