The Soft Ambition of a Quiet Life

How this Enneagram 3 found balance between big dreams and small, personal moments

Hello, Protagonists! In this post, you’ll find:

📚 What’s Filling My Creative Well - books + articles that are lighting up my brain

📝 Letters from the Creative Life - a new, occasional feature

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📚 What’s Filling My Creative Well

Currently reading:

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt - a beautifully tender story that slowly peels back the layers of a woman’s life as she works at an aquarium.

This is our book club pick this month!

• Our next meeting is Sunday, June 22, 2025 at 8 pm ET / 5 pm PT

• Discussion Qs and RSVP here.

Loved this article:

“The Bookstore that Became a Book Hotel” - (Substack) - What a cute idea to convert a bookstore into a themed destination for book lovers!

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📝 Letters from the Creative Life

Lately, I’ve been feeling drawn to share more than just the behind-the-scenes of writing and publishing. Maybe I’m getting pensive as I get closer to the release of The Incredible Kindness of Paper, my tenth novel. Maybe it’s something about the weather warming up and allowing me to sit on the balcony while I have my coffee. Or maybe I just want to play with writing in a format that’s new.

So some days, I’ll send you a short personal essay. Think of it as a letter from my life to yours.

These won’t be about writing advice or book launches. Instead, they’ll be reflections on the quieter corners of a creative life: protecting slow mornings, navigating ambition with tenderness, or making meaning in everyday moments.

They won’t be frequent, but rather, when the mood strikes… and the first one happens to be right now. ☺️

So here you go. The first “Letter from the Creative Life,” from me to you:

Evelyn and Tom on the Pacific Coast Highway, near Big Sur

The Soft Ambition of a Quiet Life

There’s a particular brand of advice that follows creative people around like a well-meaning but slightly pushy friend: Go big or go home. Dream louder. DO MORE.

The assumption is that if you’re not sprinting toward the next milestone, you’re standing still. It’s as if ambition has to announce itself with noise and urgency, or it’s not real ambition at all.

I used to believe this, too. But now that I’m about to publish my tenth novel, I realized I’d been carrying the wrong definition of ambition entirely.

The Texture of Slower Goals

Real ambition, I’ve learned, doesn’t always wear a suit and carry a briefcase. Sometimes it wears pajamas and carries a cup of tea to the writing desk at 6 a.m., before the world wakes up and starts making demands. Sometimes it looks like choosing to write the story only you can tell, even when market trends suggest you ought to write something else.

I’m an Enneagram 3—the Achiever—which means I genuinely do want to build something big and lasting. The desire to create work that matters, to reach readers across the globe, and to see my stories adapted for the screen isn’t a consolation prize. It’s real ambition, the kind that gets me up early and keeps me writing through difficult chapters. But I’ve also learned that wanting big things doesn’t require becoming a different person to achieve them.

My version of ambition lives in the spaces between the big moments. It’s the decision to carve out fifteen minutes for creativity while waiting to pick up my daughter from school, then closing the laptop completely when she wants to tell me about her day. It’s telling my agent I’d only write The Incredible Kindness of Paper if we found the right editor, the one who understood the importance of small acts of generosity and who wasn’t too jaded by the world. And it’s building a community like the one we have here, focused on all of us rather than just promoting my latest book, because why not? Community-building feels like the kind of legacy worth having.

This soft ambition doesn’t always photograph well for social media. You can’t put “chose emotional truth over commercial viability” on a resume. But it creates something more valuable than metrics: it creates work that feels alive and a life that you actually want to be living while you’re building it.

I think about this every time I’m tempted to compare my career trajectory to someone else’s. (I’m looking at you, Stephanie Meyer, who made millions with her debut).

That sort of ambition isn’t wrong—it’s just not mine anymore. Because here’s the thing about being a Type 3 who values slow living: I want both.

I want to build something that lasts and reaches people. I also want slow Saturday mornings where my family lingers over coffee and donuts and nobody checks their phone.

I want my name on bestseller lists. I also want family dinners where I’m fully present, not mentally drafting Instagram captions about the pasta I’m eating.

I want the freedom to turn off the “achiever” part of myself and just be a mom, a wife, a woman who sometimes reads novels for pleasure instead of for market research.

The Permission of Small Things

When I discovered I have aphantasia—that I can’t visualize images in my mind the way most people do—I finally understood why traditional creative advice never quite fit. I couldn’t “picture” my characters or “envision” scenes. Instead, I had to learn to feel my way through stories, to trust emotional ambience, to write from instinct rather than a movie running through my head.

This taught me something crucial about ambition: it doesn’t have to look like everyone else’s to be legitimate.

My writing practice isn’t built on grand gestures. It’s built on the accumulation of small, intentional choices, like showing up to the blank page even when I don’t feel inspired, or insisting that every book I write means something more than just a rollicking plot.

This approach has given me a decade-long career with Big 5 publishers, Netflix, and Disney, and a community of tens of thousands of readers like you who believe, like I do, that creativity doesn’t have to be loud to be powerful. But more than that, it’s given me a life that feels sustainable, a career that enhances rather than diminishes my relationships, and work that I’m proud of not just because it succeeded, but because it came from an authentic place.

Redefining the Finish Line

Here’s what I wish someone had told me earlier in my career: success isn’t just about reaching the destination. It’s about who you become during the journey, and whether you can still recognize yourself when you arrive.

The “go big or go home” mentality assumes there’s only one kind of home worth having— the seven-figure advance, the viral BookTok moment, the top of the bestseller list.

But what if home is the quiet satisfaction of finishing a chapter you’re proud of?

What if it’s building something meaningful with people who understand why stories matter?

I’m not advocating for small dreams. I’m advocating for dreams that fit the shape of your actual life, ambitions that honor both your professional goals and your personal values. Dreams that leave room for the people and practices that sustain you.

My ambition includes wanting to tell stories that matter and wanting to build a creative career that lasts. But it also includes wanting to be present for my family, to maintain friendships that aren’t transactional, and wanting to take walks that aren’t content for social media… they’re just for me.

These aren't competing priorities. They’re the integrated life of a creative who refuses to believe that meaningful work requires sacrifice of everything else that makes life worth living.

The world has enough of the loud kind of ambition. What it needs more of is the soft kind—the kind that prioritizes depth over speed, connection over competition, and stories that last over stories that trend.

Your dreams don’t need to be loud to be legitimate.

They just need to be yours.

What does soft ambition look like in your life? I'd love to hear your thoughts. 💛