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

~ Jack R. Hart (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Good writing can dance, according to Jack Hart, "writing coach" and managing editor at The Oregonian. It has a rhythm "that pleases in its own right, creating cadences that give pleasure, regardless of content." This guide is intended to nudge insecure writers-especially those in the early stages of honing their craft-in the direction of their keyboards with practical tools for how to achieve clear, forceful and effective writing, no matter the subject. Hart's experience as a newspaperman is perhaps his greatest asset here; focused and clutter-free, chapters follow a logical learning sequence complete with one-word chapter titles ("Method" "Process" etc.) that get right to the point. His narrative tone is accessible and engaging, with anecdotes and advice from seasoned colleagues in the industry. Though positioned as a guide for tackling anything from a personal letter to a memoir, Hart's examples and terminology lean heavily on newspaper and feature writing, which may frustrate some creative types. That journalistic approach (which Hart freely admits to in the book's introduction), however, makes for an insightful, methodical approach to developing an idea into a story. Structured more like a textbook than a general professional development or trade title, this makes an ideal addition to the classroom.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Although Hart addresses his pithy writing guide to those working for newspapers and magazines, the managing editor of the Portland Oregonian offers such practical yet inspirational advice that both aspiring and longtime writers in any discipline would benefit from reading his book. He immediately strips away the mystique that often surrounds the writing process: "Great writing happens not through some dark art, but when method meets craft." He shoots down a litany of angst-ridden complaints, including writer's block and keyboard anxiety, with hard-nosed insight gleaned from years of working at a daily newspaper. Emphasizing that most of the work of writing comes in the thinking and information-gathering stages, Hart gives a finely detailed analysis of the steps needed to efficiently produce a finished piece. He also provides many excerpts from excellent writers illustrating the value of rhythm, color, and voice, and points out common pitfalls, such as spending too much time polishing the final draft instead of organizing the initial one. Best of all, Hart's writing is a model of the craft he so eloquently dissects. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (August 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375423273
• ISBN-13: 978-0375423277
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #720,158 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Keeping words square with the world., November 28, 2006

By	Roy Wenzl "newspaper reporter" (Wichita, Kansas.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.
/
"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."

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, a well written book for writers!!, November 12, 2006

By	Hedwig of NC "Hedwig" (North Carolina Coast) - See all my reviews

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.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For the Writer Ready to Move to the Next Level, September 26, 2007

By	Meryl K. Evans "Content Maven behind meryl.net" (Plano, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.