Creative Safety First—with Novel Atelier

What does it actually take to develop a craft?

In this conversation with Alice Sudlow and Kim Kessler of Novel Atelier, we’ll dig into the Renaissance workshop model they follow, why psychological safety is a prerequisite for growth, and how we can survive this algorithmic digital dark age together.

This is a bit longer than our usual episodes here, and it’s clearly my first run at a video format. I do hope you’ll stick with us, though, because we’re unpacking so much more than the ins and outs of a fiction space.

The story under the story is that Kim and I met when she was new to Scribe Media but a year+ into her time at Story Grid just as I was new to Story Grid and well-worn in my time at Scribe.

If you aren’t knee deep in writing industry gossip, both of those companies have now had very public meltdowns (public to this niche, anyway).

But we were never in those spaces for those spaces. Not really.

We were there for the authors. The stories. The art of story. The people who had gathered for similar reasons. The nerdy analysis. The power and potential.

We were there for each other.

And we stayed that way, zooming endlessly all throughout COVID, and eventually bringing Alice into our “Epic Work Sesh” or “Big Ol’ Zoom Session” lines for, honestly, most hours of the day.

The more we showed up for each other, the more we grew as practitioners and as people. The more we grew, the clearer our purpose became, the less any of the other stuff mattered.

Though, let’s be clear: it has been the challenge of my life to survive getting kicked out of the nest when Scribe collapsed, and it is a grief-riddled mess to watch Story Grid go through a similar shake-up. It hasn’t been easy. But it has always been clear that our work is far bigger than the containers we first found it in.

And the work itself is what this conversation is about.