Atul Gawande is a surgeon & author. Those in the medical field speak highly of his books. I only know him from podcasts. Smart guy. Constant improvement is important to him.
The subject line of this post is from a Ted talk he gave on coaching. See the video below.
He speaks of how professionals improve themselves: coaching at an individual level. You would think that coaching would be helpful for my writing. But I’m not there yet. I find I still have lots to learn from what others have already put out there in books, podcasts, and blogs.
But I know that part of my resistance is fear. At this early part of my writing career, I am still not comfortable with direct feedback on my work. Which is a weird thing to say with five books published.
Sure, I hire editors, but they are copyeditors and they focus on grammar. I’m happy to work on my grammar. Probably because problems with my grammar (damn commas) don’t speak to the more important part of how good a writer I am. Are my characters interesting? Are my plots intriguing? Does the dialogue move the story forward?
This talk has a lot to think about, the least of which is my writing, and I’m sure I will come back to it again.