Top Athletes Have Coaches. Should Book Writers?
Today’s blog post comes to us from Author Accelerator CEO Jennie Nash. If you enjoy today’s content, you can sign up for Jennie's weekly newsletter here.
In 2011, Atul Gawande, the surgeon and writer, wrote an article for The New Yorker’s Personal Best column, with the headline: Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?
This article came out around the time when I was forming my book coaching business and philosophy and it had an enormous impact on me. I had been teaching memoir writing in the UCLA Writer’s Extension Program, one of the largest adult writing education programs in the country, and the work was very frustrating. I loved it, but it also seemed to me that the entire set-up was terrible for both the instructors and the students. We would gather for 10 weeks, or 6 weeks, or 4 intensive days – a group of 15 or 20 students and one instructor. Book writers are working on very complex creative and intellectual projects – projects that normally take a year to complete, and usually many more to master. I wanted each of my students to make progress in the short time we were together – but what did progress mean?
There is the idea of writing about one’s own life – of dealing with the fallibility of memory, the fragility of sharing one’s most vulnerable experiences, and selecting the small moments in an entire life that will illuminate the point you are hoping to make.
There is the idea of crafting a narrative – of writing scenes, developing characters, and weaving them together into a coherent whole that holds a reader’s attention.
There is the idea of trying to get emotion on the page – of using words to convey feeling, of understanding the oft-misunderstood idea of show don’t tell (you do tell, you have to!), of how to write in a way that feels like real life.
There is the idea of writing for publication – of writing something that will be chosen, and bought, and sold, and read. That demands an understanding of the marketplace and of one’s own desire and motivation.
In any given classroom full of students, there would be people working on all of these ideas, at various levels of mastery, and with various levels of doubt and overwhelm, but every student came in with the same deep yearning for someone to see their work – to truly see it – and help them know if it was any good, and if not, how to make it so.
Set Up to Lose
The job of the writing instructor is wonderful, but it is also in many ways a lose-lose proposition. Students press a chapter into your hands, or 30 pages, or whole manuscripts, asking, Please look at this, see me, help me know if I should keep doing this work, if I have a chance, if I am worthy. And you can’t do it. It would take you all week to do it – and if you did, you would be making a few dollars an hour. And so you read a few pages and give a bit of specific feedback, and then you give general advice, general inspiration, a few lessons in craft that can stick in a short period of time.
I kept thinking that there had to be a better way – and that way fell into my lap when one of my fellow instructors asked if I would help her write a book. She was teaching in UCLA’s fiction program and she wanted to write a book about the things novel writers get wrong, and why they get them wrong (which, she believes, has to do with the way our brains are wired), and how they could get them right. She understood that I had a market-focused approach to writing; although there is a time and a place for writing to learn, and writing for pleasure, and writing because it’s therapeutic, I am all about writing for publication – about naming that intention and working toward it. She also understood that I had a strategic approach – a logical process for approaching the creative work – and she wanted both the market focus and the logic.
So I said yes, I would help her. We developed a system where I gave her assignments, she did them, and I responded to her work every week, like clockwork, for about a year. As a writer, she got the intensive attention writers need on their work, and as an instructor, I got to give the sustained and deep attention I wanted to give a writer, and to help her get to where she wanted to go.
That writer was Lisa Cron, and her book, Wired for Story, went on to be published by Ten Speed/Random House, and become a beloved book in the writing community. She followed it up with Story Genius, which I also coached her through, and this week, she publishes her third book, Story or Die.
Working with Lisa was the beginning of my understanding that what writers who are serious about publication really need is not a one-time or every-once-in-awhile instructor, but a coach who can be with them throughout the entire creative process. Atul Gawande gave me a word for this work, a framework for understanding it, and the inspiration to keep doing it.
Coaching, Not Teaching
In his New Yorker piece, Gawande talks about inviting a coach into the operating room to help him continue to get better – to watch him and critique him and guide him. On surgery!! The fact that one could get better at surgery had never occurred to me – shouldn’t surgeons just be excellent at surgery, full stop? Apparently not. Apparently, surgeons can indeed get better. And really anyone doing anything can get better – which is where the idea of a coach comes in.
Gawande wrote:
“The concept of a coach is slippery. Coaches are not teachers, but they teach. They’re not your boss—in professional tennis, golf, and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach—but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.
Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention. Consider Maxwell Perkins, the great Scribner’s editor, who found, nurtured, and published such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. ‘Perkins has the intangible faculty of giving you confidence in yourself and the book you are writing,’ one of his writers said in a New Yorker Profile from 1944. ‘He never tells you what to do,’ another writer said. ‘Instead, he suggests to you, in an extraordinarily inarticulate fashion, what you want to do yourself.’”
The revelation for me was that the solution to the problem with teaching writing in a classroom was to get out of the classroom and adopt the practices of a coach: To observe and judge and guide someone 1:1. This would allow the instructor to give the writer exactly what they needed, in the order they needed it, no matter who they were, or what they were writing about.
I had some experience being coached, because I was a pretty good tennis player when I was younger – winning state titles in high school and playing at a D3 college. I switched over to squash my junior year in college and learned a whole new sport. I love to compete, and I enjoy the camaraderie and shared purpose of being on a team. I also liked the growth mindset – the idea that you could maximize your chances of winning by determining what wasn’t working and striving to fix it. What is surprising about a surgeon needing a coach is par for the course about an athlete. Coaches watch where your foot is, what you are doing with your grip, when you lift your head. They do it all without judgement, because in addition to the critique, they have a solution: point your toe there, turn your hand that way, keep your eyes on the ball.
People who play sports are immersed in this culture of outside perception leading to improvement. So are musicians and musical theater geeks. So why not writers?
As soon as I began to frame the work of helping writers as “coaching,” it made so much sense. This is the way so many adults get better at something that matters to them. We are so used to professional athletes having coaches – no one expects Serena Williams to get to the finals of Grand Slam tournaments on her own, or for a group of talented basketball players to make it to the Final Four without someone organizing their practices, watching their progress, and helping them with their mindset and their skills and their game-play. We should not expect writers to be any different. Even though writers do their work alone, they do not have to be alone in it.
Since working with Lisa on that first-ever coaching project, I have honed the art of being a book coach and launched the Book Coach Certification program at Author Accelerator. I have become an evangelist for working in this way, because I have seen it transform many hundreds of writers’ lives, making it possible for them to bring their books to life. It seems cruel to me now to imagine writers doing this work without the support of a coach.
Writers absolutely should have a book coach – to guide and to cheer, to support and to edit, to watch and to help them improve.
As I watch basketball this month, I will watch the coaches, knowing that there is a special thrill in that role. When your job is to witness, and to make game-time decisions, and to be immersed in the big-picture strategy of the work, winning is especially sweet, even if you are not the one sinking the game-winning three-pointer.
