The Novel Coach- What coaching and writing novels have in common (part two) by Andrew Parrock.
Introduction
As my experience as an author and as a coach has grown, I have seen some surprising similarities between these two very different activities. This blog continues to examine these and draws a tentative conclusion as to why that might be.
In part one I described how it came to be and explored the similarities of the framework and mindset a coach and an author (the ‘being’), looking at Contracting and Researching, and Show don’t tell.
The final three of the five things that the practice of coaching and the practice of novel writing have in common are;
Getting the reader/client to do the work
Having patience with the unfolding story
Flow state; being ‘in the zone’.
I will describe what they feel like for both my coaching practice and my creative novel writing and focus on the internal and external processes for coaching-writing (the ‘doing’).
Getting the reader and the client to do the work.
The first coaching model I learned (and, I suspect, most other coaches as well) was the GROW model [1]. This stands for
Goal - The goal is what the client wants to achieve.
Reality - The reality is their current position and state.
Options - The options are the routes they will discover during coaching that could help them achieve their goal.
Will OR What/when/where – The will is their motivation to carry out the steps in their action plan.
Source: https://www.coachingcultureatwork.com/the-grow-model/ accessed 28th January 2022.
The GOAL is the thing that drives the whole process, creates the reason for the coach and client to meet and talk. If there is no goal then there is no purpose to the coaching relationship.
I explain to my clients that coaching is a ‘conversation with a purpose’, that I am there to help them achieve their goal. Everything that is said during the meetings is said with that goal in mind; it may be at the back of their mind, while we explore an area of interest to them, but it is always there.
For me as an author, the reader is the reason I write. Every author and aspiring author I have ever spoken to wants their stories to be read. Our goal is to draw a reader’s attention (hopefully, many readers!) and to hold it so that they find the story hard, if not impossible, to put down. For me as a coach, my client is the reason I coach; every coach I have ever met wants to help their clients, by getting them to reach their own answers, not by telling them what to do.
Having that goal in mind enables me to write and coach in a way enables both the client and the reader to do the work that I have helped the to be motivated to invest their time on.
Both coach’s and authors can do this by making their client or reader do the work.
For authors, that can be done using ‘show, don’t tell’. This engages the reader’s emotions through their imagination, by describing important scenes just enough to give them a hint (maybe a strong hint) and allowing their imagination to fill in the gaps. For example, at the virtual 2021 Winchester Writers’ Festival, I attended a talk by Lissa Evans, a successful author of many novels including her latest, ‘V for Victory’, set in London in the winter of 1944 [2]. Her subject was how to make descriptions of people and places move the plot along, and not to just be something that needs to be done, like housework, to set the scene. The way Lissa does it is to give her readers an impression, brief but emotive, to allow their imagination to fill the details in. For example, she only ever describes a character once. Here is how she described Avril, the twin sister of Winnie, one of her main characters, an important part of Winnie’s back-story, and a factor in the development of Winnie’s personality. Consequently, Avril was an important person for the reader to know about. Here is how Lissa Evans describes Avril;
“There was no need to ask what Clive had fallen for; heads snapped round whenever Avril walked past. They did so again now, as she tip-tapped down the stair ahead of the waiter.
‘Darling Winnie!’ she called, from across the room, and the other diners simply stopped with forks halfway to their mouths. She was striking rather than beautiful – seemingly drawn with a stronger pen than everyone else.”
This created a very strong image in my mind. It is my image; another reader will have seen something different. But what Lissa wanted to convey was how noticeable and confident Avril was, to contrast with Winnie, her sister. This contrast is one of the essential elements of the story. It works. This is not a genre I usually read, but I was hooked by this softly spoken yet powerful story of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. Throughout ‘V for Victory’, Lissa got my imagination to do the hard work of building the alien world of a bombed-out London in the midst of severe austerity and a bitingly cold winter.
On reflection, the vital thing for me as an author to achieve is to stir my reader’s emotions. Great writers do this really well; I remember reading John Steinbeck’s ‘East of Eden’ and shedding tears when Sam Hamilton, one of the central characters, died.
In my coaching, I use a ‘person-centred approach’ [3], not as a deliberate choice, more by discovering that the way I coached had many features of this particular style, unconsciously influenced by things I have read. As I gained experience, I have learned to rein in my tendency to want to give advice and share my own experience, and temper this by asking my client’s permission for me to share my experience. This has led me to ask more questions of my client, to reflect more on what they have said to check my understanding, and let them hear their own words reflected back to them.
One client said to me recently that
‘…they liked my style, because it made them think for themselves, but they also appreciated the personal stories I shared because they could see some use for themselves from the stories.’
What started for me as an approach thought might be useful for my client has evolved into a deliberate practice aimed at challenging my client, albeit quite gently at times, to see themselves in a different light; to do things differently, to give them more options around how they might achieve their goal. My client is doing the work, I am merely setting the scene for them.
In contrast to writing, as a coach I am not deliberately aiming at evoking emotions from my client. However, I have noticed that when we are getting to the heart of the client’s goal, their emotions will be evoked, for example when they see themselves in a different way and realise what has been holding them back. Having done that, I as coach, must not get caught up in those emotions, but maintain the right distance so that I can continue to be objective. And maybe as a writer I must be able to be caught up by the emotions I am aiming to evoke, yet still maintain my distance to be able to carry on with the story. I remember clearly writing a powerful passage in ‘Legion in Exile’, being carried away on the tide of emotion as I wrote, my pen skipping across the page, the words flowing as I gave myself up to the flow. But a short while later, once that scene was written, I went back to it and read it critically, making sure it made sense and that it added to the emerging story, by showing us something of the protagonist’s character. That required me to maintain a narrow position between feeling the emotion but also observing it, very similar to the position I am aiming to achieve when I coach.
My reflection: For me, coaching and story-telling work best when I am guiding my clients and readers with a light touch, trusting them to want to continue with me, because they are enjoying the process because they are being asked to think for themselves, and are an active part of the process, not just inert passengers of the goal they have set for themselves.
Having patience with the unfolding story.
Novel writing: I have been asked about how I plot a story. Indeed, this is a constant topic in writers’ groups and writing courses that I have joined. Does the author allow the story to develop not knowing where it is going the end up, writing ‘by the seat of their pants’, or do they plan the story out; ‘pantsers’ vs ‘plotters’! I am most definitely a plotter. Writing historical fiction, I don’t think I could be anything but a plotter, because the story must fit within the framework of the historical facts. The world appears to be evenly split between them. But I have a feeling that plotters and pantsers have one thing in common; patience to allow the story to unfold and reach its natural and satisfying end.
Now the funny thing is that, having said that I am a plotter, my second novel (not yet published as I am looking for an agent) took a decidedly unplanned turn when my daughters told me that what I needed to include was a main female character. Naturally (!) I started with her as the ‘love interest’ for my male protagonist. But I quickly realised that was not what they had meant. She had to be much more than that. This is where research supplied the answer, because my reading about medieval Japan had told me that the 14th century was the start of the decline of female power in Japanese society. What better way to follow my daughters’ advice than to change the plot to include a powerful female figure with whom my protagonist could collide. The plan went out of the window and was replaced by a better plan, still within the historical events, but now shining a clearer light on the society of those times.
What has that got to do with patience? The unfolding of the plot, once I had decided to include this new character, did not occur to me in its entirety in one moment. I knew what I wanted to do, I knew the framework, I had an idea of how I might achieve that, but had to trust myself, that my imagination and knowledge would find a path in the new landscape I had wandered into. There were times when I wondered if I had got it wrong, but stuck to it and trusted my instincts.
The novel is now complete and has been sent out into the cold harsh world looking for some fertile ground to grow!
Coaches: As a coach, my client’s and my journey towards their goal feels very similar. The client knows (or thinks they know) what they want to achieve. Sometimes in detail, sometimes just a vague idea. My job as their coach is to build a trusting relationship where they can feel safe to explore the potential pathways to get to their goal. Sometimes things are unclear, we veer way in unexpected directions. I have to trust my ability to keep their goal in mind while allowing us to wander around in the landscape, but knowing that somehow, we will get to our destination. It feels like a very similar process. I remember one client had some quite specific goals at the start. But our conversations looking at these and their perceived blockers took a different turn when they started to talk about things from their past. I asked then how they thought these were connected to their goal (I am not a counsellor and our contract made that clear). They could see a strong connection so we continued. This ‘checking in with my client’s facts’ I see as akin to reminding myself of the historical facts when I am novel -writing. What emerged was, for my client, different from what they had started out wanting, as we added to the original goals and went further. For them the result was a more satisfying outcome.
So, for me, patience and trusting one’s instincts that a satisfying outcome will be reached in the end, is a very strong similarity between coaching and writing.
Flow state; being ‘in the zone’.
My best work, in both coaching and writing comes when I am ‘in the zone’. I feel that if I can get myself into flow deliberately and consciously, then my clients and readers will get the best possible value from me, what might be described as ‘good customer service’. They get the best possible benefit and I benefit by creating a good reputation. Commercially, that will help drive up future sales or attract new clients!
I came across the idea of the ‘Flow State’ when completing an online course on ‘Neuroscience for coaches’ [4,5]. It was first identified by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi [6]. It is commonly referred to as ‘the zone’, and when people are in the flow state they are ‘in the zone’. When we are in the zone we are focussing optimally effectively on the task in hand, all extraneous distractions are blocked and we have a strong feeling of enjoyment and fulfilment.
It has been described, specifically with reference to creative writing as follows [7]:
“Flow is a psychological state defined by the presence of both high skills and high challenges, giving individuals a sense of control over the activity at hand. Flow is characterized by intense focus and concentration, a merging of action and awareness, the feeling that the passage of time may be distorted in some way, and intrinsic rewards. Thus, when in flow, writers are able to exert a considerable amount of effort towards their work while at the same time being fully engaged and absorbed in the process. In spite of the effort dedicated to the task, flow allows writers to reflect back on the process as enjoyable.”
I have experienced both of these as a writer and a coach.
For creative writers, the phenomenon has been reported on by Susan Perry [8], who describes it as
“…an altered state in which you find yourself- or recognize later that you have just come out of- when time seems to stop and the writing flows through you with little or no angst.”
She then goes on to describe how she discovered that writers go through a process before they start to write, a ritual that is personal to each writer, which allows them to abandon the real worlds and enter the world of their imagination that they are writing about.
My ritual can take place in most places (on holiday, my regular evening commuter train, a coffee shop and at home). A background buzz of conversation does not matter, but it cannot occur if there is one particularly insistent voice. I settle reasonably comfortably, pick up the bic ballpoint, open up the notebook and stare into space, conjuring up the last thing I wrote about – better if it’s a cliff-hanger- and think about where I want the story to go, what that scene must do to push the story forward to reveal a bit more about the characters. This will give me an image in my mind’s eye, a mental picture. I then put my pen in contact with the paper and write.
The immediate feedback of my thoughts becoming words is a major part of the joy I get from writing. When the words are flowing there is nothing quite like it. The characters then take over, acting sometimes in surprising ways that I don’t stop to challenge just describing what I am seeing (if there is a lot of action) and hearing (if there is conversation), in my imagination. I stop if something disturbs me; just as I am writing this, our cat is demanding some attention- my flow-state vanishes. Or I may come up against a problem, such as a choice of direction that will require more thought.
Before that can even happen though, there has been a lot of research, internal debate about the plot, ideas tossed around inside my head about characters and plot and how they might develop- there is a real challenge there, which is also fun. That preamble, which can happen anywhere, but usually on my walk to the train station, or time set aside for thought, is me preparing the soil and fertilising it then planting the seeds, for later when the ideas sown start to grow.
My coaching has many similarities to that process. The preamble stages involve reading around the subject, not just about coaching, but popular neuroscience and psychology books, newspaper articles and articles from ‘New Scientist’. It also involves talking about coaching in Action Learning Sets and in my Supervision Group, writing blogs like this one which allows me to reflect on my practice.
Then, come the next coaching meeting, I will give myself a few minutes to look back over my notes and remind myself where my client and I left off. We open with some pleasantries (the weather!) and then one or other of us will remind the other where we were when we last spoke. Our conversation continues but we are now into the ‘conversation with a purpose’, I am listening and reacting in the moment, sometimes summarising or reflecting what my client has said to me back to them, sometimes being reminded of personal experiences and choosing to share that or not, and if yes, asking their permission to do so. All the time, at the back of my mind, the question, “is this helping my client towards their goal?”, and judging my next action against that, choosing the best path, keeping myself on the edge between the automatic habitual actions generated by previous experience, and the conscious choosing between potential pathways. My previous blog on ‘Metathinking’ looked at this in more detail [9] If I cannot see how it relates to their goal, I will ask, but that is quite rare. In the last five minutes of the session, I now consciously ask my clients to summarise what they feel about the session, what they have learned and what they now intend to do to move them towards their goal. I do that now following a CPD session given by an experienced coach.
Most times I get caught up in the flow of the conversation, and we reach the end, with some saying that they did not know where the time had gone. Mostly, when that happens, I feel the same way; we have both been in ‘flow’ together. When that happens I have noticed that is when my client is most open with themselves and has those moments of insight; we have been optimally focussed on the task in hand, oblivious to external distractions.
My reflection: The feelings of enjoyment and fulfilment from coaching and writing are, now that I think of it, identical. I find that I can get myself into a flow state with practice, in both my coaching and creative writing. Both practices require skills (which can be learned and developed) and challenges (by their very nature). In both I find myself absorbed, with time flying when it is going well. Both require intense concentration but which seem, at the time, to be effortless, (but see also my blog on Metacognition for more on that). Both are highly rewarding. This, to my mind, is flow in action in both practices.
Conclusions
I think these five things are tightly integrated together, in what can be described as a series of concentric shapes.
In the centre is ‘Show, don’t tell’, as an essential practice for both activities. ‘The reader/client doing the work’, because if ‘show don’t tell’ is effective, they must be doing the work because they are engaged with the coaching conversation or developing story. Around that is ‘Having patience with the unfolding story’, because both coach and writer must be patient with their client and with themselves if the process is to work. Then ‘working in a flow state’, because that state can be produced if we follow the preceding three things. Finally, ‘Contracting and Research’ surrounds all of these as it provides the arena, with its boundaries, within which the developing conversation or story can grow.
I am struck by how similar coaching and story-writing are. Maybe I should not be surprised, because both are essentially creative processes aimed at enlightening others, either about themselves, or about other people in other worlds.
Andrew Parrock (MSc, CMgr, MCMI) has, since graduating in 1980, been a teacher, a tax specialist and a manager. He spent 10 years as a volunteer mentor with undergraduate students at UCL and, later, Brunel University as part of the National Mentoring Consortium. He discovered coaching late in his career and has now become an accredited coach at Practitioner Level with the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC).
References and notes
1. ‘Coaching for Performance- GROWing human potential and purpose’, 4th edition2009 John Whitmore
2. ‘V for Victory’ by Lissa Evans, 2021 Doubleday
3. ‘The Complete Handbook of Coaching’ op cit, Chapter 4 The person-centred approach- Stephen Joseph p56
4. https://neuroscience-for-work.thinkific.com/collections. Neuroscience for Coaches, a collection of four modules, collated and presented by Amy Brann
5. ‘Neuroscience for coaches: how to use the latest insights for the benefit of your clients’, Amy Brann, 2017 pub: Kogan Page AND online course https://neuroscience-for-work.thinkific.com/bundles/ns4c
6. ‘Flow; The psychology of optimal experience’ New York; HarperCollins, Csikszentmihalyi, M (1990)
7. ‘The Psychology of Creative Writing’, Marie J. C. Forgeard University of Pennsylvania, Scott Barry Kaufman New York University, James C. Kaufman California State University at San Bernardino. p18, found here: https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Forgeard-Kaufman-Kaufman-in-press-The-Psychology-of-Creative-Writing.pdf- accessed 17th December 2021
8. ‘The Psychology of Creative Writing’, Cambridge University Press, 2009, edited by Scott Barry Kaufman and James C Kaufman: chapter13, Writing in Flow by Susan K Perry
9. the good coach, www.the-goodcoach.com
