Coaching Writers


Book Description

Coaching Writers is the first text to outline a complete system for editors to coach journalists. This highly influential text, based on the curriculum and methods of the Poynter Institute, has been updated to include coverage of coaching across media platforms and in diverse newsrooms. It now offers special consideration of ethical concerns. In newsrooms, where the management structure is increasingly flat, everyone needs to be a coach — this book will teach them how.




The Threadbare Heart


Book Description

Jennie Nash’s “winning debut,”* The Last Beach Bungalow, was followed by The Only True Genius in the Family, a “page-turning delight.”** Now she introduces us to two women who learn the lessons of grief—and of hope… A photo of her sons. A doormat from Target. Twenty-three tubs of fabric. Somehow it comforts Lily to list the things she lost when a wildfire engulfed the Santa Barbara avocado ranch she shared with her husband, Tom. He didn’t make it out either. His last act was to save her grandmother’s lace from the flames—an heirloom she has never been able to take scissors to, that she was saving for someday… As she negotiates her way through her grief, mourning both the tangible and intangible, Lily wonders about her long marriage. Was it worth all the work, the self-denial? Did she stay with Tom just to avoid loneliness? Should she have been more like her mother, Eleanor— thrice-married and even now, approaching eighty, cavalier about men and, it seems, even about her daughter’s emotions? It is up to Lily to understand what she could still gain even when it seems that everything is lost. Someday has arrived… *Publishers Weekly **Book Club Classics




Anatomy of a Premise Line


Book Description

If a story is going to fail, it will do so first at the premise level. Anatomy of a Premise Line: How to Master Premise and Story Development for Writing Success is the only book of its kind to identify a seven-step development process that can be repeated and applied to any story idea. This process will save you time, money, and potentially months of wasted writing. So whether you are trying to write a feature screenplay, develop a television pilot, or just trying to figure out your next story move as a writer, this book gives you the tools you need to know which ideas are worth pursuing. In addition to the 7-step premise development tool, Anatomy of a Premise Line also presents a premise and idea testing methodology that can be used to test any developed premise line. Customized exercises and worksheets are included to facilitate knowledge transfer, so that by the end of the book, you will have a fully developed premise line, log line, tagline, and a completed premise-testing checklist. Here is some of what you will learn inside: Ways to determine whether or not your story is a good fit for print or screen Case studies and hands-on worksheets to help you learn by participating in the process Tips on how to effectively work through writer’s block A companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/lyons) with additional worksheets, videos, and interactive tools to help you learn the basics of perfecting a killer premise line




Coaching Teacher-Writers


Book Description

When teachers write, good things can happen; writing helps educators to better understand themselves, as well as students, parents, and colleagues. This practical book illustrates how to encourage, lead, and sustain teacher-writers, especially in group contexts. In contrast to guides on writing and teacher research, this book is designed for those who support teacher-writers, such as teacher educators and literacy coaches. The authors offer descriptions of key practices they have developed over years of coaching, teaching, and collaborating with K–12 teachers who write about classroom instruction, teacher research, or advocacy for better policy and pedagogy. Knowing firsthand just how hard writing can be for teachers, they provide a repertoire of strategies to elicit writing, to support teachers as they write, to find audiences for the teachers’ work, and much more. This book offers clear guidance to coach teacher-writers to: Choose topics and shape ideas.Conquer insecurities and draw from their strengths.Establish authority with their audience.Navigate publishing, including choosing venues and working with editors.Find time and space to write and create the habits of writing daily.Respond to audience reaction to their writing.Reflect on their teaching and writing. Develop a voice and vision as a professional. “Understanding writing is a lifelong journey. This book is an indispensable guide to beginning that journey yourself and together with colleagues.” —Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, executive director, National Writing Project “Gives advice on how I can become a better collaborator, facilitator, and cocreator who helps teachers celebrate the power (and joy) that writing can give them.” —Cathy Fleischer, professor, Eastern Michigan University “The authors know how to support teachers in gathering the courage to write. I am grateful for the ideas that have ignited my own writing.” —Penny Kittle, Teacher and Author




Welcome to the Writer's Life


Book Description

Learn how to take your work to the next level with this informative guide on the craft, business, and lifestyle of writing With warmth and humor, Paulette Perhach welcomes you into the writer’s life as someone who has once been on the outside looking in. Like a freshman orientation for writers, this book includes an in-depth exploration of all the elements of being a writer—from your writing practice to your reading practice, from your writing craft to the all-important and often-overlooked business of writing. In Welcome to the Writer’s Life, you will learn how to tap into the powers of crowdsourcing and social media to grow your writing career. Perhach also unpacks the latest research on success, gamification, and lifestyle design, demonstrating how you can use these findings to further improve your writing projects. Complete with exercises, tools, checklists, infographics, and behind-the-scenes tips from working writers of all types, this book offers everything you need to jump-start a successful writing life.




The Buddha at My Table


Book Description

Can you come sit at the table? Tammy Letherer’s husband of twelve years spoke these words on a Tuesday night, just before Christmas, after he had put their three children in bed. He had a piece of paper and two fingers of scotch in front of him. As he read from the list in his hand, his next words would shatter her world and destroy every assumption she'd ever made about love, friendship, and faithfulness. In The Buddha at My Table, Letherer describes―in honest, sometimes painful detail―the dismantling of a marriage that encompasses the ordinary and the surreal, including the night she finds a silent, smiling Thai monk sitting at the same dining room table. It’s this unexpected visitation, this personification of peace, that sticks with her as she listens to her husband reveal hurtful, shocking things―that he never loved her, he doesn’t believe in monogamy, and he wants to “wrap things up” with her in four weeks―and allows her to find the blessing in her husband’s betrayal. Ultimately, it’s when she realizes that she is participating in her life, not at its mercy, that she discovers the path to freedom.




How Distant the City


Book Description

*Finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize The poems themselves are archives, of the body, of place, of the body's gestures and movings through the city of these poems. The images are electric with worry and wonder, memory and possibility, and through it all, love. -Natalie Diaz, judge of the Charlotte Mew Prize "What does courage mean anymore?" asks the speaker in Freesia McKee's How Distant the City, a question that pulses through the nuanced body of this book to its profound extremities. "She would fly home more, but TSA never knows who to get to do the pat-down," comes one moment of revelation. "You realized your pain isn't the only pain/ worth knowing," comes another. How Distant the City is a courageous and arresting debut. -Julie Marie Wade, author of When I Was Straight and SIX: Poems Freesia McKee's How Distant the City is a city of questions, asking us to account for how we pay attention to our small wild moments in a time made strange by war. This poet pushes us to keep circling around what most would pass by to mark our stains on each page, to turn our ears to notice who has gone by and who has gone missing. -Ching-In Chen, author of The Heart's Traffic and recombinant Freesia McKee's debut chapbook, How Distant the City, illuminates geographical, emotional and psychic spaces to expose the alienation and displacement we create when we substitute apathy and avoidance for empathy and connection. This collection shines most brilliantly in poems that connect the quotidian to the remarkable, traversing with linguistic adroitness through representations of loss, rape, racial injustice, murder and commonplace acts such as getting a haircut or setting a Thanksgiving table. In the juxtaposition of everyday acts to acts of terror, McKee draws attention to the dialectics of the self's most private desires, struggles and traumas with those of the displaced and terrorized "others" in our villages, in our hearts, in our local and national news, and in our global community. McKee boldly makes connections across differences with a poetic fluency that is vibrant, honest, inspiring and chock-full of integrity. -Donna Aza Weir-Soley, author of First Rain, Eroticism, Spirituality and Resistance in Black Women's Writings, The Woman Who Knew and co-editor of Caribbean Erotic.




Perfectly Imperfect Parenting: Connection Not Perfection


Book Description

Proven Methods for Understanding Children, Improving Family Communication and Raising Self-Confident and Resilient Kids by parenting expert Dr Mary O' Kane.




Chief Inspiration Officer: How to Lead the Team Everyone Wants to Be on


Book Description

Whether you're gifting it to your ladder-climbing best friend or sliding it under the door of your least favorite manager, Chief Inspiration Officer is a thought-provoking guide filled with stories, strategies, and techniques to achieve your leadership vision. With modern, real-world advice culled from years of experience in the corporate workforce, Val Ries coaches you on how to lead a high-performing team everyone wants to be on. Discover how to... Inspire yourself so you can inspire others Encourage employees to push past their own limitations Guide your team to reach their full potential Communicate with confidence, calm, and ease Create a microculture that thrives no matter the challenges.




The Christian Writer's Coach


Book Description

The Christian Writers’ Coach: How to Get the Most Out of a Writers Conference is the first in a series of books specially designed by Northwest Christian Writers Association writers. It is our goal to give you best-practices information and to put tools in your tool belt to help you succeed as a writer. We started this book with five bios of successful people in the industry. People who started out just like you and are making it in the world of publishing.

This book is designed as a primer for writers conferences. After the bios, the book is divided into three parts:

  • Before a conference
  • During a conference
  • After a conference

In each section, your questions will be answered in articles on how to be prepared and how to put your best foot forward. Then we have provided links to the most helpful resources on the web. We hope you find this a fun and interactive research tool.

God created you for a purpose, and he gifted you with the ability to use words to inspire others and to shape culture. It is our prayer that as you read this book, you will find new tools that will alleviate the mystery of publishing and help you fulfill the dream you were called to.

If you’d like more information on the Northwest Christian Writers Association, you can find us on our webpage www.nwchristianwriters.org; our blog, http://nwchristianwriters.wordpress.com/; or look us up on LinkedIn groups, Facebook, and Twitter (@NWCWriters).