Meet the Author: Brooke Adams Law

As a book coach and writer, I love it when I get to interview other book coaches who write—my conversation with Brooke Adams Law was one of those, and it was a delight from start to finish. Brooke and I have very similar ideas about coaching (see her advice to writers toward the end of our conversation!), and it was wonderful to learn about her lengthy journey to publishing her first book.

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Brooke Adams Law is an award-winning author and founder of the Writing Brave movement. Brooke helps creative, intuitive people claim their author identity so that they can start, finish and publish brave, dazzling books.

Brooke’s debut novel Catchlight won the Fairfield Book Prize, was named a Best Indie Book of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews, and was featured on Good Morning America’s blog (affiliate link*).

Brooke spends her professional time coaching her book clients, writing her own novel, and running the publishing arm of her business, Writing Brave Press. In her personal time, you can find her reading in the backyard, breaking up disputes between her children, and drinking decaf cafe au lait with oat milk.

You can visit Brooke’s website to take her quiz, Discover YOUR Writing Routine Personality. You can also follow Brooke on Instagram.

Tell me about your journey to writing Catchlight. What is that about? Who should read it?

Oh my gosh, it's a long journey. Catchlight is about a family of four grown siblings. They can't stand each other, and their mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and they're like, what now?

It's a “What now,” both in terms of they have to negotiate how they're going to take care of her and who's going to make decisions about her health and things like that—but there's also this what now of how they're going to navigate being in relationship with each other, right?

They can't stand being in one room, and so all of a sudden they're having to work together. It's about what happens next.

The writing process of getting there, like I said, was long. I first had the idea the summer after I graduated from college. I came up with this idea, and I started writing. It took maybe a couple years, but I wrote a draft and I was like, “I could do better. I don't know how I feel,, this could be better than it is, but I don't know what to do.”

I ended up going and getting my MFA, which is not a path I recommend for everyone, but for me, it really helped me step into writing the book that I wanted to write and that I knew that I was capable of.

I worked on it throughout my MFA, and then it took me a long time to get it published. So all in all, it was 13 years from idea all the way to the day that it came out. I'm really proud of it, and I'm really proud that I stuck with it for that long and built a lot of skills along the way.

What kept you going through that whole process from idea to publication?

I think there were a few things. I think one was the joy and satisfaction that I get from writing, just the process of writing. I find it really enjoyable and fulfilling.

I think another thing was I felt like that story chose me, and so there was a little bit of distance from it. I feel like this story picked me, and if it's meant to be, it's going to go all the way through.

There were times where I thought maybe this book will never come out, maybe it'll be my first book, and it'll be in a drawer, and maybe the next book is the thing that's going to come out. But I am really glad that it came to fruition in the end.

You got an MFA along the way. How did your writing change from the beginning to the end of this process?

Oh, that's a great question. So my writing really blossomed when I was in the MFA. I mean, I had people use that exact word, they were like, we feel like your writing has blossomed, and it sounds kind of corny, but it did feel true.

For me, it was being willing to take feedback even when it was painful, and really try to stay in that teachable space of always having things to learn. I'd say the biggest things that changed were I got some feedback that was really hard to hear, because I submitted a piece, a chapter that I felt really strongly about, and it was a fun chapter, and all the other students in my workshop loved it. I was feeling really good about myself, you know, “Yeah, I've got it going on.”

And then the professor in that workshop, who is a pretty famous writer—she was an Oprah's Book Club author; she's pretty well known—she just looked at me very gently, and she said, “You know, this piece, it feels like a technically perfect piano player. You're hitting all the right notes, but there's no heart behind it.”

She went on to say, “I feel like you're protecting your characters from feeling what they would actually be feeling in this situation.”

I was like, “Oh shit, she's totally right.” It really was painful to hear that, and I knew that she was right.

What I really had to do in the next draft of the book was let my characters make really dumb decisions and have to live with the weight of the consequences of what they had chosen, and also really let them feel.

I had set up this story of this family and their mother has Alzheimer's, but I was sort of still skating on the surface of what they were experiencing. What she was pushing me to do was to dig down and really go there and go deep into what they would be feeling.

It was very painful to do that, even though they aren't real people. It was very painful to imagine what that would be like and then to put it on the page. But I'm really proud that I went there and I did that.

I had one day when she read the book, and she's like, “It's really great. Emotionally, you really go there.” She meant it as like, oh gosh, it was a little intense. But I was like, I accomplished what I set out to do.

What is your writing practice like now? What are the strategies that you find most useful?

I love this question, and I talk about writing practice a lot. The one thing I will say is it has changed a lot over the years. In the years that I was getting my MFA and really working on the revisions of Catchlight, that was before I had children.

I have two children, and so that has completely changed, obviously, everything. But what works for me right now is I typically get up and we get them off to school in the morning, and I go for my walk, and sit down and write a shorter session, like 30 minutes.

I usually do that four days a week. Occasionally I'll have additional sessions. Like this winter, my son was doing basketball, so I would take him on Saturdays, I would drop him off at basketball, and I would drive to the Starbucks down the street. I would get an extra 40-minute writing session.

I was like, “This is the best day of my life.” Every time I got to do that, I was like, “He's doing something active, and I get to do this.”

A lot of people tell me, “Oh, 20, 30, minutes a day?” People have this objection, like it doesn't sound like enough time.

I told someone recently, I wrote an entire draft of a new novel like that in nine months last year. Just 20, 30 minutes, and it came through. So yeah, so that's what's working for me at the moment.

I have a little ritual when I sit down. I sit down and I light a candle. I usually journal for a few minutes, and then I usually read a little bit, a short excerpt from a book about writing that inspires me. I'm reading Julia Cameron's The Right to Write and that one has been really beautiful (affiliate link*).

How do you protect your creative energy while supporting other people's creativity?

When I started my business, I really was like, “Oh, if I'm going to coach other people on writing, I have to be in integrity with what I'm doing for my own writing, because I can't really be teaching about having a writing practice if I'm not doing my own.”

So this writing practice was really seated in that. When my kids were born, it was hard for a little while to find a rhythm that works. Supporting other people's writing makes me more committed to my own because, again, I think I'm in my integrity. I'm also a working writer, and this is what works for me.

The other thing I have been practicing is when I'm writing my to-do list every week, I'll break out which client projects I'm working on and what I need to do. I always put my writing at the top.

Even though I do that the first thing in the morning, I remind myself that's something I'm giving my energy to. I don't need to necessarily put it on that list, because it is part of my routine, but it helps me.

When I'm looking at a list of things, it's like, “Okay, well, maybe I'll have to push this other thing to next week.” There is some level of energy that's going towards my own work for sure.

There is this piece that I talk about in a lot of my work with other writers. We do have this idea in our culture that creativity is this nice-to-have, or that it's like, “Are we allowed to have this?”

For me, it's this necessary force. There's this great talk by Ethan Hawke, who's an actor, and he talks about the idea that making art is vital, that it's like this vital practice and this vital process, and that when we don't do it, we can shrivel up a bit.

Reframing it in that way for myself and for my clients has been really helpful.

You had a 13-year journey from coming up with this book idea to getting published. What was the publishing process like?

I really wanted a traditional book deal, so I started looking for agents, and I queried, over time, around 125 agents, and they all said no.

I really got to this moment like, “Well, what now? What do I do now?” I sat with it, and I put it away for a little while, and I thought, maybe this isn't the book that comes out.

I was working on some other things, but I kept going back to it. At one point I actually gave it to a couple of beta readers who weren’t writers or editors or anything like that. They were people who I really thought were the target demographic of the book. I said, “Be honest with me. Is this any good? Would you want to read it? Because I will put it away if it doesn't resonate with you as a reader.”

They were like, “Brooke, this book, it needs to come out.” I read it again, and I was like, “I still think it's good. I’m going to keep going.”

At that point, I was pitching small presses and I was entering contests, all these different things. My MFA program has a contest called the Fairfield Book Prize, and I entered it in 2017 and nothing happened. I didn't make the finalist round or anything like that.

So the thing about that contest is it’s this very small pool of people, because you have to have been through their program in order to enter it. On the other hand, everyone has an MFA, everyone has worked with the same professors as you like, everyone's stuff is really good. It's this double-edged sword.

In any case, it comes around every two years. Two years later, still nothing was happening, so I entered again. And they were like, “Congratulations, you made the final round.” At that point, it was the same book; I hadn't made any changes. Same exact draft, no changes at all.

They had four or five finalists, and they brought in a guest judge to choose the winning book. My book won the prize, and the prize was a book deal with a local independent press.

I learned what the publishing process was like through that book. It's really wild to think about it now, because I think it proves how subjective writing really can be. Same exact draft: first time, it didn't even make the final cut, and the second time it won the whole thing.

I feel like it really is subjective, and you never know what's going to happen.

You'd been through this whole process, getting rejections from editors, getting published—and suddenly the book is getting all of this positive attention. What did that feel like?

I love this question. The first thing, which I did not anticipate, was that I really thought on book publication day that I was going to be popping champagne and to be so happy. It was this whole culmination of these 13 years, right?

Actually, what I felt that day was like grief. I did not expect that to happen at all. And I remember my mentor at the time said to me, “This is very common when you have a dream that comes true. For you, this is a lifetime, lifelong dream of publishing a book, and it came true. Sometimes it lands in your system as grief, because your body almost can't take it in.”

That's sort of how it felt. It took a little while. I was still really excited and happy, all the things, it was all the emotions together, but I wasn't expecting that kind of darker side of the emotion to be present. I remember being a little bit surprised by that.

I also remember other authors I talked to around the same time were describing something similar, of how vulnerable it can be to have people reading your words.

The other interesting thing that happened was, even though the book is fiction, and it's not based on real people in my life—my grandmother did have Alzheimer's, but it's not based on my family, none of the characters were inspired by my family. But there are certain small details, like there was one character who had a name who was similar to someone that I know in real life, and everyone started assuming that it was them.

I was like, it's really not them. I just liked that name. So people were reading themselves into the book in really interesting ways, which I didn't expect.

Someone else was like, “Well, this character, is it our cousin?” She named all these similarities. I was like, Oh my gosh, it really isn't, but I can see why you would think that. There were interesting things that people were noticing. I did not see that coming.

But then otherwise, still to this day, it's almost five years later, but I still feel really proud of that book. Like, wow, I did it. I stuck with that thing all the way through to the end.

I talk a lot in my work about the power of completing a creative cycle. Certainly, there are things that we write that are just for us and maybe for our own healing process, and they're not meant to be shared.

But I think if we keep too much of our writing to ourselves and we don't share it if it's meant to be shared, it can create some stagnation. I feel really proud of moving all the way through that process.

What's next for you creatively?

I was working for a few years on a book which was maybe 70% done, and then something happened in my personal life that was very similar to some of the themes in the book. I had to put that book away for a little while.

It’s really strange how sometimes life starts imitating art. It's wild. So in any case, I put a pause on that book. But the nice thing was, I had an idea for a different book that came in pretty quickly afterwards.

The book I'm working on now is almost finished, and it's actually a romance novel. The first book is more literary, and it's more like a family drama style novel. There is a love story, but I wouldn't call it a romance novel.

This book is a romance novel, and it's really fun. It is. It's very pop culture-inspired, so it's sort of Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce adjacent. The premise is, there are two brothers who are NFL stars. One of them is an NFL quarterback, and he's super famous, and his girlfriend is a mega pop star. But it's not about them, right?

It's about the younger brother who grew up in his brother's shadow, and he is a kicker in the NFL, so he's a little bit less respected, and he gets injured in the playoffs. The opening scene is him watching his brother play in the Super Bowl without him because he missed the playoff kick because he got injured.

He ends up falling in love with his physical therapist, because of course he does. It's been really fun to write, and I'm in the last maybe 30% of a second draft, so I'm finishing that up. I have a few connections to a few agents, so I'm hoping to get agented this time around. We'll see what happens.

The other book I was working on, the question of the book was like, how do we heal from trauma? It's a little bit dark. It's been really nice to have this sunshiny energy. I've been enjoying that a lot.

If you had to give a piece of advice to writers, what would that be?

I love this question. I think I can narrow it to two, but they go together.

The first is to find a writing practice that works for you. I think there's a lot of conversation on the internet and in books and things like that where people feel like they have to write every day, or they have to write for at least an hour every day, or whatever it is, and it doesn't have to be all or nothing.

There's not one right way to do it. There’s this idea they have to write first thing in the morning. But if you're a night owl, you should write at night.

How can you make writing work for you in this season of life that you're in? Our lives change, and you have to shift what works in order to work with the season that you're in.

The second piece of advice that I have is, I talk a lot about communicating and connecting with the spirit of your book and the idea that we can channel a story through us. It comes from some other place.

I think it can be really powerful to think of stories in terms of, the story picked you to tell it. Then we get out of this question that you asked earlier, like, “Am I allowed to spend time writing?” There's more of this question of, “This story picked me to write it, so how can I find ways to honor the story and make time to honor what wants to come through me?”

What is the best book that you've read recently?

I really loved How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang because it is a romance novel, and it does some interesting things with typical romance tropes (affiliate link*). It's really smart and well done, and the characters really have a lot of depth to them.

I also found out Yulin Kuang works in Hollywood, and she's adapting a couple of Emily Henry books, which I thought was really cool. So she has written her own book, and I just loved it so much.

It was fun because I believe she's Chinese, and the main character is also Chinese. My husband is Chinese. There were some things about Chinese American culture that really made me laugh out loud. Some of the things that the character's mother says, I'm like, “Oh yeah, my mother-in-law says that.” She captured it perfectly. It was really enjoyable.

Meet the Author interviews are lightly edited for clarity.

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Brooke's story has so much to offer writers. When you're feeling discouraged, come back and reread her journey to publishing, her experience with how subjective the process can be, and her advice on seeing a project through to the end. Take heart, and find the writing process that works for you!