“This week in Behind the Studio — where we share the real moments, decisions, and stories shaping our creative life — we’re stepping back to reflect on where our work began and why the name still matters.”

What’s in a Name? The Story Behind ‘The Lonely Creative’

When Willow Lane and The Lonely Creative Books recently collided with a crisis, we did a deep dive with what we’ll call, for now, an online consultant. They asked us to step back and look not just at what we were doing, but at who we were — and why.

Yes, the friendship and partnership has always been the heart of what we do. But beneath that, something else was quietly binding every part of our creative world together.

For years, I’d thought of our website as a bit of a mixed bag — two creative souls making things we love. It began with novels. Then, out of our shared love for producing physical books (and an even deeper love for notebooks), it grew into notebooks and Willow Lane. From there, it grew into a catalogue of art styles, designs, products — all the things we both adore.

Or so I thought.

Online Consultant helped us see what should have been obvious:

We didn’t diversify.
We grew branches of the same tree.

Books, art, design, photography, studio life — all threaded together by one thing:

Story.
Story in words.
Story in images.
Story in the quiet, everyday life behind the scenes.

But somewhere along the way, I had begun burying the storyteller part of myself. It’s the part of me I know I was made for, and the part that once caused me deep pain. Years ago, I ran from it entirely. More recently, I hid it beneath art — a gentler, quieter outlet. It felt safer. It demanded less of me. It hurt less.

But you can only hide from the truth of who you are for so long.

Art, I realised, had still been storytelling. Even when words failed me, I was speaking in colour and line. It was another language for the same thing.

As part of the deep dive, I had to remember why I called the website The Lonely Creative. I didn’t want to revisit that because it meant acknowledging the echoes of sadness — the reason I buried storytelling in the first place. Did I want to return to that world? That “lonely” place?

But when Online Consultant and I traced the name back to its beginnings, I let myself feel it — really feel it. And as I lay awake late into the night, in a moment of deep reflection, I was finally able to articulate it. I grabbed a pen, and I wrote it all down. It was a scrawl of words, but the next day I was able to order them into the picture of both beauty and sadness they held. And as I read the words reordered, I cried. Not out of defeat, but out of recognition. I saw myself again. And I realised that being called to storytelling had once been the most worthwhile thing I’d ever done.

It could be that again — if I choose to return to it fully.

I want to share the piece I wrote that night — the one that reminded me why the name mattered, and why I chose it.

The Middle Places —
The story behind the name

There are places every storyteller knows —
the quiet hours, the in-between spaces,
the moments where imagination opens like a door.

The Lonely Creative was born there.

To be a storyteller is to dwell in the middle ground —
that place between all things.
It’s a quiet space, sometimes a lonely one,
where you stand a little apart from the world,
watching, listening, gathering the threads of what you see.

Storytellers are observers more than participators —
always on the outside looking in,
noticing the details others pass by,
holding one foot in the real world
and one in the imagined.

We live in that threshold between worlds —
the places many pass through but few stay,
the places where stories wait to be found.

It can feel solitary, yes —
but it’s also where the work becomes worthwhile,
where deeper truths reveal themselves,
and where imagination unfurls in quiet, sacred ways.

That is the world of The Lonely Creative —
the middle place, the dreaming place,
where stories are born before they are written.

It’s about the kind of solitude that shapes a story —
the hush before an idea arrives,
the stillness where characters step forward,
the private world a creator enters
long before a reader does.

Rediscovering the meaning behind the name hasn’t solved every crisis or answered every question about the future — but it has given us something steadier to stand on. Storytelling is the thread that binds our books, our art, our studio moments, and the life we share behind the scenes. Whatever shape the business takes in the months ahead, this is the part that endures. This middle place, this dreaming place, is where everything began for us — and where it begins again.

We’ve put that gentle reminder to ourselves and pointer to others on its own new page on our site:
‘Why ‘The Lonely Creative’?

About the Author: Lisa Saul

Fiction writer · creative guide · lifelong storyteller … Lisa Saul writes in the quiet spaces between words and paint. For more than twenty years she has worked side by side with her sister Naomi — shaping novels, illustrations, notebooks, and the little studio world behind this blog. A lifelong maker, Lisa has moved through journalism, photography, editing, watercolour, and award-nominated fiction, always returning to the same thread: story. Whether she’s writing a novel, illustrating a notebook, or sharing a moment from her creative life, Lisa brings a thoughtful, honest voice shaped by imagination, experience, and a deep love of helping others grow creatively.