Read the Room
Coaching writers requires the ability to understand your writer and quickly scan them for a number of factors including low self-esteem, damage from poor teaching, a false sense of skill, and an overall fear of process. Your objective is to increase their confidence in themselves while establishing a relationship that welcomes feedback. In other words, read the room! Because I often work with students writing their Common Application and supplementary essays or students struggling in English or history, there is often an extra welcome challenge: parents. I am a parent; I love and respect parents but sometimes they block progress in their offspring as that offspring struggles to discover their authentic and unique voice. Parents, on the whole, view their children as gifted and wonderful.
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How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?
“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.” —Ernest Hemingway. No one wants to hear the truth when it comes to writing because it’s boring and painful. Words exist in our world so why can’t everyone write well enough to constantly produce beautiful poetry, galvanizing journalism, novels that enthrall and essays that change lives? You love to dance so why not be a ballerina? You love to speak so why not a TED Talk? The truth is no one is good immediately and many will never achieve anything beyond okay after dozens of revisions. An idea is not a book, movie or play. It’s a thought and until you sit down and make that thought come to life with excellent writing, like a dream, it slips away.
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Mother’s Day 2021
Yesterday my son called me to say thank you for being his mom since he and his girlfriend just got a puppy, and they are being kept awake and feel overwhelmed. “You were the best puppy,” I said. “Just perfect.” He really was. He slept, he smiled, he made us laugh and cry and feel like the luckiest parents in the world. He also obliterated my ability to detach, to write, to manage to be the struggling writer I had been in Manhattan replaced by being a struggling mother in Dallas, Texas. He owned me completely and knew it. He came after a childhood filled with anxiety and careless violence, an adolescence shadowed by sexual assault, alcoholism and major tragedies, the sudden death of my beloved best friend, and my sister.
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