Why writers shrink their own dragons
What it costs the writer when the industry keeps acting surprised.
Years before The Story Temple, before Shadow & the Pen or Write From the Wound, before any of this had a name, I was simply a developmental editor. My client list was a mix of fantasy writers, sci-fi writers, and a handful of literary folks who wandered in from somewhere else. My job was strictly craft. Pacing, structure, character development, voice at the sentence level. I was good at it. I still am (very good at it).
But there was something I kept seeing in the work, and for years I didn’t have words for it.
The writing was often clean. Sometimes it was good enough that I’d sit back in my chair. But underneath some of it sat a quality I couldn’t quite place. Something held back. Something smaller than the story around it.
Here are a few things I was seeing on the page. A protagonist who took up less room than the story needed them to. A fictional world that felt borrowed, like somebody else’s house with somebody else’s furniture, and the writer was a guest instead of the one who built it. I was seeing magic systems that played it safe. And stakes that never quite climbed as high as the premise promised.
The questions these writers brought me were craft questions. Why does this scene feel flat? Why doesn’t this character feel real to me? Is the magic system working, or does it just look like it should? I answered as an editor. We talked about interiority, about specificity, about raising the stakes on the page. Sometimes that helped. Sometimes it didn’t, and I couldn’t always explain why.
My last essay was about the publishing industry’s surprise regarding the range of Black storytelling. I wrote that the surprise is the tax, and that “Black writers have been paying it for sixty years: re-proving range that was already documented, fighting for investment that was always deserved, and entering genres they never left.”
I wrote about who sits at the acquisitions table, and who decides what gets a marketing budget and a spot on the front table. And I wrote that because of who’s sitting at the table, “the range of Black storytelling becomes invisible. And the people with the power to invest in it are not, by and large, the people reading it.”
That essay was about the industry. This one stays closer to home: what happens before the industry ever sees the manuscript.
I’ve been in the publishing business for almost 10 years now, and have learned quite a bit from sitting across from those writers with their borrowed worlds and their careful dragons. The tax doesn’t start at the acquisitions table. It starts on page one. A writer who has spent their whole life absorbing the message that their work will read as too much, too Black, not relatable, and not what readers want, learns to shrink the dragon themselves, long before anyone else gets the chance to. Before they’ve written a single line, the white gaze is already in the room. And it’s wearing their own face.
There’s one session I keep coming back to. One of my first clients, a Black writer, working in fantasy romance, three drafts deep into a manuscript she couldn’t get past a certain point in. We’d been over the craft notes twice. The structure had good bones. The prose was clean. And still, every time she reached this one chapter, she stalled.
On a hunch, I asked if she’d be open to trying something different during one of our sessions. We pulled cards.
I read tarot intuitively, so as the cards came up, I started asking questions. About the novel, and about the season of life she was in. What was shifting underneath her. Because all of that comes through on the page, whether a writer knows it or not.
We talked for maybe ten minutes. Then she stopped answering and started writing. Feverish, head down, pen moving fast across the page. She filled two pages in her notebook before coming up for air. I watched something happen in her eyes that I still don’t have a clean word for. The closest I can get is alchemy.
She finished that chapter. Eventually she finished the draft.
Years later, I watched it happen again while teaching a workshop for a friend of mine who is a writing coach. A few days after the workshop, word got back to me that one of the attendees had been stuck on the same project for three years. By the end of the session, she wasn’t stuck anymore. Same thing, in front of strangers this time. Something underneath the craft problem, surfacing the moment someone made room for it.
I didn’t have language for any of it back then. I only knew that something had moved, something that craft feedback alone hadn’t been able to reach. Looking back, I understand now what I didn’t understand then. The inner work and the craft work weren’t two different practices. I’d been doing both the whole time without realizing it. I just didn’t have a name for either one yet.
Let me say plainly what the work I do is for.
It’s for the writer who wants to write the dragon, the joy, the space heist, the ordinary Tuesday where nothing happens except a family eating dinner together, and for it to be enough. It’s for writing anything at all without the nervous system treating the blank page like a courtroom.
The white gaze followed those writers into their invented worlds because it doesn’t live in the genre. It lives in the body. Jesmyn Ward has talked about getting frozen three chapters into Let Us Descend. Ward is a writer at the height of her powers, with every award and every credential. And yet she still met a wall she couldn’t write past. The work I do now dissolves the wound that credentials can’t heal.
Once the gaze loosens its grip, the subject matter can stay exactly the same. What opens up is everything underneath it: the dragon gets its size back, the world stops feeling borrowed and starts feeling like yours.
If you’ve ever opened a blank document to start something that was supposed to be entirely yours… your world, your rules, your magic… and felt the colors get pulled down before you wrote a single word, I want you to name what that is.
It’s the gaze. It’s old, and it’s been riding shotgun longer than you’ve been writing. It showed up before the story did.
Shadow & the Pen is where we look at that directly. Your manuscript and your wound, both in the room at once. Booking are available. To claim your spot, click here.
About the author
High Priestess Lakeisha is the founder of The Story Temple, a spiritual writing sanctuary for Black writers healing their relationship with their voice. She is a developmental editor with close to 10 years of experience across fiction and nonfiction, an initiated priestess, a certified evolutionary astrologer, and a shadow work facilitator. Her editorial roots are in fantasy and speculative fiction, the genre space where she first saw the patterns she would later have language for.
Lakeisha’s work holds craft and spirit as one practice. The Elemental Writing Energetics framework reads the manuscript. The Elemental Shadow Wounds framework reads the architect behind the words (the writer). The Story Temple exists on a single premise: writing is a spiritual practice, and a free sentence is a prayer being answered.
Morrison knocked the gaze off the shoulder. Baldwin showed what the eyes could do once it was gone.
Every time I read one of your posts, I wonder, "How did she get so wise so young?" When you give these bits of case study, I wish I could see the before and after drafts -- even a paragraph or two.