What is a Writing Coach?

Heidi Williamson, a Writing Coach based at the Writers Centre Norwich,  describes her role and what coaching could do for you:

'There’s a whole host of workshops, courses and groups where you can get help with writing skills – the nuts and bolts of sentences, character arcs and stanza breaks. But few places where you can get help with the process of becoming, being, and enduring as a writer –your development as an artist. 

Who do you talk to about the issues? The practicalities of trying to get published. Fears and confidence. How to get beyond where you are. Recognition. Getting un-stuck. The nitty-gritty of daily concerns – lack of time, space, cash. When you know you should do something, but for some reason just can’t….

People to help you work through this stuff are few and far between. That’s why the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) and Arvon decided to grow their own.

Several years ago I attended a development session where I was asked a series of practical questions about my writing practice. It fundamentally changed my work. Fast forward a decade and I still use the strategies and techniques from that session. So last summer when I saw NAWE and Arvon offering a qualification in becoming a Writing Coach – helping equip other writers with strategies for self-development – I signed up in a heartbeat.

Training was delivered by RD1st over the summer of 2014. We attended three very full days in York, then had a period of a few weeks intensively practising coaching and co-coaching, writing up case studies, a journal and reflective essay, then came back together for a further three days including a live assessment by an external examiner.

One of the first questions our trainer asked was ‘What is coaching?’ It turned out very few of us really knew. Vague notions of American cheerleading style ‘you go get ‘em baby’ clichés entered my head. ‘How is it different to mentoring?’ ‘What specifically is coaching writers, and how can it help them especially?’ After day one I felt I’d done a degree in psychology and wondered how on earth they were going to fill the remaining five days of training.

We learnt techniques for helping writers structure and develop their thinking. Spatial visualisation of goals. How to use metaphor as a powerful method for getting the subconscious to help out. How to work with and through self-limiting beliefs. Managing conflict. Strategies for dealing with difficult relationships that are holding you back. Thought, visual and spatial exercises to cover all sorts of eventualities.

Everyone on the course was an accomplished writer also working as a tutor, mentor, and in some cases life coach too. The training we had will stand us in good stead for whatever comes up in a session, and I’m grateful for that. The eighteen of us that completed it together really bonded, and I made some good friends.

So what exactly is a Writing Coach? Being a coach, working with a ‘coachee’, is a more equal relationship than mentoring. A mentor is someone more experienced showing you the way. You learn from how they did it. But with coaching, it’s about stepping along together, with someone keenly questioning how you can step further. It’s about what will work for you.

What happens if you decide to come along for a coaching session? Well, each session is usually an hour and can be face-to-face, by ‘phone or Skype. It’s entirely confidential. All you bring along is an idea of something you’d like to make progress on. A pen and paper is handy too for anything you’d like to note down. You don’t need to bring any of your work. Surprised by that? You’ll understand why if you read on.  

At the start your coach asks what you want to cover in the session. She’ll ask you detailed questions, probe your answers, and help you expand your options before helping progress towards practical steps you can take. This could all happen in one hour-long session. Or you might book another session for a few weeks later to explore further, or talk about something else. Towards the end of each session your coach will ask you to recap what happened in the session for you, and what has changed. 

Coaching isn’t about feeding back on your work at the level of the writing. So it doesn’t matter if your coach is in the same genre as you. They won’t edit your work in a session. It’s not about whether you can improve that sentence or ending on the page. It’s about how to get your head in gear and develop strategies for overcoming any issues and moving forwards. Which might well improve that sentence or ending. But the point is to help you stand back and come up with answers you couldn’t see before.

It does help that you’re working with a fellow writer – someone who knows what writing is, what it means. The processes that underpin any writing are the same. The issues writers face are common across genres.   

As a writer herself, your coach can help you shortcut to the nub of the matter. If you want to go there. Because the great thing about coaching is the ‘coachee’ is in charge. You call the shots for each session. If you want to explore a reason, a problem, unpick just how and why something worked so well for you so you can do it again… you’re in charge of how far you go with that thinking. The coach will give you a nudge, but you don’t have to say it out loud if you don’t want to. Or you can mull on it after the session. The coach is 100% on your side and working for you. Think sports coach and you get the idea.

I’ve found Writing Coaching to be a unique, rewarding occupation. I get to hang out with other writers. And to help them help themselves. I’ve since joined the Association for Coaching and gained AMAC status. I have regular supervision, CPD and meet up with other coaches. It’s turned out to be something I enjoy immensely.

If you want to find out more, there are Q&As and testimonials if you click on ‘Coaching Sessions for Writers’ at writerscentrenorwich.org.uk.   

There are a couple of helpful blog posts about how Writing Coaching was useful for a couple of local writers too – read debut Penguin novelist Becky Done’s post at http://bit.ly/1KOMk3s or poet, editor and tutor Julia Webb’s blog at http://juliawebb.org/blog/?p=380

You can see me at Writers’ Centre Norwich, Dragon Hall, on a Monday sometime between 10 and 2. Or my fellow coach Katri on a Wednesday between 1 and 5. Writing Coaching works really well by phone or Skype too.

So what can writers really gain from Writing Coaching? Quite a lot I think. You could always come along and find out for yourself…'

Heidi Williamson (AMAC) qualified in relational dynamic coaching with the NAWE and Arvon affiliated RD1st Accredited Writing Coach programme. She is an Associate Member of the Association for Coaching, specialising in Writing Coaching. She studied poetry and prose at the UEA and has many years’ experience of teaching writing, including at The Poetry School, Writers' Centre Norwich, Poetry Anglia, and Virgin. Published by Bloodaxe, her poetry has been shortlisted for major prizes and received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her next book 'The Print Museum' is due out with Bloodaxe in Spring 2016.  

Why come to Norwich, England, to study creative writing?

Rachel Noelle Sammons
(C) Feyi Fagade

Rachel Noelle Sammons is from Chicago, USA, and here she describes why she decided to make the move:

‘The sensible choice was to move to England and study creative writing at the University of East Anglia.  I could focus on my passion whereas my top American universities offered English only as a degree with a marginal concentration on creative writing.  At UEA, I could also sidestep the American liberal arts education which would have obligated me to take classes in science, maths, history, and even gym.  UEA was cheaper and a year shorter.  It only made sense to leave America for it. Unfortunately, my chances of going to UEA were slim.  In America, the universities and colleges (university without postgraduate options) need responses to their offers by April, much earlier than UEA.  I didn’t think I would be accepted to UEA because of its prestigious standards so I settled on my choices in America.  I said yes to Houghton College.

Houghton College is a cosy campus on the site of a former Caneadea Indian Reservation.  It’s currently in Amish Country.  My mother and I drove there from Buffalo, New York, on a gravel road, for three hours straight, occasionally pulling over to let a horse and buggy pass.  The town is named after the college and it boasts a Subway but nothing else.  I was charmed.  I loved the seclusion.  I marvelled at the thickly-forested hills and the students’ stories of bear sightings.  It was also a Christian college which meant the majority of my fellow classmates would be sheltered, churched kids like me, maybe even home-schooled.  There would be no drinking parties, no sexual misadventures, and no drugs because no one would choose Houghton if they were interested in those things.  It did not matter that the English Department was lacklustre.  This was a safe haven, an isolated bubble of piety.  We would be obligated to attend Chapel three times a week.  My mother liked that a lot.

I accepted Houghton’s offer, reviewed my timetable at a summer orientation, and got in contact with my future roommate.  At the end of May, I graduated high school and began to prepare for the Houghton life.  July rolled around and I received an email from UEA accepting me into their Creative Writing course.  My dad was stoked.  Within a week, we left for an impromptu flight to England.

My first taste of Norwich was the Prince of Wales Road.  As my father and I searched for our hotel, we passed an array of bars and clubs which somehow looked shadier than the ones in Chicago.  Once we gave Norwich a proper tour, England’s casual drinking culture became clear to us by the number of pubs we stumbled across.  My first impression of UEA involved the fact that there was a pub on campus.  I had no disapproval of alcohol consumption.  I just hadn’t expected its constant presence.

However, I was reminded of all the reasons that made UEA so desirable in the beginning.  Its course respected creative writing as a serious discipline.  I would be surrounded by passionate creative writers, while at Houghton I had yet to meet another student like me. My dad said to me, ‘You gotta be crazy to not go here.’

Despite how sensible it was to choose UEA, I was still bent on going to Houghton.  I came back to America torn between two radically different futures.  It didn’t matter that Norwich was the UNESCO City of Literature. I just didn’t have the confidence to bear the secular world.  In addition to that, I didn’t have the confidence to bear immersion in a culture beyond my home country.

Pushing aside my parents’ opinions, I considered what I was looking for in the university experience.  I realised that I wanted an adventure.  I wanted a series of unpredictable events that would fuel my creative writing.  But I knew that an adventure wasn’t an adventure unless you’re a little bit scared.  I cancelled my enrolment in Houghton and accepted UEA’s offer.

It was the best decision I could ever make.  I underestimated Norwich’s literary culture and it was thrilling to discover it through poetry readings and literature festivals.  My spirituality grew strong in its isolation and it motivated me to pursue my own, personal faith.  I relaxed in a culture that accepted me as an adult, one in which I can drink and ultimately make my own decisions.  Most of all, I became part of a community of writers.  It has been an encouraging, liberating, and challenging place to be – just the right kind of adventure.’

Rachel Noelle Sammons is from Chicago, USA and is entering her third year at UEA with the hope of staying in England.  She’s self-published a young-adult novel called 'Toni' and its sequel, 'Illusions for a Thief' on Amazon.  She has interned at the Writers' Centre Norwich, volunteered for monthly live literature events, and assisted in creative writing workshops with young students.  Lately, she finds herself writing about characters who struggle with their faith as well as what happens when the secular world collides with the Christian world.

Nonnie Williams Korteling on Ann Quin and ‘Three’

This is the next posting by Nonnie Williams Korteling about the British experimental writer Ann Quin who died in 1973. Here Nonnie describes the decisions she made when writing her PHD on Quin. She then offers two extracts from that PHD which focus on Quin’s book Three which was published in 1966...

‘Much of the writing process of the PhD on Quin was spent agonising about how to manage the biography—critical distinction/tension/complement.  I toyed with moving back-and-forth between short sections of the two, referring to ‘Quin’ when I was in literary critical mode and ‘Ann’ to indicate passages of life-writing.  But this really didn’t – and I’m sure you can see why – work: too clunky, too messy, too simplistic.  In the end, and much against my own instincts and interests (driven, I think, by my sense, whether misguided or not, of what my PhD ‘ought’ to be), the thesis was largely made up of long and complex literary critical essays with short sections of life-writing in between, entitled ‘Illuminations’.  These were – you guessed it – intended to ‘illuminate’ aspects of her work.  I really didn’t want the life-writing passages to be reductive, to seem to offer the answer or meaning, to limit the experience of reading her books.  Looking back now I’m not sure how well they work, but I did and still do rather like the idea of placing life and work side-by-side, without offering them as explanation, and seeing what energy this creates.  So, here I’m going to do just that; begin with a reflection on her second book, Three (1966), followed by a very short ‘illumination’.  

***

Three – what Quin called her ‘ménage’ book – is a collage, comprised of fragments of friends’ letters, comments, household receipts and bills.  It begins with a married couple – Ruth and Leonard – discussing ‘her’ death.  This death, ‘could’ they say ‘so easily have been an accident’.  Throughout the book, Ruth and Leonard’s conversation is haunted by the desire to interpret this mysterious death of the book’s third protagonist, a character only ever referred to as ‘she’ or ‘S’.  Each of their utterances follows so closely at the heels of another that things are unclear and need working out, creating a disorientated reading experience.  The momentum of the speech (written as plain prose without speech marks) and run-on lines, together with the continual return to worrying at the same event, means that our reading must slow, circle and repeat for understanding to happen.  Whereas Berg – Quin’s first book -continually returns to a fantasised but never carried out parricide, in this book the death has always already happened: Three ‘begins’ when S is dead and ‘ends’ when she is approaching death.  This focus on S establishes the pattern of the book as a whole.  This third, absent character, emerges as a necessary part of the dynamic of the married two: together and alone, Leonard and Ruth are obsessed with S.  She plays a crucial role in their marriage, and the mystery of her absence offers an opportunity for a uniting of the two that the third-ness of her presence never could.  S is the figure that shadows, the mystery that designs, the narrative as a whole.

To read the overlapping collage of different narrative forms of Three is to perform a kind of trespass: to read and transgress upon diaries, to ‘listen’ to tape recordings and watch home-movies.  Confused reminiscence is mixed with intensely detailed experience; third-person narrative with journal entries and free ‘poetry’.  The resulting combination of texts are literary experimentation which moves this book beyond Berg.  In many ways here the plot itself is even simpler, but the energy of the writing is more consciously ‘experimental’.  For example, S’s journal transcripts appear as words scattered across the page.  These half-formed thoughts and feelings are conveyed impressionistically, through unusual or repeated word pattern and image, or by focus on the sound and rhythm in and between words.  The writing seems to have a free associative, pre-articulate momentum, sensory impressions are recorded without communicating a recognisably inner self.  

According to the critic Robert Nye Three is Quin writing at her best.  Here, Nye said, “Quin showed herself to be admirably alive to the elusiveness of what happens between people, to what is lost in conversation, and to the possibilities of the English language for suggesting these little communicative lacunae. Her best writing hoarded words as if they were pebbles washed smooth by huge seas of experience”.

***

Although it is a book haunted by a drowning, foreshadowing her own, final, journey into the sea, Quin began her second book, Three, more than ten years earlier, while living in a turret room at Lansdowne Road and working as a secretary for the painter, Carel Weight, at the Royal College of Art.  When life in London became too intense, she caught the train to Axminster, in retreat to her friends and fellow writers Carol and Alan Burns’ cottage in Dorset, just inland from the coast at Charmouth.  The cottage had no running water or electricity, but water was drawn from a well, there were oil lamps and a garden with an apple orchard. Here, Quin fantasised a Mellors in every farm labourer, walked for miles along the coast, holidayed with her then – incongruous as the pairing may seem – lover Henry Williamson (author of Tarka the Otter), and spent time with the Burns reading Ezra Pound, making cut-up poems, talking.  These trips were energising and inspiring: they were also not without tensions perhaps inevitable in an intense friendship between a young woman and a married couple.  Quin often played the role of third to her married friends’ twos including the American poet Robert Sward and his wife Diane.  According to Sward the number three was absolutely central to Quin’s relationships, her fantasies, her writing.

           But Quin’s longing for intimacy was in tension with a real fear of being trapped by domesticity.  In discussion with Nell Dunn – one of a really interesting collection of conversations collected in a book called Talking to Women (1965) – Quin talks with dread about the domestic expectations and daily grind of a long-term relationship.  Yes, something stable and comforting was alluring, but this would, she assumed, inevitably become ordinary and full of compromise.  And worse, a traditional domestic set-up could well interrupt the stillness she believed vital for her ability to write: at the same time she desperately wanted consolation, affirmation.  She jokes to Nell Dunn; ‘what I really need is a wife’.’

Scroll down for Nonnie’s earlier post on Quin, dated 13/09/15.

Nonnie Williams Korteling: Between 2008 and 2012 I was researching and writing a PhD on Quin at UEA. The project, called 'Designing its own shadow' - Reading Ann

Quin, ended up as a combination of critical readings of Quin's work

and biographical vignettes. I now teach at UEA and am particularly interested in twentieth-century literature, women's experimental writing, life-writing, and the essay form. My current writing projects include reflections from the classroom, a life-writing project reflecting on the women who made me, and a book on British Avant Garde

Fiction of the 1960s.

Nonnie Williams Korteling writes about Ann Quin

On a hot August Bank holiday weekend in 1973, aged 37, the British Writer Ann Quin walked along the beach, took off her clothes and walked into the sea off the coast at Brighton.  She then swam far out, with slow, deliberate strokes, and drowned.  Was she seeing visions?  Being called by the mystical voice of the ocean?  Was she echoing one of her literary influences, Virginia Woolf?  Did she commit suicide?  Was it all a horrible accident?  Who was Quin anyway, and why should we care about her life and want to read her writing?

I think it was that first term of my ‘Studies in Fiction MA’ at the University of East Anglia, in September 2007, that I first came across Quin’s first book, Berg (1964).  An experimental British writer from the sixties; a macabre, strange, funny, lyrical, vehemently experimental female British writer from the sixties.

Berg is a bed-trick, schlock Brighton tale about, as its opening proclaims, ‘A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, [who] /came to a seaside town intending to kill his father. . . .’  As some of its reviewers and readers have noted, these first lines are designed to, and do, grab us, hook us in.  And, in the narrative that follows, the protagonist, a man called Alistair Berg but posing as one named Greb, does indeed go to a seaside town supposedly intending to find and kill his father, Nathaniel.  Of course – spoiler alert – he fails, and in fact in some weird way kind of becomes his father in the end.  The plot and story are farcical and the prose style is slippery and strange, often bordering on the grotesque.  I became obsessed with the treatment of domestic pets in the book – in increasingly bizarre scenes Berg kills his father’s budgie, Bertie, and father’s (and own) lover’s beloved cat, Seby.  The seemingly domestic was a dark and nightmarish place in Berg, and I was fascinated.  But when I tried to read up on Quin – What else had she written? What did other writers and critics think of her writing? – there was very little to be found, and so, sure there must be more to say, I decided to take on the project of researching her life and writing for myself.

What I found was that Quin was an ordinary, working class woman who had worked as a secretary at Art Schools in London and embraced the ideas of the sixties counter-culture: she was an experimental writer, traveller, drinker, peyote taker, bisexual lover, good time girl; she had also slightly ‘missed the boat’ – coming from a single parent background and leaving school at 17, she hadn’t been to university and wasn’t quite young enough, middle-class or educated enough to enjoy the sixties to the full.  She was also, as her obituary in The Times notes, plagued by ‘a fatal streak of melancholia in her preoccupations, which is present in all her work, and which was sadly prophetic of both the manner and the circumstances of her death’.  She had her first breakdown at the age of 19, and despite the early promise of her writing – Berg was awarded fellowships that enabled her to live and write in America in 1964 – Quin’s later life and prose were plagued by increasingly desperate, erratic behaviour and bouts of severe mental ill-health.  In 1971 Quin was found semi-naked and freezing in a snowdrift in Sweden.  She had, she said, been fleeing red agents, plagued by the signs all around her.  She was taken to a mental hospital in Stockholm, diagnosed with schizophrenia, forcibly sedated and given ECT.  The treatment and sedation, she said, silenced her angels as well as her demons and she found she couldn’t write at all.

Over the next couple of blog posts this autumn I’d like to share some of my research about Quin – I hope that you’ll be as drawn in as I was.  In the meantime, if you’d like to find out more, do check out annquin.com

Nonnie Williams Korteling: Between 2008 and 2012 I was researching and writing a PhD on Quin at UEA. The project, called 'Designing its own shadow' - Reading Ann Quin, ended up as a combination of critical readings of Quin's work and biographical vignettes. I now teach at UEA and am particularly interested in twentieth-century literature, women's experimental writing, life-writing, and the essay form. My current writing projects include reflections from the classroom, a life-writing project reflecting on the women who made me, and a book on British Avant Garde Fiction of the 1960s.