Hey there,
I'm Julian.
& Creator of the Story Pillars Method.
If you're working on your novel in the margins of your life, join a community of fiction writers getting emails built to get you to the finish line.
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Work With Me
In the Story Pillars Programme, we work together on your novel for six months, from the story in your head to a finished first draft. You get my feedback at every step, so you don't spend years revising it later.
Current Project
Arrow Minded Trilogy (working title)
Speculative thriller
A man returns to the family manor he spent years trying to escape, called back by his parents' deaths. Among his father's belongings, he finds a collection of encrypted poems: passwords hidden in verse, written in a world that no longer trusts the cloud and keeps its most dangerous secrets on paper. As he decodes them, the evidence around their deaths starts pointing somewhere he never expected, and a figure from his past returns to bury what he's about to find.
A story about inheritance, obsession, and what we bury so others won't find it.
Written using The Story Pillars Method & illustrated by a human artist, no AI.
About
When I was eighteen, I had a story idea that would, years later, turn out to be the most ambitious creative work of my life.
But being a creative wasn't really an option back then. So I buried it and got on with life. I moved to London, joined the London School of Economics to do academic research, and then pursued a career in an advisory and research firm.
One day, the story slipped its way back through the cracks of a pretty settled life. But no amount of books or YouTube videos truly helped me write it the way I saw it in my head without the story falling apart halfway through. A draft cursed to exist between pure action and pure introspection, with neither holding the other together. So after looking at a draft that would take me years to fix, I decided to treat my own novel like a research problem. Which meant studying existing frameworks, identifying gaps, and building something new. And that's how The Story Pillars Method came to be, which pretty much saved my sanity… and my draft.
Then I decided to share the method on YouTube, and it found its way to writers who were stuck in the same place I'd been. Something about watching them finish drafts they'd nearly given up on closed a loop I'd left open for years. Now it's my turn. I'm returning to the trilogy I first imagined at eighteen, writing it with the method I built when nothing else worked. And at the same time, I'm helping the writers who found me get their own stories to the finish line.
I've stopped trying to work out whether that makes me a writer or a coach. It's both at once, each side feeding the other. A dual storyline… just not the kind I expected to be living.