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A Writer's Coach: The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies That Work, by Jack R. Hart
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Mystified over misplaced modifiers? In a trance from intransitive verbs? Paralyzed from using the passive voice? To aid writers, from beginners to professionals, legendary writing coach Jack Hart presents a comprehensive, practical, step-by-step approach to the writing process. He shares his techniques for composing and sustaining powerful writing and demonstrates how to overcome the most common obstacles such as procrastination, writer’s block, and excessive polishing. With instructive examples and excerpts from outstanding writing to provide inspiration, A Writer’s Coach is a boon to writers, editors, teachers, and students.
- Sales Rank: #167610 in Books
- Model: 1763265
- Published on: 2007-08-14
- Released on: 2007-08-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .63" w x 5.19" l, .50 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
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
Review
“Wise, practical and smart, A Writer's Coach is an exceptional book, offering advice with good humor and great insight.”—Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief.“A helpful and informative guide to ‘words that work,’ covering such essential writing topics, as clarity, rhythm, mechanics and voice.”—The Seattle Post-Intelligencer“Offers such practical yet inspirational advice that both aspiring and longtime writers in any discipline would benefit from reading his book. . . . Best of all, Hart's writing is a model of the craft he so eloquently dissects.”—Booklist“A hands-on guide remarkable for its completeness, its clarity, and its passion....towers above others of its kind.”—William Blundell, author of The Art and Craft of Feature Writing
Most helpful customer reviews
59 of 60 people found the following review helpful.
Keeping words square with the world.
By RRReader
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?"
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"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."
34 of 35 people found the following review helpful.
Finally, a well written book for writers!!
By Hedwig of NC
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.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
An essential for non-fiction writers
By Jerry Saperstein
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
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