Outsiders, Welcome!
Start here to join this writing community
Consider this post to be your tour guide/host/orientation session to learn about what I’m building here at Write Like An Outsider.
What’s Write Like An Outsider about?
I’m a book coach for memoir writers with battered passports. I believe we need more stories about living cross-culturally, about being brave and forging friendships across difference. I believe that deep down, we all feel like outsiders, and we can write ourselves into connection.
This publication shows you how to write an unconventional life in a way that connects with readers.
If you’ve started writing because you know you’ve had a story of a life, only to get stuck in the details that you suspect no one will understand because “you had to be there”; or you’ve lived in more countries than you have digits to count with and don’t know how to create a writing container that holds them all; or your story is so wild that you’re afraid people will accuse you of making it all up, you’re in the right place.
Read more about me here.
What can I find here?
I write weekly posts in four containers:
Book Reviews: Books and interviews that contain outsider themes or craft techniques specifically applicable to memoirists writing in the long-term travel or cross-cultural understanding zone.
Personal Essays: Reflections from my life lived across continents and cultures.
Craft Tips: Level up your writing with these memoir-writing posts based on my MFA, book coaching, and lived experience.
Coaching: A big part of becoming a better writer is mindset work. Here I give you access to coaching topics that I find my memoir clients most need.
Top Performing Posts
Get a taste of Write Like An Outsider here.
Write Your Life with Main Character Energy
I was working on plotting an emotional transformation arc with a writing client, encouraging her to think about points in her life where she made a decision or took an action that propelled her closer to her goal.
Author Interview: How Alex Poppe Wrote Her Outsider Life in a Way that Welcomes Readers In
Alex Poppe's bio convinced me I would be a fan of her writing because it so closely mirrored the thoughts and feelings I have regarding my international development experience. Alex took a detour from the expected American life path at 44 when she traded a marketing job for a teaching position in northern Iraq. While in Kurdistan, Alex went through the …
Crossing the Street: It's One Foot in Front of the Other, but It's Also So Much More
This is a story of almost getting splinched while crossing the street.
Writer Personality Quiz: Do You Start with Character, Plot, or Idea?
One of my creative writing profs posited the idea that fiction writers tend to have a comfort zone where their story concepts emerge from.
Who’s this publication for?
We all feel like outsiders at one point or another.
I spent my earliest memory formation years in Belgium and Burkina Faso, and then was the weird child who skipped kindergarten (because I had been abroad in Burkina where they didn’t have kinder) and went directly to first grade, and the administration in my Pennsylvania public school raised their eyebrows at that one. I feel like people have been raising eyebrows at me ever since, and I’ve been longing for this elusive sense of belonging to home that never quite seems to show up in the place I am currently occupying.
If you feel any of that, you’re home here.
Writers and readers who have lived in more than one place, who have experienced what it’s like to establish an identity more than once in their life, who can code switch in conversations or interactions between their cultural knowledge and successfully blend in: you’re home here.
These outsider categories have a variety of names. Perhaps one of these resonates, though I find that they are so many that you may be one that is not yet on this list:
Third Culture Kids
Expats
Missionary Kids
Diplomatic Kids
Military Families
Immigrants
Refugees
Development Workers
Peace Corps Volunteers
Each time I write this list, it grows longer. Like I said, we all have felt like an outsider at one time or another. If you don’t find your identifier on my list, I’d love to know it. Message me!
If you want to convert that feeling into some writing, or you want to read someone who is, you’re home.
How do I get involved?
Free Subscription
When you become a subscriber, you get weekly posts to your inbox in one of the four topical areas I described: personal essay, craft tips, coaching, or book review. You also get added to the subscriber chat where I post prompts for the community to get to know one another and to share about their writing progress.
Paid Subscription
Once a month, I send out a post specifically for paid subscribers, in which I include a writing technique that you can use right away. Your subscription to this service gets you access to a growing repository of craft instruction, built from my experience in SO many classrooms, including an MFA, as well as my rigorous training as a book coach. I provide paid subscriber chats in the week that I post, so that you have an opportunity to ask me questions or interact with others in the community.
Consider it my gift to you, so that you don’t have to sit in the uncomfortable chairs, trying to stay awake for grad school night classes, like I did.
Access the archive of paid posts here:
Founder Subscription
At this time, founders have the same perks as the paid subscribers. What you are doing if you subscribe as a founder is you are supporting the writing, researching, and coaching I am already doing and making it just a little bit easier to keep at it.
Here’s the button to subscribe at any level:
What’s a Book Coach?
I’m a book coach because I love accompanying writers from idea to book. I help in the planning and writing stages to crystalize a message, to create outlines, to do a deep dive into character motivation, to give professional feedback on written work.
I do not, however, write your book for you. That’s your challenge and your reward.
To get a better idea of what book coaching is like, you can listen to a coaching session:
I would love to hear about your writing project. You can read more about me at my website link below, or message me to start the conversation.
Esther Harder is an Author Accelerator certified book coach in memoir.
