Become a Writing Coach, and Despair
My work as a writing coach has been tremendously fulfilling so far, mostly because of the people I work with. Those who come to me have easily enough brainpower and distinctness to produce excellent writing, but they just need some massaging, and I’ve been able to do that massaging, and it’s a pleasure. A couple are startlingly close to writing actual bona fide Great Literature, they just need a tap on the shoulder, and being the tapper is a privilege.
But there’s also something sad about that. What it means is that our society’s relationship to the written word is totally broken. This should not be left up to me. People as smart as my clients shouldn’t need psychological encouragement to feel free in their writing. But they’re taught that writing is an awful chore in public school, and perhaps coached to write as charmlessly as possible in university. Many people with verbal gifts are beaten into silence.
Then, as if that weren’t enough, the pipeline from Literate Person to Book Contract is terrible. I know from personal experience that the easiest way to get literary mentorship is to hang out in certain circles. You can get an MFA for tens of thousands of dollars and meet professors who might publish your entertaining email in the New Yorker, as John McPhee did for Peter Hessler. Or, as in my case, you could get drunk with a restaurateur who has an amazing literary agent who can be harangued into checking out your work.
While I’m glad I was caught up in those particular rapids, and I love the people who guided me along the way, it’s just not a great way to do things. It misses a lot of sources of talent, and it tends to attract same-y people who write same-y things, because among the coastal literati, certain opinions and stances tend to congeal. (Nothing personal, literati; this is true of any group ever.)
There’s at least two great books that will only exist because I was sent some Twitter DMs, and that’s nice for me, but it’s also haunting. How many other specters of books are out there, Borges style? How much less boring could literature be, if the system were better?
I don’t know how to improve matters, other than to keep chugging along with my little service business. But I’ll be thinking about it, and if you have any suggestions I’d be glad to hear them.
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If only this version of this song were on an album!
If only more vapor trap sounded like this!