RTW: What Kind of Coach…?

It’s Wednesday, and you know what that means here on the blog… Road Trip Wednesday! RTW is a weekly “Blog Carnival” (but without the flashy costumes… though if you want to read this with a flashy costume, I can’t stop you) where someone over at YA Highway posts a question, and invites people from all over the blogisphere to answer the question on their blogs. We all then post a link to our blog on the YA Highway blog, and everyone checks out the various answers. It’s all good fun in a get-to-know-you and get-some-cool-ideas and be-provoked-to-thinking kind of way.

Today’s RTW question is this: What kind of writing coach do you need? When you have to coach friends, what kind of coach are you? My initial response was, “big and soft, with a built in foot-rest, like a La-Z-boy…” then I realized it said coAch, and not coUch… so I had to re-think. YA Highway has given us some help by means of a link to an article by Sarah Enni about writing mentors. In that article, Sarah gives a range of types: the positive feedback coach (like Mr. Rogers), the gentle honesty coach (like Tim Gunn from Project Runway), the brutal honesty coach (like Jillian Michaels on The Biggest Loser), or the tear-you-down-to-build-you-up coach (like Amy Chua, The Tiger Mom).

I have a fairly thick skin. Not infallibly thick, but I can take criticism without crying or throwing a tantrum. Of course, no-one really likes to be critiqued. Everyone wants a Mr. Rogers telling them how wonderful and special they are. Perhaps, as writers, there are some things we’ve written that frankly we don’t care what anyone else thinks of them: we love them and, as far as we’re concerned, they’re perfect just the way they are. But those aren’t projects we plan to get published. I hope not, anyway. But the majority of our projects, as writers, are ones we plan to share with the rest of the world. As such we need these works to shine, to show our writing chops at their best, and be the best stories they can be. This takes objective criticism, edits, smoothing of edges, sharpening of words, stuff that we writers don’t always see “from the inside.” We need someone who will tell us when our writing sucks like a black hole, and who will tell us when something’s good–and we believe them because they don’t always tell us it’s good.

So, the kind of writing coach I need is the Simon Cowell. Yup, you heard right–and it’s not because he’s a fellow Brit. Why did people have a love-hate relationship with Simon Cowell when he was on American Idol? They hated him because he spoke his mind with blunt honesty. If a person’s singing was terrible, he wouldn’t say “Hmmm, I think you were a bit pitchy in parts.” He would say, “That was dreadful! My cat sings better than that!” And yet they loved him because he always spoke his mind, and so when he gave praise it was truly inspiring and motivating–because he never gave praise lightly. The time he gave Adam Lambert a standing ovation was probably, I daresay, one of the best moments in that young singer’s life. Cowell was never mean for the sake of being mean, either. At least for those singers who were sincere about their singing, his critiques were always meant to help them realize what they were doing wrong, and encourage them to do better next time. Sometimes the thing they were doing wrong was imagining they could sing in the first place–and he would tell them so.

As a writer, I want the kind of coach who will prevent me from embarrassing myself in front of an agent, an editor, the entire reading public. The kind of coach who will tell me when my writing’s off, or something’s not working–even if s/he doesn’t know exactly why. Someone who will tell me if the whole novel is bad and I should start over. Because that’s the kind of coach I can trust when they tell me something’s good, something works, or “this is a novel I would buy.” And, if I’m ever asked to be someone’s writing coach, that’s the kind of coach I hope I will be. So be warned!

How about you? How would you answer this question? Use the comments to answer, or participate in RTW by answering on your blog and posting a link in the comments on YA Highway.