I encourage, guide and prompt. Whether your writing skills are basic or advanced, I have a keen eye for strengths and weakness. I am civil about the weaknesses unless they are due to laziness. In fiction, if you have five riders galloping into a box canyon and six coming out the other side, I'll go berserk. In nonfiction, if you are going to tout specific brands of fishing tackle, then why on earth can't you look at your own kit and use capitals just like the manufacturers do?!
If you are typical of some past clients, you'll fire back that I'm too detail oriented, that I don't appreciate full ramifications of your art, that you are tying to do something different from all that went before. Don't I get that Muses have ordained you to be more than Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, Jane Austin, Mark Twain, C.S. Lewis and Quentin Tarantino all rolled into one?
No, I don't get it.
Once that sinks in, you'll either stay or leave. Usually writers stay because of the reasons that they came in the first place. Those reasons parallel the motives of athletes who take on personal coaches because they realize they can perform better. They are not asking for blessing on what they can already do but straight advice on how to improve. For the writer, there is something about the work that is not quite as good as first imagined. Playing with words to bring it life makes it seem dead. It isn't you. You're not sure what it means.
My job is to help you find philosophical underpinnings and logical inconsistencies, analyze structure, stick with a style most natural to you and standardize the grammar to fit that style. You can be just starting or finished with a piece, and I'll mentor you through the steps necessary to make your writing read , sound and feel like you mean it.
If you get blocked, I'll sweet talk you, I'll mock you, I'll metaphorically kick your behind, whatever it takes to get you on your feet again.
Coaching writers is not same as editing their work although the functions sometimes overlap. Editing is much more detailed and time consuming; it requires in large or small part collaborating with the writer, getting into the work and fighting side by side. Coaching is more fun. For me. You're doing all the fighting while I'm at ringside yelling, "Keep your guard up!"
When I edit, I charge by the page.
When I coach, it's by the hour. We do workouts in my office, which means you either travel here for face time or we talk on the phone. You make first contact by email, to which I usually respond with a boiler plated letter that asks you to reconsider. Wouldn't your time and money be better spent studying medicine or going into business?
My negativity is due to three writers I know. The first was a young man who wrote a first novel about growing up in upper New York State. The novel brought a time and a place and a personality fully to life. It never got sold. The author is about to retire from years working in a library.
The other two are women. One was so wildly off the wall and brilliantly kinky, I thought I was sane. Wherever she ended up, it wasn't on a best seller list. The other wrote teleplays that grabbed your complete trust by page five. She knew the genres she wrote in; her acts always built to escalation of conflict; her scene and character descriptions were to the point and never cliched; her dialogue fit her varied and colorful characters; there were no misspellings or typos. She should have sold a spec script, gone on to a staff job, become a show runner. None of that happened.
All I could give those writers was respect and appreciation. As your coach, I can give you that too. But no more. I don't control the erratic forces that allowed me to be a professional and that may or may not open the door for you. I wish it were only a matter of talent, but you have to know before going into the game, the powers that be seldom recognize novelty, and their playing field is designed to give the advantage to friends, relatives and people they have worked with before.
Contact.