Writing Through the Real: Tricia Thomas on Shame, Struggle, and Finding Freedom as a Creative5/27/2026
 In the midst of messy first drafts, towering to-do lists, and the quiet ache of watching our WIPs sit untouched for weeks (or months), every writer eventually faces the same question: Am I falling behind? In this candid and heartfelt Q&A, Tricia Thomas opens up about the real challenges of a creative life. From battling imposter syndrome and writer’s block to embracing criticism and releasing unhealthy comparison, Tricia shares the hard-won wisdom that has sustained her writing journey. Whether you’re wrestling with self-doubt, balancing family and creativity, or simply craving encouragement from someone who truly gets it, this conversation offers both honesty and hope for every writer in progress.  Have you ever felt ashamed of how long your WIP is taking? What shifted that shame for you? Absolutely. I think that restless, ants-in-your-pants, I’m-going-to-miss-my-train feeling is something that all writers struggle with. When you have a world inside of you, all you want to do is make it a reality. But . . . life happens. For some of us, that’s a busy day job or the care of elders. For others, it’s chronic illness. For me, it’s two precious, energetic little boys. It’s hard to write and also have eyes in the back of your head. Or I’ll have just sat down in the silence of my room, ready to disappear into my book’s world, only to hear my door creak open and a tiny head poke in. The real world has a way of being, well . . . real. When things don’t progress as quickly as I would like, my inner critic (let’s call him “Fred”) is quick to point out all the ways that I could have done better. I could have gotten up at five in the morning to write before the little energizer bunnies woke up at six. I could have made an extra cup of coffee and stayed up till midnight (never mind what the quality of that writing would have been). I could have . . . you get it. I’ve found the only thing that stops Fred and the “coulds” is accepting that I’m simply not capable of being more than one person. None of us like to accept limitations, but the reality is, to be human is to be limited. And that’s okay. Limitations force us to create a hierarchy of priorities, which, in turn, reveals what matters most to us. For me, that’s the two tiny, hilarious, exhausting blessings that are in my care. If I have to choose, my WIP will just have to wait. I remind myself constantly that that’s not failure; it’s a choice. If this book remains unpublished forever, what would you need to believe to still feel you had spent your life well? At its core, writing is about expression and connection; it’s the process of one person reaching through little lines on a page and grasping the hand and heart of the person on the other side. So, if a work is never published, and it never reaches the audience on the other side of the page, does that mean the writer has failed? I don’t think so. Being a writer is a mindset and lifestyle as much as it is a physical act. It is the daily choice to see the things others overlook. It is the choice to slow down and ask the hard questions. You don’t have to wait until a book is published to live a life like that. Believe in the power of humor? Try doing stand-up comedy. Believe in the importance of helping others? Volunteer. Believe in the beauty of the natural world? Find ways to protect it. Embrace the writer’s mindset, not just the physical act of writing, and whether a book is published or not, you are still being true to your vision. That is a life well lived.  Learn secrets and proven paths to finding an agent with the book GET A LITERARY AGENT. The guide explains query letter writing, submission dos and don'ts, how to craft engaging opening pages, synopsis FAQs, nonfiction proposal tips, literary agent pet peeves, and much more. If you could go back and spare your younger writing self from one specific pain on this journey, would you? Why or why not? To answer this question, I’ll start with an example from nature. When butterflies are ready to come out of their cocoons, they don’t just wiggle out of their casing and fly. The cocoon doesn’t let them go that easily; the process of getting free from the casing is long and exhausting. Now, if I were to walk past a butterfly struggling to get out, it might seem like the kind thing to do would be to help it peel off that pesky shell. It doesn’t need it, and it’s just a barrier to the butterfly’s goal…so why not just remove it? Unfortunately, if I were to do that, the butterfly would never fly; it would be condemned to a weak, crawling life on the ground and a premature death. When a butterfly pushes itself out of the cocoon, the struggle forces fluid into its wings, allowing it to fly. Without struggle, flight is impossible. I think all of us dream of a life without struggle or pain. I know I certainly have. I’ve had setbacks, rejections, and moments of weakness that still make me cringe to this day. But wishing for a life without struggle or pain is wishing for a crippled life. No writer ever reached their potential without rejection, criticism, and correction. It’s how we grow and learn. Personally, I don’t want a life on the ground. I want to fly, and the price of flight is struggle. What’s a fear about your writing that you’ve never told anyone before? This is a hard question for me, and I didn’t really want to answer it (which is why I needed to). The truth is, I have been blessed by so many wonderful, encouraging people along my writing journey. These expected angels have taken a real interest in my dreams, my work, and my success. Without each and every one of these friends, mentors, and role models, I never would have made it this far. I hope each and every one of them know how grateful I am for their presence in my life, but…I never tell them the fear I feel as well. Beneath the gratefulness, down where my own imposter syndrome and insecurities lie, I have a nagging, terrible fear that, in the end, I will be a disappointment to them all. Every single one of them. My brain is constantly looking around at the kindness I’ve received, measuring it against my prospects, and deciding that all I will do is disappoint. My abilities and their care won’t balance on the cosmic scale, so to speak. I think that scares me far more than any disappointment I might feel over my own failure. When you have people in your life who believe in you, you want to make them proud. I’ve never been able to fully silence the question…what if I can’t?  Need an expert critique of your query letter, synopsis, novel/manuscript, or nonfiction book proposal? We have you covered. Check out our critique options and many success stories who found literary agents after working with us. If you could go back to your early writing days, what one piece of advice would you give your beginner self? Honestly, I’d smack myself up the back of the head and tell myself to stop comparing. Comparison leads to competition, and I truly believe that competitiveness is one of the biggest joy stealers—not to mention creativity killers—there is. Competitiveness whispers that your worth depends on getting the trophy, and worse still, that there are not enough trophies to go around. Someone must fail for another to rise. Fifteen years ago, at the beginning of my writing journey, my sense of personal worth was far too entangled with my identity as a writer, and it showed. I was fiercely competitive. Whatever it took, I was determined not to fail. This mindset was lonely and stressful, and I have no interest in ever going back to it. Thankfully, I matured and pried my sense of worth and my identity as a writer apart. Once I did that, I could finally view other writers as friends and peers rather than as competition. I’m truly happy to see others succeed. It is a warm and happy place to be, and I would sacrifice all the book deals, awards, and success out there to keep this mindset. Writing, like life, is about people—and you cannot love what you view as an obstacle. How do you tackle writer's block when you're stuck mid-plot or with a flat character? For me, the trifecta is music, coffee, and a walk. I curate playlists for each character, and returning to those playlists helps me to reconnect with them. Human beings (or creatures, if one writes fantasy) are emotional, so if a character feels flat, it’s generally because I’m spending too much time on their actions and not enough time inside their heads. Actions are a consequence of the inner world, not the originator of it. I might have the perfect plot worked out and every action accounted for, but if I don’t know my characters as well as my best friends, that plot won’t matter. The story will fall flat. As for the coffee and the walk? Well, I’m a coffee-dependent life form at this point, so honestly, coffee helps everything. Caffeine and exercise reset me the same way music resets my relationship with my characters. After some time touching the proverbial grass, I generally find that I’m in a better headspace to write. And if all else fails, take a nap. It’s the human equivalent of unplugging your laptop and plugging it back in. It’s always worth a go. Every writer faces self-doubt. What’s a moment in your career when you questioned your work the most, and how did you overcome? I think the closest I ever came to quitting was after I’d finished the fifth revision of my first manuscript. It had taken several years, and I’d finally submitted it to agents. I was overjoyed when I received a handful of full requests. Then, rejections came…a lot of rejections. My imposter syndrome was far more deadly than the disappointment; I was convinced I would never succeed as a writer. If I didn’t love writing so much, or if I had another viable option for work while staying home with my munchkins, I might very well have quit. But I was determined to make it as a writer, so I wrote to every agent who passed on a full and asked them if they felt comfortable sharing what they felt my manuscript’s greatest flaws were. It was not a fun series of emails to write, but I knew that if I ever hoped to hear a yes instead of a no, I had to know what I was doing wrong. Most of the answers were the same—the book was thick enough to be a series, had far too many characters, and asked the readers to keep track of too much. It was, in short, exhausting. One agent even told me to set it aside and start again. It was too bloated to save. It was in those emails I discovered one of the most important realities of being a writer—how you choose to engage with criticism will define everything about your journey. If hard feedback is treated as the enemy, or as a personal attack, you will never grow. Criticism doesn’t have to feel good, but it does need to be welcomed for what it is—the nourishment upon which dreams are built. Those agents were not attacking my value as a human being or as a writer; they were graciously giving me the building tools to grow. I wrote back and thanked every one of them. Still, if I’m being honest, what came next stung. I put aside that massive manuscript I was so proud of and started again. I created a new story. A new world. A new set of characters. I stopped trying to be clever and complex and just tried to be authentic. And guess what? My next manuscript was a hundred times better than the last one. Perfect? No, absolutely not. But better. And after that, when I rewrote it yet again, it was better still. I learned that growth would be slow, painful, and at times, embarrassing to the ego. Still, the only way to fail was to stop—stop growing, stop listening, stop trying. Criticism was never quite as scary after that. Now, I wish I could say I’ve become so full of enlightenment that I welcome criticism with open arms as a gift from the universe. But that would be a big, fat lie. I’m still human (and that’s unlikely to change, I’m afraid). Still, I have learned to accept and value criticism . . . even when it leaves me smarting and my prized manuscripts in a drawer.  Want to sell more books and market yourself? Check out the guide CREATE YOUR WRITER PLATFORM. The book explains how to build an audience, understand social media basics, sell more books, increase promotion & publicity, get engaged online, and much more. What's one book (or author) that transformed your writing? This question always feels a little like picking a favorite child. I could honestly probably write a book about all of the works and authors that I have admired and grown from. However, for the sake of the question, I’ll restrain myself to one modern author who has been particularly inspiring to me lately—Charles Martin. What I love about Martin is his ability to centralize characters without losing the forward moment of the plot. Martin often goes back in time to explore how past traumas and experiences affect character choices, and yet, he never forgets to move them towards growth in the present. As someone who drawn to character-driven fiction over plot-driven fiction (personal preference only), this masterful dance is nothing short of inspiring. I also appreciate the tough questions he asks about life, loss, and our place in the world. As a religious person myself, I’m often disappointed with how the ugliness of life and the hard questions about our existence are sanitized in religious novels; it’s as if the only acceptable reason to wade into messy waters is to find a clear, clean path out. I think that mindset does both the human experience and religion a disservice. In contrast, Martin does a great job asking the hard questions with love, empathy, and compassion, and avoiding pedagogy and preaching entirely. What's your secret to creating characters that feel alive and unforgettable? Do you start with backstory, flaws, or something else? Ernest Hemingway had a marvelous way of constructing characters—he took the time to map everything about them, right down to what they liked for breakfast. He believed that, while the reader did not need to know everything about the character, the author absolutely must. A character could never behave like a real person until they were a real person. I firmly agree with him on this. Since characters are the most important part of any story for me, I spend a vast deal of time getting to know them before I even begin to write. I start with “the bones” (family, childhood, major victories or traumas, etc.), then fill in “the flesh” (the childhood memory they were never able to forget, what their greatest insecurity is, the annoying quirk they do under pressure, the one thing they want from others that they are too afraid to ask for, their comfort item, etc). Last is “the surface” level—the way they speak, how their appearance affects others, what their style or hobbies are, etc. Not all of this is achieved by writing lists, and it can’t be rushed. Sometimes, inspiration pops up while out on a hike, or listening to music, or puttering around drinking coffee and doing art. It comes through those unexpected little moments where, for whatever reason, I find myself inside their skin and go, “aha!” Once I feel like I could spend a day inside their skin without ever breaking character, I know they’re ready for the page. What’s the hardest storytelling lesson you’ve learned and how did embracing it elevate your fiction? When I started writing, I was far too focused on creating something that felt unique. I had this mindset that if any version of character profiles, plot line, or ending had been done before, then I wasn’t a “real writer.” As a result of this (very doomed) perspective, I spent a vast deal of time creating intricate worldbuilding and convoluted plots. It was as bad as it sounds. Probably worse, honestly. And to make matters worse, it forced me to be someone I was not—a plot-driven writer instead of a character-driven one. I was floundering, and I didn’t know why. I only stopped floundering when I accepted two realities. One, that I was never going to create something that had never been done before because, well . . . it has all been done before. Human beings have been telling each other stories for millennia; if you go back far enough, every story is simply a variation of another. Second, I’m a crappy plot-driven writer. I’ve never tried to write a mystery or a thriller before, but if I did, I’m sure it would be studied for generations—this is how to never, ever write a book. The truth is, I love people and the human mind. I’ve spent a large portion of my adult life studying psychology, counseling, and caregiving. My writing is at its best when I am sitting with my characters and asking questions about the human experience. lot is the medium they swim in, but the characters will always be the main event. My hope is that my characters’ struggles will help someone be a little bit braver and have a little more hope; if I achieve that, then I have succeeded. Once I accepted that, my writing improved dramatically.  Tricia Thomas is an author and mental health professional with a lifelong passion for storytelling. She published her first magazine article during college and has maintained a freelance writing career ever since. She holds a master’s degree in mental health counseling and an educational specialist degree. When she’s not writing or caring for her young children, Tricia enjoys baking, painting, and spending time outdoors in nature. You can find out more at: https://triciathomasbooks.com/  This post was complied by Brandy Vallance, a literary agent with Barbara Bova Literary Agency, an award-winning author, and a Story Consultant for Writing Day Workshops. Brandy is the winner of two national writing awards, one of which included a $20,000 prize. Her novel, THE COVERED DEEP, has been featured in USA Today & Writer’s Digest. WITHIN THE VEIL has been called “passionate and riveting” and Publisher’s Weekly encourages those who like sweeping Scottish sagas to dive in because “the journey is wonderful.” Brandy loves helping writers break the chains of fear and self-doubt. You can find out more at brandyvallance.com.  Pitch Agents at a Writers Conference in 2026:
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