ValiantLane LLC - Courageously Define Your Path

A question I hear often from parents: "What actually happens in a coaching session with you?"

To begin describing a coaching session, we need to first consider the student. Each of them brings their own thoughts, feelings, perceptions, academic skill set, and comfort level with writing. That’s where I begin to evaluate how I can best serve the needs of the student.

Most of my students are in high school or college, working on the full range of writing assignments: argumentative, expository, narrative, and descriptive essays, analytical papers, research papers, and college essays. They come to me at different stages: some with a completed first draft, some with a more developed draft, and some with a description of an assignment and no idea where to begin.

Here's what a first hour might look like:

If a student brings a draft, we review it together, looking at argument, evidence, structure, and clarity. I provide specific, actionable feedback they can implement immediately to move their draft forward to final version.

If a student doesn't have a draft yet, we start at the beginning: the assignment requirements, any prompts, what the student is thinking about the material, and what they might have to say about it. We brainstorm topic, content, and thesis statement together. Then we build a plan to complete the assignment.

Every student walks away from that first hour with something concrete: a defined topic and thesis statement, basic outline, or a time-based plan for developing their topic, thesis, and content, with clear milestones for getting to a finished assignment. Sometimes that first hour is to ensure the writing assignment is in the correct writing style, especially for in-text citations and reference pages.

If needed from there, I become their accountability partner, working with them through drafts, revisions, and feedback until the assignment is complete. For longer semester-end papers and college essays, that relationship most often spans up to six to eight sessions.

One hour usually isn't a quick fix. It's often a beginning. For many students, having a clear plan and someone in their corner makes all the difference between a writing assignment that feels impossible and one that gets done well.

All students who I work with receive a complimentary copy of my eBook, The Writing Framework™: 15 Steps to Your Strong Five-Paragraph Essay.

👉 Learn more: https://valiantlane.com/the-writing-framework

Let’s have a conversation about writing: When did writing stop feeling possible for you. Or for your student?

I'll go first.

I didn't go to college right after high school. My parents couldn’t afford it; I couldn't afford it. Instead I went to a for-profit business school and graduated with a certificate as an executive secretary. I knew that I could always find work with that training.

It was there that I took my first real writing course: business writing. And I was good at it. I could produce a polished professional letter, perfectly formatted, every bell and whistle in place.

Years later, back in school as an adult college student majoring in Environmental Science at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, my research papers across every subject were well received. I thought I had figured this writing thing out.

Then came my master's thesis at The University of Waterloo.
After all my field data had been collected, analyzed, and interpreted, I remember sitting in front of my computer, staring at the blank page, feeling like I was standing at the bottom of Mt. Everest, looking up. All that data. All that research. All that was expected of me. I had no idea how to begin.
I cried in my cubicle, quietly, wondering how I was ever going to turn everything I knew into something worthy of a master's degree.

I was not a beginning writer. I was an experienced writer who had hit a wall she didn't know how to climb. Really had not even imagined would be there.

To this day, 25 years later, I still vividly remember the enormity of that writing block. And it's a big part of why I spent 12 years as a writing coach—developing a framework that gives student and adult writers a clear path through exactly the kind dread and paralysis that comes from fear of failure.

Now it's your turn.

When did writing stop feeling possible, for you or for your student? What was the moment the blank page won? What was the moment you overcame fear to succeed?

Drop it in the comments. I read and respond to every one.

👉 https://valiantlane.com/the-writing-framework

Something I often hear from students is this: "Everyone else seems to know how to do this. I'm the only one who doesn't get it."

The truth: you are not alone. Feeling anxiety about writing is very common, even for experienced writers who don’t always know where to start as soon as they sit in front of their keyboards.

Struggling with writing is one of the most universal experiences, especially in school where the stakes can be very high. Grades depend on what a teacher or professor thinks about your writing. Getting accepted to college depends on grades. So every other student in your class is staring at the same assignment, and their self-talk is saying the same thing yours is: “I’m the only one who doesn't know where to start.” That isolation — thinking we’re all alone — makes facing the blank page even harder.

Here's what I've learned from more than 12 years of working one-on-one with students: shifting our self-talk from anxiety and unfair self-criticism to curiosity about what might help. I’ve found that having a clear, step-by-step process for writing an essay is what offers a place to start, work through, and complete a writing assignment.

That's exactly why I built The Writing Framework™: 15 Steps to Your Strong Five-Paragraph Essay. It’s not just structure for an essay. It’s the reassurance that there is a reliable path you can use anytime, it's clear, and you are more than capable of using it successfully.
When a student discovers that their struggle isn't unique, that capable, serious, hardworking students at every level experience writing struggles, something shifts. The stress lifts. The isolation dissolves. And writing becomes something approachable as part of a community of learners, not as a test they're taking alone.

You can become a more skillful, confident writer. And I’m in your corner, here to help you figure this out.

👉 Learn more: https://valiantlane.com/the-writing-framework

Solving The Blank Page Writing Problem

When a student, or anyone faced with a writing task, shuts down in front of the blank page, the instinct is to give it a label: unmotivated. Often it is not. In my experience as a writer and an evidence-based Coach, that label has significant judgment attached to it and doesn’t constructively describe what’s happening. Or lend itself to the critical thinking needed to provide a strategy to solve the problem.

What I've learned and consistently observed throughout more than 12 years working with middle school, high school, college, and post-graduate students is something significant is not often considered: the theory of self-determination. So, let’s think about how self-determination helps us solve problems.

Beginning with The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the basic definition of self-determination is the “free choice of one's own acts or states without external compulsion.” This definition relates to something called “intrinsic motivation” — our own internal drive to engage with a situation or task, for instance a writing assignment.

A deeper understanding of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) offers the opportunity to gain wisdom around how we can develop intrinsic motivation. In their 2000 paper, “The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior,” the founding experts on SDT, psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, identified three core psychological needs that drive intrinsic motivation.

According to Deci and Ryan (2000), “Self-determination theory (SDT) maintains that an understanding of human motivation requires a consideration of innate psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness.”

Competence: having the knowledge and skills to succeed at the task in front of you.

Autonomy: being able to regulate, organize, and direct oneself, acting freely and independently.

Relatedness: feeling meaningfully connected with others and having a sense of belonging.

At least one of these sources of intrinsic motivation will have collapsed when a student stares at a blank page and shuts down. Sometimes it’s a domino effect and all three have broken down.
They don't feel capable (competence). They feel trapped by an assignment they didn't choose and can't see a path through (autonomy). And they feel isolated in their confusion, convinced that everyone else somehow knows how to do this (relatedness). Motivation crashes.

An effective tool for creating, or restoring, a student’s ability to complete a writing assignment — and attain any goal for that matter — is structure. All three sources of intrinsic motivation can be enhanced through a sound structure.

I built The Writing Framework™: 15 Steps to Your Strong Five-Paragraph Essay, intentionally from the ground up, to support all three. Practicing with a clear, step-by-step process restores a sense of competence. Having a writing structure that provides a reliable process that can be accessed independently builds autonomy. And knowing that this exact struggle is shared by serious, capable students at every level — that restores relatedness.

Intrinsic motivation grows stronger when the conditions for it exist.
If you're working with a student who seems checked out around writing, I'd encourage you to ask not "Why won't they try?” but "What do they need in order to feel capable of starting?"

That's a question with an answer: a writing practice plan and structure that builds knowledge and skills, the opportunity to work independently with a proven process, and the sense of belonging with everyone who is learning to become a confident and skillful writer.

[This article was originally published on https://valiantlane.com/solving-the-blank-page-writing-problem.]

About The Author:

Valerie A. Lane is an Independent STEM Educational Consultant, Scientist-Coach, and National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach (NBHWC) based in Greater Boston. With more than 12 years of experience working one-on-one with middle school, high school, college, and post-graduate students, Valerie brings a research scientist's rigor and a coach's compassion to educational and career consulting. She is the developer of The Writing Framework™: 15 Steps to Your Strong Five-Paragraph Essay — a structured, evidence-based writing practice grounded in self-efficacy and self-determination theory. Learn more at valiantlane.com/the-writing-framework.

Have you ever wondered why some students can sit down and write with confidence while others freeze before they've written a single word?

It's not talent. It's not intelligence. It's not even how much they like to write.

It's structure. And more specifically — it's knowing exactly what to do at each stage of the writing process, before the anxiety has a chance to take hold.

This is the insight behind The Writing Framework™: 15 Steps to Your Strong Five-Paragraph Essay. No arbitrary rules; 15 intentional steps that organize and clarify thinking.

Here's the logic:

Each step in the framework accomplishes one specific goal in a sequence, taking one writing decision off the table to make room for the next. Instead of facing a blank page with infinite possibilities and no direction, a student faces one clear task at a time. What is this assignment really asking? How do I relate to the topic? What do I want to say about this topic? What evidence supports my thinking? How do I connect one idea to the next? What have I learned and how do I convince my audience?

When writing an essay is approached as a path to a destination, something important happens with each step. The overwhelming becomes manageable. The manageable becomes doable. And the doable — done consistently — makes writing a skillful and confident destination.

That's how writing skill development actually works, practiced through a well-defined, organized framework.

The blank page then becomes an uplifting opportunity for thoughtfully expressing ideas and feelings; and, most important, for connecting with others.

👉 Learn more: https://valiantlane.com/the-writing-framework

Do you ever sit down to write an essay and just... freeze?

You're not alone. And it's not because you're a bad writer.

For most students, writing feels hard because no one has ever shown them a clear, step-by-step process for how to actually do it. You might understand the topic. You might be confident in what your teacher expects. You might even know what you want to say. But getting it out of your head and onto the page in a way that makes sense…that's where it falls apart.

Here's what I've learned from working with hundreds of students over the past 12 years: writing struggles are almost always about not having a reliable framework to follow.

When you don't know what to do next, the blank page becomes overwhelming. And when the blank page becomes overwhelming, the self-talk starts. "I'm not good at this…I don't even know where to begin…This is impossible…I don’t have time for this!”

That self-talk is a real problem. And a clear framework can stop it before it starts.

The Writing Framework™: 15 Steps to Your Strong Five-Paragraph Essay gives you exactly that — a precise, step-by-step process that takes you from a blank page to a finished essay, one step at a time.

No more freezing. No more staring. Just a clear path forward.

You don't have to be a "good writer" to start. You just need to take Step 1, then Step 2 and on until you have a complete essay.

Becoming a more skillful and confident writer follows naturally.

👉 Learn more: https://valiantlane.com/the-writing-framework

valiantlane.com

I am happy to announce the launch of my eBook and page: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DdbAgQLkk/

We’re LIVE! 🚀

I'm launching The Writing Framework™: 15 Steps to Your Strong Five-Paragraph Essay, an eBook built from more than 12 years of working one-on-one with students who struggled to get started, stay organized, and finish strong.

I know that struggle firsthand. When I was writing my own master's thesis, the blank page was genuinely frightening. And over the years, I watched that same fear stop hundreds of capable, intelligent students before they'd written a single word. What I discovered — as a Scientist-Coach and as someone who has been there — is that a writing struggle is often about not having a clear, repeatable process to follow. When a student doesn't know exactly what to do next, the blank page becomes a test of who they are. The writing problem becomes a self-confidence problem. And that's when the domino effect of negative self-talk sets in.

The Writing Framework™: 15 Steps to Your Strong Five-Paragraph Essay was built to stop the first domino from falling.

It's designed for:

✏️ Students in grades 8 through 12 navigating more demanding writing expectations.

🎓 College students mastering research papers, analytical essays, and argumentative writing.

🌍 Adults and English language learners building more skillful and confident written communication.

Through 15 structured steps, writers move from a blank page to a finished essay, with growing clarity, competence, and confidence at every step.

The Writing Framework™ also addresses something every student, parent, and educator is thinking about right now: AI and ownership of your own work. As I write in the eBook…

“For your writing to be truly yours, you must be able to fully explain your topic, defend its thesis, and reframe your ideas without AI.”

This framework helps you get there.

There are three ways to begin your student’s or your own writing practice:

📖 The eBook for a complete, independent writing practice.

📖 The eBook + 1 or 3 hours of individualized, one-on-one coaching with Valerie.

☀️ Personal Summer Writing Workshop, a six-week immersive writing experience with Valerie, including the eBook.

Every option is built around The Writing Framework™: 15 Steps to Your Strong Five-Paragraph Essay.

If you know a student or adult who has decided they're not a writer, please share this. They may simply not have had the opportunity to work within a clear framework for becoming a more skillful writer.

Twelve years in the making; I hope The Writing Framework™: 15 Steps to Your Strong Five-Paragraph Essay serves you or your student well.

👉 Learn more and purchase: https://valiantlane.com/the-writing-framework

I help people navigate life’s transitions—whether in education, career, or personal growth—with purpose, clarity, and perspective.

Through my organization, ValiantLane, I guide students, families, and STEM professionals across the full education-to-work lifecycle. Together, we clarify meaning, purpose, and direction; align values; and build sustainable paths forward—grounded not only in strategy and credentials, but in self-leadership and lived experience.

Before my 12 years of college counseling and career coaching, I spent more than 14 years as a research and consulting environmental scientist, working in academic research, university–industry partnerships, operations management, and litigation support for Fortune 500 clients. Those years gave me a deep understanding of both the human and organizational realities of STEM education and careers—and the insight to help others navigate complex professional choices with confidence.

Along the way, I noticed something important: no matter the field, the most meaningful transitions are guided not just by skills or opportunities, but by reflection, self-understanding, and well-being. That realization led me to scaffold and expand my work into health and wellness as a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach and a Certified Wellcoach.

My new health and wellness coaching venture is in development as "graycful," a platform dedicated to women’s mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being—exploring growth through the lens of time, experience, and self-awareness. My blog, "A Longer View," a collection of essays reflecting on the wisdom gained over decades and the ways we heal, grow, and make meaning as life unfolds, will be hosted at "graycful." So stay tuned for updates as development progresses.

On a morning with nourishing, torrential rain, I am inspired by this nourishment from the Daily Stoic email that landed in my inbox. I hope it nourishes you:

"'The secret to happiness is work worth doing.'*...Stoics didn’t seek happiness. They sought purpose. They were of service to others. They worked on art and made scientific breakthroughs and changed people’s lives. They fought for causes. They held public office. They represented clients in court. They dedicated themselves to their children. They did their duty. They did work worth doing. The byproduct of which was happiness, joy, contentment, pride, satisfaction, all of those things....[happiness] is not pursued. It ensues. From doing work worth doing."

*Attributed to Supreme Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

"It’s Never Too Late: 25 Famous Women on Starting Over in a New Career." I can vouch for this. At 39 I went to college to become an environmental scientist. Got a BSc in Environmental Science/Hydrology and a MSc in Earth Sciences. Worked 14 years as a consulting environmental scientist. In 2010 got coaching training and became a career coach for STEM workers and worked 12 years in that field. As of February 2022 enhanced my training to become a Certified Health and Wellness Coach. Now I also offer help to create work well-being, including purpose, satisfaction, and forward momentum.

See this article at https://www.thecut.com/article/famous-women-on-switching-careers.html?fbclid=IwAR2TRAYMyKtJBYjAQVlDav9TSE4h4wrtUygEarJ1OBvRUbAopCBXYPOW3Ao"

It’s Never Too Late: 25 Famous Women on Starting Over in a New Career Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cardi B, Mindy Kaling, and more famous women on starting over in a new career.