The Pencil-Driven Life was the name I used for several years for a large part of my writing life.
It became a home for essays about fiction, story, belief, ordinary life, creativity, learning, and the practice of putting words on the page. It also became the name associated with several of my nonfiction books and with projects that reflected where my thinking and work were at the time.
That work remains part of my history.
But my focus has narrowed.
Today, my primary work is writing novels. I also work with a small number of beginning novelists through a year-long, in-person story-coaching program centered at West Hollow Writing Studio near Boaz, Alabama.
I publish A Place to Write, a Substack for people who write novels—and people who have always wanted to.
Rather than maintaining The Pencil-Driven Life as a separate website and identity, I have brought my current work together here at RichardLFricks.com.
The Writing Continues
Some of the essays originally published through The Pencil-Driven Life are being preserved in The Writing Archive as part of the record of a writer learning over time.
The older TPDL website itself is no longer maintained as a public site.
Books from The Pencil-Driven Life
Several nonfiction books grew out of this period.
The Pencil-Driven Life
The Pencil-Driven Life is a nonfiction book about letting go of the need to force life into a predetermined purpose and learning instead to live by attention. It grew from my own attempt to rethink ambition, meaning, work, and what it means to notice the life already being lived.
The Pencil-Driven Life Reset Guide
The Pencil-Driven Life Reset Guide is a quiet workbook for stepping back and looking carefully at the life you have inherited. It offers questions and exercises designed to help you notice the assumptions, habits, expectations, and patterns shaping your life, question what no longer fits, and begin revising your life with greater awareness and intention.
Where My Work Lives Now
If you arrived here through an old The Pencil-Driven Life link, business card, book, or reference, you are in the right place.
