A Writer's Coach: The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies That Work - Softcover

Hart, Jack R.

 
9781400078691: A Writer's Coach: The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies That Work
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1400078695 ISBN 13: 9781400078691
Verlag: Anchor, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Mystified over misplaced modifiers? In a trance from intransitive verbs? Paralyzed from using the passive voice? To aid writers, from beginners to professionals, legendary writing coach Jack Hart presents a comprehensive, practical, step-by-step approach to the writing process. He shares his techniques for composing and sustaining powerful writing and demonstrates how to overcome the most common obstacles such as procrastination, writer’s block, and excessive polishing. With instructive examples and excerpts from outstanding writing to provide inspiration, A Writer’s Coach is a boon to writers, editors, teachers, and students.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jack Hart is a managing editor of The Oregonian and has served as the newspaper's writing coach and staff development director. Formerly a professor of journalism at The University of Oregon, he has often lectured at Harvard's Niemann Conference for Narrative Journalism, and he teaches at writers' conferences throughout the country.

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The Agony and the Methodology

The pain of writing is legend. And its intensity hardly varies between the student facing a term-paper deadline, the office worker thrashing out a report, and the seasoned professional writing for publication.

When I run a writing seminar, I usually hand out a questionnaire that, among other things, quizzes the participants about the emotion they bring to their writing. They like to quote Dorothy Parker, the New York literary wit who said she hated writing, but loved having written. "It's agony and ecstasy," one writer said. "When I get the idea, and when I'm finished . . . it's joyful. Everything in between is agony."

Why should that be? Physically, writing's relatively easy work. Take it from a guy who's loaded log ships, pumped gas, and tarred roofs in the midsummer sun. Writers work on their butts and out of the weather. So what's with all this whining?

And why the avoidance, which one writer labeled "tap dancing"? "I'll dance around the story," he said, "putting it off because I think it's harder than it invariably is."

What's the first thing you do when facing a new writing assignment? I ask. "Get a cup of coffee," a journalist replied. "More difficult story, more coffee, more trips to the bathroom, more procrastination."

"But is it really procrastination," another writer asked, "when I'm walking around, getting another cup of coffee, and thinking about the story? More likely, it's a paralysis from possibilities: possible stories, possible leads, possible story flow."

Exactly! Paralysis from possibilities. The tendency to see the task ahead as overwhelming explains most keyboard anxiety. For a variety of reasons, we view writing from the back end. Day in and day out, we witness the finished work of accomplished writers. In our mind's eye we stroll down street after street of beautiful homes, ignorant of the piece-by-piece construction that created them, one two-by-four at a time. "Look at that gorgeous building," we think. "The craftsmanship. The detail work. The sheer size of the thing! I could never build something like that."

Time for another cup of coffee.

But there's another way to look at it. For the past year I've watched four row houses rise on the lot next door. The work was noisy, messy, and distracting, but instructive, too. From the logging crew that brought in chain saws and cleared the lot to the roofers who nailed on the shingles, not one bit of work went into those houses that you or I couldn't do ourselves, given enough time and some research into the technical details. The secret is in the process, not the finished buildings.

The pain of writing stems from comparing your blank screen with the finished pages you see all around you. But beautiful writing is built one step at a time, just like a house. Take the steps slowly, break them down into pieces small enough to handle easily, and the agony will disappear.

Writing, it is often said, is thinking. And the most productive form of thinking, the method that built the modern world, is science. The discipline, the logic, and the procedural rules of science took us from oxcarts to interstellar probes. So it's not surprising that scientists place so much emphasis on process. Science, they will insist, is process. Articles in scientific journals invariably include detailed descriptions of how the authors conducted their research--the methodology. That mandatory section of the report sometimes takes more space than the section describing results.

Methodology is just as important for writers. "Genius," said F. Scott Fitzgerald, "is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind." In writing, that can involve a considerable journey. And, as every mother's cliche will have it, the longest journey begins with a single step.

The Back-End View of Writing

For decades, I focused my writing-improvement efforts on the last stages of the writing process, the eleventh-hour nit-picking that burnishes words to a high gloss. That's what I spent my time doing in the newsroom. And those were the skills I taught in my magazine columns and workshops.

I wasn't alone. Most writing coaches, copy editors, workshop organizers, newspaper line editors, readers, and critics have focused on the polish stage of writing.

Harvard education professors V. A. Howard and J. H. Barton, authors of a wonderful summary of writing research called Thinking on Paper, note that a principal "obstacle to writing improvement is our tendency to dwell on either the final results or the mental origins of writing to the exclusion of the activity of writing, as if an empty gap separated writing from thinking."

As Bob Baker, the author of Newsthinking, puts it, "You have to stop concentrating on merely the results of good writing--the examples they show you in most textbooks. You have to begin thinking about the causes--the thought strategies that created those polished examples."

Baker, a former writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times, was one of the writing-process pioneers who helped me discover new dimensions to writing and editing. Don Murray, the Pulitzer Prize-winning University of New Hampshire professor, was another. Murray's seminal book, Writing for Readers, helped shift the focus of American writing instruction from results to causes.

I've seen the power of what Murray teaches. Analyzing and improving process, making it less painful and more efficient, is the surest route to writing improvement. It's helped me with my own writing, and I'm confident it can help yours, too.

I. THE WRITING PROCESS

Seize the subject, and the words will follow.

--Cato the Elder

Writing One Step at a Time

Most of us have had a classmate who could sit down the night before the due date for a big term paper and bang it out in a couple of hours. He'd be heading out for a beer while we sat staring at our keyboards with--as journalist and screenwriter Gene Fowler described the predicament--little drops of blood forming on our foreheads.

Or maybe your experience was with a colleague who could knock out a big departmental report before lunch. Or a friend who dashed off long, beautifully organized letters in one continuous flow of words. Or a closet novelist who produced a book by turning out a few pages a day despite holding a full-time job and having two toddlers underfoot.

Maybe they're all writing gibberish. Or, like the reporters who shrug and say their stories just "write themselves," maybe they're mindlessly spewing out cliches according to a formula that requires no thought whatsoever.

Still, sometimes the two-hour term paper gets an A, the speedy report writer earns a promotion, and the relaxed reporter wins a Pulitzer.

That shouldn't be terribly surprising. Most accomplished writers follow an efficient road map that leads them through projects without a lot of angst. In the real world of experienced professionals, a published piece almost never originates at the keyboard.

Consider everything that typically leads to a final draft:

1. The idea that results in a piece of writing may take days, weeks, or months forming in the writer's mind. It probably will be shaped by discussion with others--editors, friends, sources. Eventually, the best ideas take the form of hypotheses that can be tested in the real world.

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Verlag
Anchor
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400078695
ISBN 13 
9781400078691
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
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Verantwortliche Person
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