My writing coach career started a good 25 years ago without my even realizing it. I’d helped a literary agent with her book proposal and then her book. She mentioned me to a colleague who had a client with monster talent but not enough drive or direction. That person was part of a writing group, which led to client number three.
In hindsight, however, my first writing coach sessions occurred 20 years before.
Shortly after graduating from UC Santa Cruz with a B.A. in literature/creative writing and a fair amount of experience as a student teacher, I moved to Bear Valley–a tiny resort in the High Sierra, where my parents had a second home–and took a position as a teaching assistant in a one-room schoolhouse. The kids were divided into two groups. Kindergarten through third graders were on the right side of the massive stone fireplace in the middle of the expansive, open room. Fourth through eighth graders were on the left.
It was determined that I would work mostly with the older group and be responsible for the language arts curriculum. That worked for me. However, it quickly became apparent that the task was more challenging than I had assumed since I had one fourth-grader reading at a first-grade level and several seventh- and eighth-graders reading at a college level.
My absolute favorite communal lesson plan occurred around Halloween, which is funny since I’m a bit of a weenie when it comes to scary stories. Make that a huge weenie.
We started out by reading Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Telltale Heart,” while listening to a recording of the short story. If you haven’t ever read this chilling psychological thriller, I urge you to check it out.
Once we’d finished listening to and reading the story about an unidentified narrator’s murder of an old man, we all discussed what made the classic so frightening. Then I had my students write their own scary stories.
The kids were totally into it. When they finished, instead of correcting their scary stories, I met with each student one-on-one to talk about how they could make their story even creepier. You’ve never seen such an excited group of youngsters when they finally turned in their revised drafts.
After dinner that night, I headed down to my tiny bedroom on the bottom floor of my parents’ cabin and began to read. Before long, I started to notice every sound outside my bedroom window. It’s surprising how much noise an inky night in the mountains generates. Did I mention we lived a mile out of town, and that all our neighbors were part-timers with no one in residence during the month of October?
“That’s just a deer,” I’d tell myself when I heard a twig crack. But the more I read, the tenser I got. Finally, I’d had enough. Putting down the scary stories, I headed down to the one bar that was open during the off-season and joined some friends for a cocktail.
“Did you read our stories?” the kids clamored the second I got to school the next morning.
“I have to confess. Your stories creeped me out too much. I had to stop reading and leave the house.”
Nothing I could have said would have delighted them more.
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