The first book coach I ever had was my college roommate, Bridget. Fate put us together in a tiny room in a remote freshman dorm – me, a tennis player/English major from Southern California, and she, a cheerleader/political science major from Maine – and for most of the rest of college, we never lived more than a few steps apart. Senior year, I hatched a scheme to write a series of linked narrative nonfiction pieces as an honors thesis. The topic was friendship – our friendship. I had to make sure that Bridget was OK about my writing about everything I wanted to write about, so I would turn in my typewritten drafts to her long before my advisor ever saw them. She would respond and react to them, reflect back to me what was working and what wasn’t, explain when I had gone too far in sharing a personal detail about her life, help me figure out a way around the hole when I took it out, ask me where the pages were when the pages weren’t getting written, and cheer me on as the stack of finished pages grew.

She was an editor, coach, critic, trainer, judge, mirror, cheerleader, fan. She helped me do my best work, and helped me become the kind of writer who sold her first book at the age of 25. She read every page I wrote, even after I had an agent, even after I had an editor at a Big 5 publishing house.

I often use an exercise in my writing classes that I call the Universe of Support. It asks people to make a target with two concentric circles. This gives you three spaces: inner circle, middle circle, and exterior circle. I then ask people to place their friends and family in this universe according to exactly how much support they give to their writing. The only names that can go in the inner circle are the names of people who support the writer’s work 100%.

What does 100% look like?

It looks like Bridget.

It looks like the boyfriend of one of my clients, a man who was writing a magnificent memoir about being a gay phone-sex operator. His boyfriend called me one day after I had been working with him for about three months. “I don’t know what he is writing about or what you are doing to help,” he said, “but I have never seen him so happy. I want to buy your coaching for him for six more months.”

Sometimes people put their dogs in the inner circle.

Sometimes they put their dead mothers.

Sometimes they have no one to put in that sacred space, which is a tough realization, but also a good one because they can keep their writing away from the people who don’t support it, and they can go out and find what they need: someone to support their writing life. Someone who wants them to succeed and helps them do their best work.

This is what a book coach does. Only instead of doing it for love, we do it as a professional in exchange for money.

Now it may seem odd that a writer would go out and pay for this kind of support, when they can just go out and get an awesome friend like Bridget – and that is, in fact, the subject of this class:

How to be the person who gets paid to be like Bridget.

Or, as Ed Catmull says in Creativity, Inc., how to wrestle with “the competing – but necessarily complementary – forces of art and commerce.”

Recommended Reading

If you haven’t already read Creativity, Inc., do it. This is one of my top recommendations for learning what it is like to systematize creativity – to develop a strategy around helping people do their best creative work. Each time I return to these pages, I learn something new: how the Braintrust really works, what the rules for giving good feedback are, how to crush the creative spirit, how a story develops over time in circular ways, and more.