Jo Norland
Writing Coach

About me

A scribe of all trades, I started publishing in my teens, writing a bi-weekly Teen Talk column for the Ottawa Citizen, in high school, and Campus Beat columnist for the Providence Journal as a Brown University undergraduate. My first play, Mothers Have Nine Lives, premiered at Playwrights Horizons Theater, off- Broadway, when I was 19 and my other scripts have been produced on four continents. I am currently working on a stage adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, and a collection of 50-word stories.

Writing is a marathon

Writing is my playground, sustenance and refuge. But in the past, it was also my greatest source of frustration. For years, I balanced thrilling sprints with lapses of soul-destroying writer’s block and felt I had no control over the on-off switch of inspiration.

Everything changed when I ran my first marathon. During the warm up, I overheard another runner say, "The reason I run marathons is that it makes me feel like I can do anything."

For the next 26.1 miles I mulled: How could I apply the lessons of marathon training to create the writing life I desired?

At about mile 14, it hit me that my training included three crucial elements that I also needed for a sustainable writing life:

A clear, compelling goal.
A daily incremental habit.
A supportive community of fellow travellers, supporters and guides to inspire, advise and cheer me on.

Goal + Habit + Community. Over the next few months, I developed a structured creative ecosystem for purposeful, productive prolificness. Now I share it with others through my coaching and programs because I believe that:

when writing flows, life glows.

A writing coach is born

I stumbled on my calling to serve other writers a few years ago, on a visit to a local farm. The owner confided that she had long dreamed of writing a picture book about her animals but didn’t know where to start.

"You can do this!" I assured her. "I can help!"

We dug in, meeting every couple of weeks, shaping and honing that tickle of an idea. Nine months later, Nicki Fisher published "Take a Look in the Nook" and I was guiding a roster of coaching clients.