The Geography of Creative Chaos: How a Book Coach Guides a Writer From Confusion to Confidence
Today’s blog post comes to us from Author Accelerator CEO Jennie Nash. If you enjoy today’s content, you can sign up for Jennie's weekly newsletter here.
I have been thinking a lot about the big-picture work of being a book coach.
It’s such a new profession, and since I am in the business of training and certifying book coaches, I am often asked about what a book coach is and what a book coach does. As I answer, I have been refining the way I speak about it and becoming even more clear than I have been before about the true nature of the work.
It’s not the same as editing because we work with the writing as it evolves over a long period of time.
It’s not the same as therapy because we’re not licensed for therapy and because our focus is on the production of a piece of writing suitable for publication.
It’s not the same as mentoring because we’re not just giving advice; we are often sharing realities about the publishing process and strategies for how to navigate it.
It’s not the same as project management because we’re helping a writer find their confidence and their voice as well as complete a project.
It’s not the same as business or career coaching because we’re often teaching craft as well as formulating a strategy for success in the marketplace.
So what exactly is book coaching?
The other day, I was a guest on the podcast of Pia Silva, a brilliant business strategist, and I said the phrase “the geography of chaos.” I was talking about how a book coach has to navigate this geography as we work with writers. Guiding them from confusion (what am I writing, who am I writing for, what should I say, what do I believe, am I really good enough to say it, is anyone really going to care?) to the confidence of knowing (this is the book, this is the structure, this is the message, this is the audience, and these are the exact words I am going to use to engage my reader) is exactly what a book coach does.
So the question is, what is that geography and how do we guide people through it?
Let’s Start at the End: The Nature of Reading
I use the word geography because going from chaos to confidence is a very physical transformation, in my mind.
If you think about the experience of reading a book, it is an extremely linear experience. We start at the beginning of the book, turn the pages in order, and move methodically through from the first page to The End. We go through this exact same process whether the book we are reading is a biography of Abraham Lincoln, a middle grade fantasy about dragons, a memoir about escaping poverty, or a rom com about two public radio hosts.
Even very small children who are new to the experience of reading quickly figure out this physical reality – you start at the beginning, turn the pages, and move through to the end. You don’t jump ahead. You don’t circle back. This is why parents from the beginning of printed time have had to read the same story in the same way over and over and over again at bedtime: the child craves that linear experience. They crave the way the story unfolds over time. They crave the predictable nature of it. There is comfort in the fact that the same words are in the same order on the same page every single time. There is comfort in the fact that the bunny in Goodnight Moon says goodnight to the red balloon before saying goodnight to the little house every single time.
Woe to the parent who tries to skip a page because they are exhausted and desperate for the child to go to sleep. The story is the story. It has been set on the page just so. There can be no deviation. It is what it is forever and ever. The only thing that changes is the reader – what they bring to the book.
This is why so many adult readers return to their favorite books every year. Pride and Prejudice may be exactly the same, but your understanding of love and society and pride and prejudice has changed. Start With Why is always telling you that all good businesses start with why, but your understanding of your business’s purpose and the marketplace and your customer has changed. Returning to favorite books allows you to mark time and measure your own growth.
So if this is the endpoint – the reader experiencing the work in a predictable, linear fashion – the act of writing a book is simply this: the process of turning an idea or a story into a controlled, contained, and predictable linear experience for the reader.
Back to the Beginning: The Nature of Writing
This predictable, linear experience starts in the mind of the writer in a swirling cloud of chaos. I said above that I think of the process of writing as very physical, and look at what I just did there! I described the physical universe before the big bang. I described an uncontained energetic force with no organizing principle.
Cosmic dust, not (yet) a planet.
As the writer begins to work with this energy – this idea, this vision – it’s going to be a messy process. They are going to look at the idea from different angles and they are going to push it into different forms and shapes. Maybe it’s a crater on the moon, maybe the rings of Saturn, maybe the rays of the sun.
I always think about a potter at a wheel with a lump of clay. The wheel is spinning around. The clay is wet. It has weight and form, but it is not anything other than a lump. The writer shapes the idea, forms it just the way the potter does. Will it be a vase or a mug or a teapot or a platter or an abstract sculpture? They may not know. And if they do know – this will be a vase – they may not know if it will be small or large, tall or round, textured or smooth.
To get to the place of knowing, they have to do something. They have to exert a force in a specific direction. And they have to live with not knowing how it’s going to turn out until that clay becomes what it is going to be.
This is where the book writer-as-potter analogy falls apart, because if they have the skill to do it, a potter can throw a vase in fifteen minutes of inspiration. But once a writer decides what they are making, even the most skilled writer still has somewhere in the neighborhood of 65,000 words to write, which is at a bare minimum 65,000 decisions. They have a very long way to go before the work takes its final form.
What this means is that the central reality of writing is not knowing.
This is why so many writers suffer doubt – wondering what they are doing, and if it’s good enough, and if anyone will care.
And this is the reason that so many writers gravitate to methods or systems that promise that if you do X, you will write a book people want to read. X might be the classical three act structure, or some other externally focused structural shape. Sometimes these structures are helpful to the writer, but more often than not, they offer a false promise.
I call it false because the writer cannot skip over the journey from not knowing to knowing. They have to do that transformative work themselves. The reader wants a linear experience that captures the chaos of where the idea started – something of the writer’s heart and soul and mind, something of the stardust of where it all began. You can’t just take someone else’s container, or a container that worked for someone else’s idea. If you do that, you may have a container but odds are excellent that it won’t be the right one for your idea.
That’s why writing is hard work -- and why the beginning stages of writing often feel like heavy lifting, like you need a bulldozer. You are moving mountains. They are mountains in your mind, but they are mountains all the same.
The Nature of Book Coaching
The reason I am such an evangelist for book coaching is because it puts the writer at the center of the work – not just the writing, but the writer. The creator. The person making the journey from confusion to confidence.
In 1:1 coaching, the writer gets the coaches’ undivided attention on their words and their ideas and their doubts. Knowing that someone is there to witness the creation can have an enormous impact. I love this quote from writer Annie Dillard that speaks to the power of witnessing in this way:
“We are here to witness the creation and to abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house”
This has become my favorite description of the work of a book coach.
A book coach has a framework we use to help that writer envision their book* – we ask questions, suggest exercises, consider the market, discuss other books and possible structures – but the primary work we are doing is helping the writer to get clear in their own mind so they can write clearly on the page. The primary work we are doing is to witness the creation and abet it.
We do that by standing alongside the writer as they take the journey from chaos to clarity. We are there when they are unsure and when they change their minds. We notice when they light up and when they shut down. We receive their words and their energy in raw form and help them transform it all into something whole and shining and beautiful and new – something with weight and form.
I love the geography of creative chaos. I love the place of not knowing. But most of all, I love the journey of transformation that happens in the writer as they traverse this landscape. It is always a joy to witness.
*This is the framework I teach for both fiction and nonfiction in the Book Coach Certification program at Author Accelerator. It’s called Blueprint for a Book. I have a new book coming out on the Blueprint for fiction in a few months. You can sign up HERE to learn when it’s ready.
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