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A Writer's Coach: An Editor's Guide to Words That Work

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Writing coach Jack Hart just published the best book about the craft of writing since William Zinsser's classic "On Writing Well."
"A Writer's Coach: An Editor's Guide to Words that Work," comes at a good time. Bad books come out of printing houses, magazines disappear, and newspaper continue to commit slow suicide, writing about government infrastructure or "converting" to online under the theory that two-paragraph text information bursts are what readers desperately crave.
(Actually, what readers crave is video, a lot more video than writers or newspapers are giving them...but fundamentally, with that video, what they really want are STORIES).
Jack is a writer's editor who knows how to build great stories. Readers might want more video these days, but they have hungered for good stories since long before a blind Greek began to dictate the first chanting lines of the Iliad. The online world will figure this out, probably sooner rather than later, and when they do, the reading public will find good stories, video and text, all of them containing the same fundamentals that Homer used to create his masterpieces. There are 12 fundamentals, actually: Method, Process, Structure, Force, Brevity, Clarity, Rhythm, Humanity, Color, Voice, Mechanics, Mastery.
Those are Hart's 12 chapter headings in "Writer's Coach, but they were the 12 tools of Homer and Aeschylus and Shakespeare and Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg and any storyteller who's ever captivated an audience.
What appears underneath those simple chapter headings is some of the best instruction anyone could have about how to become a skilled writer, and Jack does it by bringing clarity to the most complex ideas One of the hardest writing concepts I ever tried to memorize, for example, is the "ladder of abstraction," the profound idea that all words exist on a continuum running from the absolutely concrete to the cosmically abstract. It's a valuable idea for a writer to memorize, and in the ten years since I encountered it I could never make it stick in my head, until I saw this in Jack's chapter called "Color." Here's a ladder anyone can grasp:

LADDER OF ABSTRACTION:
Everything there is
Living things
Vertebrates
Humanity
Americans
American truck drivers
Portland truck drivers
Acme Freight truck drivers
Fred

Jack's book demystifies writing while deftly explaining the classic underpinnings of writing as classic art. As a newspaper editor he's edited two Pulitzer-prize-winning stories and contributed to a third; he`s long been known as one of the great coaches of writing in the country. In each chapter, he takes apart the mechanics of writing the way a gifted mechanic take apart a car, showing in an engaging way how each part works and how it all fits into a whole. For anyone like me who desperately wants to get better at writing, this is the book to have.
The best part about this is that Jack lets loose the confident and catty soul of wit. Turn to nearly any page, and you'll see it:
"Some writers bristle at the very sound of the word `outlining.' But please put aside all those negative connotations that linger from the outlines your grade school teachers forced you to do. Forget Roman numerals. Forget subheadings and sub-subheadings. All you need is a quick-and-dirty summary that cuts right to the key points."
/
"Why should writing be agony?" he asks. "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 the whining?"
/
"Of all the devices that can add humanity to your writing, the direct quotation is the most overused. A newspaper sports story or a traditional news feature may contain a direct quote in every other paragraph, a practice that usually produces a parade of inane or merely dull utterances. Great magazine writers repeatedly demonstrate that the direct quote is expendable, writing five thousand words or more without resorting to one direct quote."

Reading Jack's book about craftsmanship reminds me of a crew of workmen I worked for in the summer of 1975. The carpenters were small-town men from Kansas who chewed tobacco, talked wistfully about women, drank cheap beer in their private hours, and paid attention to the exactness demanded by their craft. Every move they made had a purpose: "Keepin' everything square with the world," they called it. They used chalked string snap-lines to quickly lay down a straight line on a row of boards to make a cut; they used levels to keep the floors and stud boards straight; they studied diagrams, placed boards and made cuts in a sequence that put a building together that could stand for centuries. They knew the names, purposes and nuances of every tool, every grain of wood and every sequence of process that they laid their hands to.
Most writers, in contrast, just start typing, which is why so many stories fall apart in their hands or don't get read by an audience.
Not one of those carpenters, as far as I know, has ever attended the Poynter Institute's national writing workshops, or the annual Nieman Narrative Writing conference in Boston, where Jack speaks to packed rooms; but those guys with the toolkits would have recognized him as a craftsman. Great writing is mostly craftsmanship, with just a brushstroke of art, and Jack is an engaging teacher of both.
Here is Jack, explaining why writers write badly, or succumb to writers' block, or see a story with great potential fall apart in their hands:
"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 minds' 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.' "
Jack explains all, from how to conceptualize and create to how to begin laying out steps that make a story stand tall.

Other samplings from the book:
"The secret to writing well is in the process, not the finished product. You get better not by sitting down at the keyboard and trying to match the finished work of good writers, but by changing the way you work.
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"Think first; write later. Why hurry to the keyboard if you're just going to sit there, stressing out and string at a blank screen? Pave your way to a first draft with some sort of rough plan. Scan your notes. Jot down key points. Ask yourself some questions. If you have two hours to write, take an hour to prepare. If you're fifteen minutes from deadline, take five to think."
/
"Shrink your subject. Most of us are way too ambitious when we set out to write. So we end up with a Missouri Basin phenomenon---a flood that's a mile wide and an inch deep. Give your readers some depth so that they can enjoy the water. Pick the most interesting, unusual, or surprising aspect of your subject and dive in."

Books on writing are often too general to be of any use. That's the reason I rarely recommend writing books. In fact, the only two books that I've recommended are McKee's "Story" and Franklin's "Writing for Story." But now I've added another to my list: Jack Hart's "A Writer's Coach."

Although aimed primarily at journalists (in the same way that, say, McKee is aimed at screenwriters), this book will be immensely useful to anyone who takes the writing craft seriously, no matter what they write. In fact, "A Writer's Coach" is an excellent companion to McKee and Franklin because it covers topics not covered by them. Hart's section on "color" alone is worth the price of the book (in it he explains the Ladder of Abstraction). But there are plenty of other useful topics/items as well, including the sections on endings, clarity, humanity, and the "Selected Resources for Writers" in the back.

The book is well organized and easy to read/navigate. I've worked as a freelance writer since 1999, but this book taught me a few things that I didn't know. My plan was to read only a few pages every night before bed, but this book is so good I've been staying up half the night reading it!

If you're a writer who is passionate about learning craft, buy this book.

Books on writing often reiterate the same advice we learn over time, the reader sometimes lucks out in using a tidbit or two. Realistically, no one has time to study the advice and put it to practice. Thus, it's not a bad thing for a book on writing to cover the things we've read before. The more we read about it, the more it stinks in.

But you can't read A Writer's Coach in the same way you read any other writing book. This one goes deeper meaning a reader may absorb the information better by reading one chapter at a time to understand and practice the concepts. Coaching an athlete to improve at something doesn't happen overnight. Thus, this book targets the serious writer who needs to move beyond the basic books on writing in order to take writing to the next level.

I try to avoid writing general reviews that tell the reader nothing, but Hart is a master in explaining the concepts of method, process, structure, and everything else he covers. It's difficult to capture them into a little review when I try to avoid long reviews.

Business and life coaching grows more popular because they're effective in helping people change behavior and improve. In thinking about coaches, I reflected on my childhood years when I played sports. The best coaches point out the right way to swing a bat, serve a volleyball, or shoot a basket. They also help players review their weaker moves so they can fix their form rather than let them continue using bad form, which will hurt them in the end. "Coach" is a fitting word in the title because Hart takes the coaching approach in showing the writer the right form for taking an idea from start to finish.

The book speaks more to journalists and non-fiction writers. However, much advice works across all writing genres -- so those who thrive on telling stories can glean a few valuable lessons from Hart. Expect to find high quality content that you find in the best college textbooks -- except subtract the stiff and convoluted writing. Hart's writing style makes the reading easy. A Writer's Coach contains smart, clear and logical guidance that will take a writer's writing skills to the next level.

Of all the writing guides out there, this one stands out for its balance between passion, precision and technique. You'll find some real gems tucked nonchalantly into the most unassuming paragraphs. Most helpful are the check-lists at the end of every chapter.
As a novelist, I gleaned a lot of wisdom and encouragement from this book. If you want to build a library of master teaching, add to this Stephen King's On Writing, and Donald Maass' Writing the Break Out Novel. These three are spot on.

Jack Hart is the managing editor at 'The Oregonian' and a frequent lecturer at Harvard University's prestigious 'Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism'. In "A Writer's Coach: An Editor's Guide To Words That Work", Jack Hart draws upon his more than 30 years of experience and expertise to demystify the writing process and methodically present every step (and misstep) in the processes involved with putting down thoughts and information into print. Hart's emphasis is that good writing demonstrates energy, conciseness, personality, rhythm, clarity, as well as being 'mechanically correct'. "A Writer's Coach" is very highly recommended reading for all aspiring authors seeking to make writing stronger and more effective - be they novice beginners or seasoned experts.

Writing is intrinsically a lonely calling. It's you, your thoughts and the blank page, whether electronic or paper. As the title implies, "A Writer's Coach" should be your coach, sitting at your side especially in the moments when you firmly believe that you have absolutely nothing of any interest to say and, in any event, no one would care even if you managed to scratch out a few words.

Jack Hart aims to remind those of us who are dependent on our ability to put words on paper in a meaningful way, that there is rhyme and reason to what we do, that there are rules which if followed will let us get from the first word to the last and remain interesting to our reader.

In twelve succinctly entitled chapters, Hart sets forth the basics that many of us forget from time to time and that others have never learned. Method; Process; Structure; Force; Brevity; Clarity; Rhythm; Humanity; Color; Voice; Mechanics; Mastery. And throughout the twelve chapters, Hart displays his command of each and every quality he describes and teaches.

His style is up close and personal. Hart writes in a way that emulates the well spoken word. This book could easily be read aloud and would flow as smoothly as warm maple syrup. Aimed primarily at journalists who have to turn out (hopefully) polished writing on a daily basis, "A Writer's Coach" is invaluable to anyone writing non-fiction. I write primarily for an audience of lawyers and judges and found virtually every word of Hart's advice valuable. If anything, my audience has less patience thank the average reader.

Hart is a teacher - and it shows. He is, in fact, a fine teacher. The book is loaded with examples, many of them of the "don't you be doing that" variety which are sure to provoke a belly laugh or two.

Like it's human counterpsrt, "A Writer's Coach" should be at the writer's side, day in and day out. This book is the perfect thing to pick up on a daily basis and just read and read again its nuggets of advice. It is also a way to feel that others know your angst as you try to produce strings of words that will inform, persuade and occasionally even enlighten.

Jerry

Very useful book. I've been borrowing a copy from the library for the past ten weeks, and it's high time I bought my own copy. It has helped me greatly in constructing my pieces. I'm a journalist/blogger with three deadlines every week and 50 or 60 clips, and Hart's book has been useful in more ways than I can summarize. I'll just say that I almost never buy writing books, and I never write reviews on Amazon. I'm making an exception to both rules for this great book. It's aimed at beginners, but journalists with dozens or even hundreds of pieces behind them will find useful ideas too.

Written by a long time newspaper reporter/editor, this is a book on writing that not surprisingly is more oriented to the newspaper style of prose than it is say to poetry. And like a good newpaper article he follows a set of established procedures that work. And when they work they produce 'words that work.' They have been developed over many, many years and they are taught because they do work.

Yes, he says, you have to have some talent. Some performers, be it in sports, science or writing are set apart from the rest of us. Einstein for instane, but even Einstein had to do his homework. (He proved his discoveries mathematically using the newly invented tensor calculus.) Then he had to write them down. Three papers in one magazine in 1905. For one he would have received an 'honorable mention' in chemistry. For the second he received the Nobel Prize (this one was on the basic theory of how televisions work). The third was the Theory of Relativity.

That's pretty much the path of good writing. As Mr. Hart says: Idea - Information Gathering - Focus - Organizing - Drafting - Polishing. You have the idea, you put it together, then the words flow.

It makes me wonder just what he would think of this little review should he ever see it.

Books about writing tend to fall into two groups. The first group are all about cheerleading and encouragement. Examples include Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life and Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Shambhala Library). These are great books to read if you want to get yourself writing and wish you could develop the habit of writing every day. Once you are writing regularly there is another group of books that you'll appreciate because they begin to help you develop your craft. This is a great example of this second type of book. It's full of tips and useful advice. The standout idea for me is his suggestion of writing a theme statement at the top of every piece that sums up what you are about to say. I've found this invaluable in drafting blog posts and other bits of writing. I found this a great help in writing First, Know What You Want - why goals don't work and how to make them and it continues to be useful. One for your bookshelf that you will come back to over and over again.

This book meets a real need for professional nonfiction writers, I believe. Lots of good advice from a pro. Writers will profit from the Ladder of Abstraction and the Blundell chain. As a professional magazine writer, I've always done such a chain instinctively when developing article ideas, but seeing it explained was very helpful. A "cheat sheet" at the end of each
chapter provides a succinct summary.

Writing is sometimes a lonely task, as another reviewer noted. The advice in this book will help keep you on track.