Coach Carver

Perhaps the most useful advice I’ve received about writing is to buy a comfortable chair. While I’ve come to appreciate the understated practicality of this recommendation (along with the emphasis it places on the non-glamorous heart of the profession), another useful piece of advice is to find a writing coach.

Although there are freelance writer/instructors who bill themselves as coaches, I was advised to seek out someone who published essays on craft: someone whose ideas made sense to me. I chose to go with Raymond Carver—he’s direct and articulate, and I still stop to consider what he had to say about workmanship whenever I think I’m finished writing a story. Coach Carver has become an inexhaustible well, someone I can return to when I need another way of looking at the craft of writing, which (to me) often feels like a Byzantine complex of intuition and instinct.

Another excellent writing coach is Michael Chabon, who offered some great advice when he recently visited Pitt (you can find the interview here). I was especially impressed by his 1997 speech “My Report to the Carnegie Institute” (which used to be available on his website—I’m not sure how one can obtain a copy now) and his musing on the concept of entertainment in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2005.

I’m sure someone from these genres can make better suggestions, but for nonfiction writers, I’d suggest Joan Didion as a writing coach, especially her wonderful essay “Why I Write.” For poets, I’ve always been impressed by Donald Hall. I’m currently reading his book of essays On Ambition: Essays 1982-88.

—

Recommended:

Raymond Carver: Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories

Michael Chabon: The Best American Short Stories 2005

Joan Didion: “Why I Write” can be found in The New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1976 or in Burroway and Stuckey-French’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 7th ed.

Donald Hall: Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982-88

– Robert