The key qualities of a great writing coach

Authors want me to coach them. I resist. Coaches have a bias towards keeping people dependent on them, while I want authors to accomplish goals and get things done.

Still, if coaching is what you think you need, I’ll help you. Just expect that coaching to come with a minimum of cozy reassurance and a maximum of progress on achieving your writing goals.

What a writing coach needs

My coaching begins and ends with your writing. I put less weight on what you tell me you experience and greater weight on what you produce. If you write something, I can tell a lot about what’s going on with you. Your complaints about why you couldn’t write something don’t reveal much about your writing psyche (except, of course, that you’re having trouble writing).

Here are the qualities that I bring to the coaching process. I (egotistically) feel that these are the qualities any great book coach needs:

• Ability to collaborate on goals. Authors are often unclear on what they hope to accomplish. I ask a lot of questions about their goals for their book, their ideas, and their audience. We then collaborate on a statement about all that, which I call a “treatment” — it’s typically about 400 words long. Until you as a coach can draw these insights out of your client, you have no foundation to work from.
• Skill at identifying strengths. So much of coaching focuses on writing weaknesses. I start with strengths. Is the writing entertaining? Is the tone unique? Are the ideas startling and powerful? Are the facts well supported? Are the sentences rational? A writer needs to know what they’re good at so they don’t throw that away. This goes beyond the feel-good praise part of the criticism sandwich. It’s not about reassuring writers, although that’s a part of it. It’s about knowing what to keep when you tear down everything else.
• Developmental editing insight. We’ll agree on what you’ll write. You’ll submit that, and I’ll edit it before out next coaching session. Here’s what I look for: everything. Were you true to your goal and ideas? Did you serve the audience as you promised? Is the writing engaging? Is it well structured? Are there problems with language? Do you have editorial tics (like little asides to the reader, or words that you overuse)? My edits on your text tell me a lot about what you need to work on as a writer. They also allow me to deploy my favorite strategy: couching all criticism in statements about what the reader needs.
• Knowledge about the psychology of writing. Your writing tells me what your problems are. I can see where you lack confidence. I can see what you’ve written the same thing three separate ways since you can’t figure out how to say it. I can see where you start strong and and trail off. I see you shying away from giving advice, temporizing (“I’m not sure, but it seems to me . . . “), being afraid to reveal too much about yourself (or revealing too much about yourself), thinking that everything has to be a framework or an acronym, and so on. I can also tell where you leaned too much on AI, because the writing there is ultra-smooth and dull. Every writer has different challenges. What you write tells me so much more about those challenges than what you say.
• Clever assignments. I will go straight at your weaknesses. “Write a personal description of how you experienced this.” “Go through your writing and remove all instances of ‘It’s not this, it’s that.'” “Write this as if you were in the room when it happened.” “At the top of explaining this idea, write a summary of the idea in two sentences.” “Dictate this, then edit the transcript.” These exercises show you that you can do what you think you can’t, and build the skills you will need to counteract your weaknesses and unfortunate tendencies.
• Honesty. I never lie. I never tell you things are better than they are. I don’t give in to your need to be reassured. Some people don’t like this, they want more love and less directness. But it’s been my experience that writers who aspire to excellence value clarity and honesty; when they finally do achieve their goals, they know the praise that follows is genuine. I have literally never had a writer tell me I was too blunt, but I’ve often been told that my bluntness was really helpful.
• Vast experience. I’ve worked with high-school age writers and business executives with decades of experience. I’ve given writing advice to men, women, and nonbinary people. I’ve coached scientific researchers and motivational speakers. I’ve edited authors who wrote half a dozen books and counseled rookies. I’ve collaborated with authors on books that were 40,000 words long and on 100,000-word tomes. I’ve coached individual thought leaders, corporate managers with lots of contributions from others, and sets of diverse coauthors. I’ve provided useful feedback on memoirs, big ideas, historical narratives, political commentary, data-heavy analyses, detailed how-tos, and every other imaginable type of nonfiction. This is why, whatever your problem is, I can help, because I’ve almost certainly seen it before.

Great writers are not great coaches

Good writers work hard. But great writers are just inspired. They know how to write great books, but they’re not necessarily introspective about process. Furthermore, they can have enormous difficulty identifying with writers who lack their talent. They don’t know what is like to be you because their excellence means they didn’t start where you are.

A great coach is likely to be a good writer with lots of experience. But their exposure to all sorts of writing, writers, and writing challenges is what makes them skilled. They don’t just know what makes books work. They know what makes writers work.

I’m sure there is a word for this kind of intelligence. It’s not emotional intelligence (a quality I lack), it’s far more focused. Editorial intelligence, maybe?

If you want a great coach, look for experience, versatility, and a deep understanding of ideas, words, and writers. Great writers who lack these other qualities are far more likely to be both expensive and insensitive to your needs.

Some thoughts on my virtual book coach in this context

So, using these criteria, is the Bernoff Book Coach a great writing coach?

No.

Because it’s trained on everything I’ve written about books — more than 4 million words — the Bernoff Book Coach has an encyclopedic ability to answer questions. Authors have lots of questions, and it has lots of answers.

But the virtual Bernoff Book Coach cannot read what you wrote and tell you what your problems are (at least, not yet).

It cannot kick you in the pants in whatever way you really need, based on an understanding of your strengths and weaknesses.

And it tends to be encouraging, where I often am not. Even though it will prod you when you’re not thinking deeply enough, but it isn’t quite as direct as I am.

The Bernoff Book Coach is an awesome tool. You should sign up for it. But I don’t think it’s quite ready to replace human coaches like me, so at least for a while, I’m not obsolete.