Author Coaching
Book coaching helps your writing by developing story, character, and your practices to revise and finish
Go beyond classes. A coach develops your skills and makes you accountable.
Together we determine your goals, identify your creation habits, and lock in your focus on the work. Writing locations, rituals, journaling to uncover meaning, tools like the Pomodoro timed practice — there’s so many concepts available to help.
I’m your guide to mastering the twisty path of getting your writing turned into a book.
Ron Seybold is as instrumental to my writing process as ink, paper and coffee. From story concept to final word, I rely on him for guidance every step of the way.
We all arrive at our assignments desk with the tools we’ve got at the time. The assignments desk editor during my journalism days always posed suggestions and questions. There’s a baked-in curiosity to the nonfiction practice. Curiosity is a great catalyst for telling memorable stories.
More than 40 years later, curiosity is still paying dividends for the authors I serve. We concoct, using questions as our launchpad. I can interview a writer about what a character is feeling or might decide. We search for the why.
Journalism suits up for the game of stories without conclusions in hand. We do the same thing as readers, consuming and enjoying stories because we want to learn. And to experience, if the writing is potent enough, through fiction or creative nonfiction.
Writers everywhere are being offered AI. You’re either Not-Bot, or Got-Bot. You might even be Not-Yet-Bot, and if that’s you, I’m glad I have your attention.
When you book a set of hours with a coach, you will come meetings to discern what you already suspect about your characters. What do they fear, what must they leave behind, what makes them yearn? Our talk, all transcribed for us, is laced with words that present options.
Perhaps
Consider
Maybe
Collaboration is our mantra in a coaching call. You want to size up the possibilities and seize the ones that make you want to write. There’s not a lot to be gained by learning from a AI bot that a few choices that it can recall were successful. Not if those choices don’t spark your muse’s engine. A coach drives you deeper, so your story improves.
As coach and author, we find and create stories together that can be expressed in a unique and familiar way. We recall things that are similar to things you’ve read, or listened to, or watched.
We call it brainstorming because the phrase conjures an act of a god. Weather is unpredictable, glorious, terrifying and boring. A storm is a tool of change, though, for tragedy or benefit, water for the crops to save them, or rains to kill innocents. We brainstorm because we want to toy with the god-like in ourselves.
Whenever you can afford the time and the modest expense to storm with a human, I can be there for you. I ask questions so you imagine the worst, the most absurd, or the finest outcomes.
“I’m stuck” is one of the most common things a writer says while exposing their imagination.
There might be a day when some machine will reply to your needs. In the meantime, you have books to write. Your coach is ready to help.
Book Coaching
Your investment in coaching will deliver more writing. Together we develop a package that fits your project and your budget. Take your book to the finish line with coaching.