Sometimes a coach can offer a single insight that makes all the difference. I discovered this recently on the squash court, and it is also true as a writing coach. That one perceptive observation, one idea, breaks the barrier to improvement.
But you still have to pay for the whole hour.
For my readers out west, squash is a game played on a small, indoor court with a lightweight racquet and a ball that hardly bounces. You can play the ball off any of the four walls. The game is fast, athletic, and as difficult as any sport I’ve ever tried. I’m obsessed with it.
Like my other favorite sport, cross-country skiing, squash takes a long time to learn above a beginner’s level. You can flail around, but to be any good you have to train your body to do it correctly. Also, there is no ceiling for improvement—the difference between the worst and the best contains an infinite number of increments.
I paid for an individual lesson because I seemed to be stuck. Like some of my writing clients, I hesitated to hire the coach, because the price seemed extravagant. How much could I really get out of it?
The pro watched me play, we did a few drills, and then he showed me what I was doing wrong with my swing—the most basic component of the game. My improvement was instantaneous. The next time I played, I was competitive with guys I’d never been able to challenge before.
I wasn’t paying for the coach’s hour, I was paying for his lifetime of watching players, analyzing their motions, and expressing how to change in a way they could understand and implement.
As a writing coach, I’m trying to fix the way my clients think rather than how they swing a racquet. Writing is thinking that you externalize. The essence of good writing is projecting your thoughts into another person’s mind (as I have written here before).
Among the most common writing mistakes is to assume your words mean the same thing to your reader as they mean to you. Like a squash player with a bad swing, you cannot improve until you fix this.
At the most basic level, consider how a beginning writer may use the word ‘it.’ As a reader, you have to puzzle through what the ‘it’ is referring to. That problem didn’t occur the writer, because he or she already knew what ‘it’ meant in the sentence.
My squash coach gave me some drills to fix my swing. For a writer, practicing correctly also is important.
Adopt the mental role of your audience and read what you have written. If that’s hard, set the work aside for a few days and then try, after you have forgotten the details. The flaws quickly emerge when you encounter them as a reader.
If you never want anyone to read your work, this advice doesn’t matter. For everyone else, it is an unavoidable threshold to improvement.
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