Author and writing coach Don Fry has worked with more than 10,000 writers during his career, helping them break out of old habits and find their own methods for successfully committing their ideas to paper. On March 13, Writers Digest and F+W Media will release Writing Your Way: Creating a Writing Process That Works For You, his first reference title aimed directly at writers. Here's a passage from the introduction, in which Fry explains how he discovered the business of coaching writers.
I never taught writing as a graduate student or as a professor of English. But one day, my wife, Joan, asked me to teach her how to write. I was shocked. Her parents, the novelist Dorothy Baker and the poet Howard Baker, wrote all the time, and Joan grew up resenting the fact that they ignored her while immersing themselves in books. At the age of eight, she kicked her father in the shin and yelled, “Don’t read!”
She hated writing and writers, and she married me on the twin conditions that I’d never ask her to type my stuff, or read anything I wrote.
A local weekly had recruited her to write food columns, and she accepted without realizing that she was in over her head. Writing ain’t cooking. She drafted her first column, which had three beginnings and three endings. Before I agreed to help her, she had to swear to take my advice as suggestions only, and that we would stay married.
We walked through her draft as I explained how to make sentences work, how to use paragraphs to develop thought, and how to structure the whole piece so readers would understand it. You don’t have to tell Joan anything twice, and she quickly developed her own style. She wrote her column for two years and parlayed that experience into public-radio commentaries. And we’ve managed to stay married for forty-seven years.
One day, my favorite graduate student, Roy Peter Clark, came to my office with a paper he’d written for another course. He called it the best thing he’d ever written and demanded that I read it on the spot. I barely managed to get through the first page before I said, “Roy, I can’t understand a word of this. It’s too dense and knotty, it doesn’t make any sense.”
Roy replied jubilantly, “Yes! I’ve done it. Form follows function, and I’ve caught the density and opaqueness of my argument in the density and opaqueness of my prose!”
I threw his paper out my office window, and we started a conversation that changed our lives and continues to this day. We talked about how readers read, how to achieve clarity for readers, and how to make the readers’ understanding the first goal of writing. We were both medievalists, and the reader became our Holy Grail.
I directed Roy’s dissertation (on farting in Chaucer, the definitive work on the subject). By a series of accidents, he (Roy, not Chaucer) ended up directing the writing program at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. He invited me to sit in on his first writing seminar for newspaper reporters. He wanted me to do what I had taught him: question assumptions.
My research up until then focused on Beowulf. In Roy’s seminar, I made a stunning discovery. Instead of speculating on what an ancient, thoroughly dead poet thought as he composed, I could interview living professional writers about what was in their heads as they wrote. And I could help them write better.
I changed professions and became a writing coach.
Reprinted from WRITING YOUR WAY © 2012 by Don Fry, Writers Digest, and F+W Media.
