Origin Story: How to Be a Writing Coach
Why did I become a writing coach? Because I had my first teaching job at Brooklyn College and faced with a classroom of Haitian immigrants, needed to learn how to teach writing. Not literature analysis, reading, or grammar. Writing using those aforementioned subjects, a sense of humor, a willingness to learn on my feet, and a deep empathy for my students struggling to remain in the United States, take care of their families and find jobs. They wrote about these things, and I found work by James Baldwin, Hemingway, Tillie Olsen, and articles in the newspaper, stories about assimilation, loss of home, and identity. We wrote and we read and I corrected their essays and found forms like letters home, poetry, and storytelling that helped them become better writers. I learned the teaching of writing is an extension of voice which is personal, unique, and easily silenced or distorted. I loved that work. I still do.
Growing up in a family with two brilliant Harvard graduates, one with a PhD, the other with an advanced architectural degree from the Harvard School of Design, parents that cast enormous shadows, it seemed impossible to find your place. I found it in writing. I documented my life, other people’s lives, events and tragedies, mostly made up. I also read avidly as we lived in the country with only two boys next door to play with. We were forbidden to watch television except on weekends and then a severely limited amount. We watched the news, the Vietnam War, riots all across the country, students protesting, and it was a three newspaper family. We wrote letters, my father wrote books and articles. It was about words and my enormous vocabulary was a reflection of eavesdropping on adults who drank and smoked around the dining room table. My father was a brilliant writer and English professor who drank too much. My mother was a fantastic architect who worked too much. I was lonely, angry, and yet absolutely loved the world I lived in and felt compelled to write.
By the time I graduated from college I had been told repeatedly I should be submitting my short stories for publication. I did not. My father was the writer. I was an actress and then a line foreman for the phone company, a cocktail waitress, a speech writer, a creative director for a linen company. Finally, I entered publishing as an assistant and then an assistant editor. I read hardcover books for publishing in paperback and at home in my shared one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, I wrote stuff. But I was busy with work and publishing parties and taking writers out for expensive lunches that replaced dinner as my salary was a pittance. I dumped rolls into my tote bag and stole blocks of cheese from company events. One day my boss, a terrible, famous, brilliant woman fired me. She said, “Maybe you can write your novel now.” And I did.
Teaching is what led me to coaching. Writing is solitary and dreadful and fabulous and joy killing. Truthfully, it’s playing God in many ways, so it doesn’t lend itself to the generosity and ego deflating work of teaching. Teaching gave me an understanding of people that had always existed but it solidified my ability to inspire and inform while allowing the student to succeed and struggle on their own. It was a survival skill I wanted to give my students, the ability to communicate, to be clear and captivating.
I coach writing because I love the sport. It’s rarely easy but occasionally there is a moment of transcendent beauty that alters the landscape of the world and someone who claimed on our first meeting, “I can’t write” has produced something unique, filled with human truth. In every case, the writer is able to feel that moment, hear they have created something very good before I say anything. I coach to teach as I was sometimes taught, to release the voice that my students feel inside.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach