Coaching

Definitely not! All that writing requires is your imagination and a way to jot down your ideas. But, if you learn your craft best with one-on-one guidance, you’re tempted to abandon your draft at the first sign of a rewrite, or you want to vet your changes before you make them, I can help. Coaching can be an efficient way to overcome the hurdles holding you back from your writing goals.

Most writing coaches are writers who use their experience to mentor you through roadblocks they have overcome in their careers. As a short story editor with a personal coaching background, I offer a different service: I will educate your inner critic. Using your current work-in-progress, we will identify your strongest and weakest areas of short story composition. Then, we will use these patterns to help you more accurately self-evaluate your work, structure your revision process, and complete your rewrite.

• Integrate feedback. Sometimes, integrating feedback on your manuscript can be annoying (or exhausting or overwhelming). I can help you with the integration and brainstorm easier ways to approach it in the future.
• Learn to self-assess. My goal in coaching is to lead you through my thought process so that you come to see what an editor sees (and confirm those niggling feelings you have about the story). Discussion of the text to determine what works, what doesn’t, and why helps you more accurately self-assess.
• Develop self-editing skills. Hearing me think through the revision process, seeing me demonstrate what to do with the text, and trying it yourself with supervision can help you feel more confident when editing your own work.
• Try new techniques. It can be daunting to try a new writing technique knowing that trial and error is inevitable. Coaching doesn’t eliminate dead ends, but it does allow me to provide examples and tips that usually take longer to learn on your own. (Check out my list of craft topics below.)

1. Pre-reading. Before the session, I’ll read your draft and prepare notes and answers to any questions you’re coming in with. If you’d prefer to work on honing your craft outside of your work-in-progress, I’ll prep a lesson (and maybe send you some homework).
2. Get down to work. During the session, we’ll work through problems from big-picture ideas down to the finer details. We’ll go at a pace that works for you, answering questions and brainstorming ideas as we go.
3. Achieve time dilation. Depending on the complexity of the issues and the depth of our discussion, we can usually cover two to three questions per hour, or if we’re working line by line, three to four pages per hour.
4. A few minutes before the session is over, we’ll summarize what we’ve covered and go over next steps.

1. One-on-one help. One hour of help with your story’s most significant issues in whatever form works best for you: brainstorming, Q&A, line-by-line feedback, analyzing literary examples, venting existential dread, revision process development, etc.
2. Next steps and resources. An email summarizing what we covered, your next steps for integrating changes into your manuscript, and any resources we discussed.
3. A copy of the session transcript and access to a session recording.