Working with a Writing Coach

In November, J.W. Judge and Barbara Hinske, the hosts of?The Write Approach podcast , interviewed me about how to work with a writing coach. Since I’ve worked with Barb on twenty books at this point, we focused on that–how the relationship works and how we’ve refined our book development process over time. First, however, the two hosts asked about how I became a writing coach, as well as about how flexibility helps me meet the needs of my clients.

You can listen to the interview?here . Or, you can just read the transcript about how to work with a writing coach and how my writing coach client, Barb, and I work together below:

J. W. Judge:

This is the Write Approach. We are your hosts. I am JW Judge and with me is Barbara Hinske. This is a podcast for writers to learn more about the craft of writing as we explore a new topic every week. Our guest today is Linden Gross. She is the writing coach for co-host Barbara Hinske. And rather than me tell you about her, we’ve decided we’re going to have her tell you about herself and introduce. What we’re going to talk about today is what a writing coach does, how you use a writing coach, how that differs from what an editor does. And so the natural jumping off point here is Lindon, welcome to the podcast and tell us how you got into being a writing coach.

Linden Gross:

Thank you so much. I didn’t plan to be a writing coach, but everything worked out to where it was sort of the perfect answer. I actually started out wanting to be a teacher and when that didn’t work out, I ended up at the?Ladies’ Home Journal?as an associate editor very quickly and so spent some time in journalism, was at the LA Times Magazine after I decided to leave New York and then moved on to writing books. I had written the first book ever written about the stalking of ordinary people and wound up helping people. A lot of people ghostwrite or just write their books. So I either worked as a ghostwriter or a collaborator. The only real difference being whether my name was on the cover or not. And the first ghostwritten book that I did was called The Legacy of Luna.

It was about the young woman, Julia Butterfly Hill, who climbed the Redwood in Humboldt County, California to keep it from being cut down and lived up there for more than two years. And I was brought on to the project. It was turned around in 10 weeks because of publisher deadlines. So that was fun. And it became a number one national bestseller, New York Times bestseller. So went on to help other people write books, was still doing a little bit of journalism and freelancing, which I had done for quite a while. And basically, I got an email from somebody who needed help with the book proposal and we ended up working together. And then that person happened to be a literary agent and her colleague had a client who was having trouble producing a book. And so that led to client number two. And then that client was part of a writing group and that led to client number three. And I suddenly, and this was 25 at least years ago, and I suddenly looked around and thought, I think I have a new branch of my career going here. So that’s how I became a writing coach.

Barbara Hinske:

And so talk about this book. I hope it’s showing on the screen. I don’t know if it is, but I do want you to mention this cuz I’m very proud of you for this.

Linden Gross:

Aw, thank you.

Barbara Hinske:

You are a beautiful writer and anybody on this podcast should sign up for Lyndon’s newsletter cause it’s just wonderful. Anyway, thank you. But talk about this guy.

Linden Gross:

So when I moved to Bend Oregon and there was an elderly woman who was one of the first female cops. She was in that first wave of female cops to be hired by the LAPD. She was when she first started walking a beach, he did it in heels and a girdle, and a skirt. And her gun had to be kept in her purse and they had to wear lipstick and it was a different era. And long story short, she’s a pretty feisty lady who wound up suing the LAPD for sex discrimination when they did not let women advance past sergeant, which is not very far up the ladder. And they only allowed eight women to get to the role of sergeant. So it was even further limiting. And so she basically said, somebody has to do this. She had passed the age where she could collect her pension if things got really ugly. So she ended up suing the LAPD for sex discrimination. And the case became a landmark US Supreme Court essentially decision and changed the ballgame for women on a lot of fronts, not just for

Barbara Hinske:

Women. And she won. She won,

Linden Gross:

Won. It took eight years and there was a lot of recrimination. It was ugly. Yes. She finally won. They lost consistently until it got to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the ninth Circuit ruled in her favor and it was appealed to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court let the decision, the ninth Circuit decision stand without questioning it. So we had worked together on a manuscript for a long time. She was determined to get it published by a traditional publisher and we just were not able to sell it. We did a book proposal and it just didn’t sell I think in part because Fanon by then was 89 and she was just as feisty as she had been before <laugh> and just as stubborn. And so there were certain things she didn’t want to hear. So long story short, she ended up passing and I always felt bad that her story, she’s historic and her story needed to be chronicled.

She needed her place in history. And finally I got a call from a researcher who was working, can’t remember maybe out of Los Angeles doing a research on this topic and said, I can’t find fan John’s book anywhere. Because of course she had done a ton of media and kept talking about this book that she was publishing, which never had seen the light of day. And I just decided I can’t stand this <laugh>. And so I ended up revising it getting rid of some of the problem areas which included Fanon writing a hundred pages about when she had been deployed to Japan in the middle of all of this as an involuntary recall by the US Army. And it just didn’t fit the story of course. And so I ended up it and publishing it without publishing it,?Busting the Brass Ceiling.

J. W. Judge:

I’m really glad that there are people who tell stories like that because it’s such an important part of history. Mean even in the last few years I’ve come across books, I’m trying to make sure I get this title, but Killers of the Flower Moon, that may not be right <affirmative>, but about this killing of these people in this Indian tribe in Oklahoma over oil money. And it’s told by a journalist who did years of research on it and you’re like, How have we never heard this story before? So stories, the one you’re telling are so important to keep track of and get out in the world. So you are clearly an accomplished writer, you’re a journalist, you’re writing your own stuff, you’re ghostwriting. And there are lots of people who are good writers but aren’t capable of teaching other people how to do it because they themselves don’t really understand their own internal processes in the same way that not all athletes can be coaches. So are there any skills that you found or things that you’re able to do that others aren’t, that help you teach other writers how to do their craft better?

Linden Gross:

Well I, I mean, did start out wanting to be a teacher and trained for that. So I think that’s part of it. I come from, my father was a very prominent journalist and prolific writer. And so from the time I was pretty young, he would explain certain things about writing to me in using some analogies that I still use today. He had wonderful words of wisdom as in I can teach anyone to write, I just can’t teach them to think <laugh>. And I’ve carried that with me as well. But I think for me, the writing coach piece is a two-pronged piece. One is, yes, I call it power up your writing, make it more effective if you’re writing fiction, let’s make it more evocative so that the reader is along for the ride, not just being told about it. And that is one of the primary pieces that we tend to work on because it’s very easy to tell the story rather than to show a story.

But I think the other piece of it, and this is where Barb and I end up having so much fun, is that to me, the hard part about writing is that it’s often very solitary. And I mean, I worked as a freelancer for a long time and I felt like, oh great. So I have to motivate myself, get myself, do the work console myself when something doesn’t sell, celebrate by myself if it does. This is a lot of just me all by myself and the fun part that Barb and I have. And I think that with fiction especially, the hard part is figuring it out the story, figuring out if it works, figuring out your character development having somebody to kind of say, I don’t buy that I, that character would do that. Or when you get to a certain point, Barb, we have now worked on, how many Rosemont is it, Barb is, are we at nine now? Seven nine

Barbara Hinske:

As of tomorrow, I’m going to start writing number nine and a week from Tuesday we’re going to be talking about number nine.

Linden Gross:

It’s crazy. That also requires like, Oh my gosh, he said the same people in the same town. What do we do now, <laugh>? Where do we take everything now? And that is how Barb and I started out with that series. But it’s a lot of brainstorming. I remember I was visiting friends who lived in Northern California and I was in my funky RV with my dogs and Barb and I were having a coaching session and the wife of my very good friend was out watering the flowers. And afterward she said, I really didn’t mean to listen in and I’m so sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing. And it just sounded like you guys were gossiping <laugh>. And I said, Well, in a sense we are, because we’re gossiping about this community and trying to figure out what’s happening and what the motivations are and it’s fine. I think that half the time it just feels like I’m settling in with a really good chum to talk about these people that have come out of Barb’s head.

Barbara Hinske:

Well, so I want to talk a little bit about how we started and our process because it has made me so much more efficient in my production and effective and a nine-book series. You have to have new stuff happening and people have to grow. There has to be character growth. It would be easy to just some Hallmark movies just it’s the same thing going to, or a harlequin at certain points in the book, you’re going to have a certain thing happen. That’s not what I want for my book. So it’s a little more of a challenge. And when we met, when I had written my first Rosemont, I thought I was getting a line at, and instead I got a good honest but kindly worded developmental edit that says, You need a whole new subplot, you’ve introduced a mobster and you do nothing with him.

Linden Gross:

Well more, this was, for me, the biggest piece of that was Barb’s first Rosemont book. The original opened with this guy who you very quickly figure out is not a good guy except it’s raining and he has stopped he stops his car on the side of the road and gets out in the rain to rescue this stray dog and then takes him to a shelter that he has founded. And so you have this amazing opportunity. You have this really nasty guy who’s going to defraud an entire town and hurt a lot of people who’s rescuing dogs to the point where he has his own shelter. And I just thought, what a fantastic character. I love characters that aren’t all bad or aren’t all good. They’re much more interesting. And it went nowhere after that. And I was like, <laugh>, this is a seriously missed opportunity and amazingly enough, and I think this is your gift, Barb, you felt you, the book was done and you were willing to realize that no, it could be much better. And a lot of writers have a hard time with that. When you think you’re done, you’re like, Oh my gosh, thank goodness if you that’s over. And so to be able to go back and really, we put in a lot of work,

Barbara Hinske:

Oh yeah, it was another year cuz I was just new. That is one of my strong points is I will seek good advice and then I will take it. I’m not looking for somebody who always agrees with me. So this has evolved over the years and now our process is we work together for a couple of months and we bang out a first draft and we talk every week. Now I’ll send you what I’ve done and you’ll look at it and we have a roadmap. It isn’t like I’ve got an outline of the entire book when I sit down to start writing because things evolve as you go along. But I have a pretty good idea of the major character arc I want to develop. And we talk, we hash that out in one or two sessions and then we start filling in the lines and doing all of that. That has made me so much more efficient. And me now when I’m done with the draft, first draft with you in eight weeks, I will do. Which

Linden Gross:

Is crazy—just saying that’s not usual.

Barbara Hinske:

Thank you. Yeah, I work real hard. I work real hard and then I need to do one read aloud edit and then I’m ready to send it to line editing that is so much more efficient.

Linden Gross:

And when we started, what was fun is obviously you had a full book written the first one. So the second one it, it’s like you sort of kept pushing the line back a little bit. You wrote most of it and then the third one you’re like, maybe I should talk to Linda A. Little earlier. And somewhere around, I don’t know, four or five, you’re like, maybe we should talk before I start writing. And it’s been so much fun and it’s worked obviously very well for

Barbara Hinske:

You. And yes, it is just a blast. That is my favorite point is this next month and into December when we’re going to be working together again. Cause it’s, it’s very collaborative, very creative and I’ve learned so much from you over the years. I don’t have a background, I’m a legal person. I’m like Jeremy, I was a legal writer. Grammar and syntax and all that kind of stuff. But the creative writing stuff I had no background in other than as a reader and appreciator. So Lyndon, you’ve really helped me learn to tell not or to show, not tell, show, not tell. And I mean now it’s a little rare. I still get every single book, You better show this. You’re telling me show it. But it isn’t every single week.

Linden Gross:

The other big thing that you have I think comes so far on, which was a didn’t come as naturally was the scene setting, right? Enabling the reader to actually be able to picture where the action was taking place and using scene setting to set the mood, to set the tone. And that seems to come naturally now. And that was a hurdle.

Barbara Hinske:

You had to beat that into me and you sent me a couple in

Linden Gross:

A nice way.

Barbara Hinske:

In a nice way. Oh yeah, you’ve always been very kind with that in a nice way. But you sent me those the, so that the urban setting. So and the rural setting, I’ve got the whole set. They come out with one every year and it’s always on my Christmas list for my kids to get me. And I read them, they’re helpful

Linden Gross:

One, they also have the emotional component as well. And what it helps you realize is how important all of that is to help set mood, to establish character to, And that the way you describe something isn’t just a and then there’s a book here and a wine glass there and a tree over in it. You choose the details that you want to focus on to again, help establish story or mood or, So

Barbara Hinske:

I, I’ll, I want to let Jeremy, I want to say one more thing and then I’m going to turn back to Jeremy. But one other thing just in my, I’m sitting on the corner of my desk is my number nine book number nine Rosemont. Number nine outline that we did with your comments. And this is a common comment that I need help on. Cause I’m a linear thinker. I take one person’s story, art, can I write it all? Well no, that’s boring. You need to intersperse them. And so as usual, your comments are so and so has been off the page too long time to shift from Loretta and Frank and let’s talk about somebody else. So it’s so helpful to have other knowledgeable eyes and someone obviously you can tell from this interview that you and I just worked together beautifully. Yeah, that’s a joy. And Jeremy, you work with a coach, don’t you? Or some or someone? She’s,

J. W. Judge:

She’s become my coach. So the person I work with, I knew only over the internet. I mean we still haven’t ever met but I’m part of this community of lawyers who were in a chat group and she doesn’t practice anymore and reads a ton and used to be a school teacher. So a lot in common there because I also used to be a school teacher before I went to law school. And so I started writing my first, Well, the first novel that I finished, cuz there’s two that haven’t been completed. I don’t know if they will be, but whatever. So the first one that I ultimately would finish, I started writing. I wrote several chapters of, But not having put my fiction writing in front of anybody before I thought that it’s not terrible because I think I would recognize that, but I needed somebody to verify it or to tell me, you need to never touch a keyboard again. Please for the good of humanity, don’t do that. And so I sent the first few chapters to her, ask her for her real feedback. And she pointed out to me that one of the people who was a side characters should get a whole lot more screen time because they were the most interesting character

Linden Gross:

That sounds familiar, <laugh>.

J. W. Judge:

And so as soon as she said that, I realized, Holy cow, how did I not see that first of all? And second, this thing is about to take a whole different trajectory. And so what has developed out of that is that I’ll write I don’t know, eight to 10 chapters, maybe a quarter of the book and send it to her. And even this week I sent her seven chapters of the book that I’m currently working on, which is totally different than the first three. And she’s read half of it to this point. And she’s like, I think you found your footing here. There’s some early chapters that you can tell. You’re trying to still feel your way around it. So I sent her these next seven and I’m like, Okay, I think I’ve really hit my stride here, but you tell me because you’re going to know. And so yeah, it has become that kind of relationship. Although at the beginning it wasn’t. And the three books that I’ve got out so far are such better products because of the feedback that she provided and insights that she provided, things that I didn’t see and frankly wasn’t capable of seeing.

Linden Gross:

Yeah. Well I think that I have now obviously coached a lot of people on a lot of books. I’ve also worked with a lot of people on a lot of books. And when I’m in the writer position, a book is a big deal. It’s a lot. And you have to dive deeply and it’s almost impossible to retain perspective. You get to the point, I get to the point where about two thirds of the way through the book, I have no idea if I’ve just written the biggest pile of crap. Pardon? Or whether it’s good. I can’t tell anymore. Can’t, if I’ve repeated a scene, I don’t see it. So I need somebody to be my person. And so I think that that’s such a big piece of the writing coach role is to be that person who is not the friend or this spouse who’s not saying, Oh, this is great, who is really involved with the story enough to really understand where things might need to go and it’s objective. So let’s put that right out on that table right away. But what I think have, you’re in the trench, but you’re not at the bottom of the trench. So you can still see out, You still have a, you’re very invested in the work and you’re very intimately involved with the work, but you’re not the one doing it. So you still have that ability to see things that an author who is so deeply enmeshed is just not going to see anymore.

J. W. Judge:

All right. So you mentioned that the feedback is, and the perspective is subjective. Absolutely. So when you approach an author with criticism in the, not criticism being ugly, but you see a problem in the book and something that needs attention if they respond adversely to the, And how do y’all work through a situation where you think something needs attention and the author?

Linden Gross:

Well, I think so if somebody already has a written manuscript, a full manuscript, I’ll do what I did with Barb, which is I’ll offer a written critique, I read the whole book and then I basically spell out what I think works, what I think doesn’t work, what I think needs to be done. If you’ll notice all of those are proceeded with the words. I think it’s my opinion. And one of the reasons that I do this is because I, it’s important for people to at least be pretty much on the same page. You don’t have to agree about everything, but where the author understands that the writing coach is seeing things sort of the same way where they go, Oh yeah, that’s a good point. Oh that would be great, man. Not so sure about that one. But that one’s cool. So that gives them right away a roadmap to whether an indication of whether they want to work with me or anybody else as a writing coach.

I think for Barb and me, when we have had situations where we don’t completely see eye to eye, we talk about it and we basically she’ll say, I’m not so sure that I agree with your point, and I’ll explain where I was going with it. And usually what ends up happening, and this for me is the very most fun part about the writing coach process, is we start trading ideas and suddenly her idea starts to morph based on mine that she wasn’t quite buying. But then we talk about it and we get another idea and it’s like we’re climbing this ladder and pretty soon we get to this idea. That’s awesome. Yes. And that had that there’s right, and there’s no way either one of us alone would’ve come up with this. And that is the ultimate super fun part about the collaboration. And that’s it. It’s just dynamic, it’s creative, it’s impossible to get to by yourself. And so I think that that’s most of the time what happens. There’s, for me, there’s a lot of dialogue and I’m never going to say, and ultimately the author is the author, is their book, not my book. I give my very best opinion, my very best reasoning. And then they do what they need to do.

J. W. Judge:

Can I should have got permission for this ahead of time, cuz So let me ask Barb. I know that in one of your recent novels there was a really climactic scene that was kind came out kind of flat and y’all worked through it. Are y’all comfortable talking? Barbara, you comfortable talking about that? Oh yeah. Okay. Cause I think it would be really helpful to talk about this specifically and concretely rather than just kind of in the abstract. So Barb, tell us about the scene that you wrote and you submitted it just in general terms, however specific you’re going to get about the book, and then y’all just kind of tell the story of what happened from there.

Barbara Hinske:

So it was in my latest Emily book over every hurdle, and it was a proposal scene. Now mind you, my own daughter just got proposed to in my own back garden two months ago in the most elaborate proposal I’ve ever seen. I mean, her fiance hired a set design crew from LA who came to Phoenix with a van full of props and set up my back eye. It was crazy. The Bachelor could never, Anyway, so it was just nuts. And there was an impromptu surprise engagement party in my house later with all these people hiding in the house and crazy. So I had all this stuff and I’m like, Oh, this is going to be so good, so good. I’m so proud of this. And I sent it to Lydon and she said, the proposal scene falls flat. And I’m like, What? I’m just too close to see it. But you know what? We’ve worked together enough. If she said it fell flat, it fell flat and it didn’t have enough emotion. And even though I write women’s fiction and there’s lots of romance in my books, I’m like writing that stuff. I’m all about the murder, the bad guy, the theft, whatever. But yeah. So

J. W. Judge:

Yeah, so when you got the manuscript, or at least that part of the story, tell us what you saw.

Linden Gross:

Well, I was just reading along, and Barb has, she is writing romantic fiction romance light. We’re not thankfully talking about bodis rippers though. That could be fun too. But in most of Barb’s books, I will read, let’s say a wedding scene way more than once. And most of the time I’m teary after even the fifth reading, it’s like, Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me. You’re tearing up still. That’s ridiculous. You’ve read this thing a million times. And with this proposal scene, I read it and I was like, It’s nice. And then I’m thinking to myself, this is not the reaction you should be having here. The reaction should be that I should be sucked into the story and sucked into the romance. And I just didn’t feel any of that. And so I went back and looked and some of it had been shortened and too much, it just wasn’t written in a way where as a reader, you got transported so that you felt you were being proposed to.

And I went back to Barb and said, This is a huge moment in this book. It is not a huge moment in the book. It’s a huge moment in the series. And this is not where we shorten things up into our reader’s Dodges version of the action here. This is a leisurely, let’s draw it out. Let’s make the reader feel like they’re participating in this thing. And we talked about a couple of different scenes that I was like, I want to hear this, I want to see this. And what if instead of this happened. And again, we had a great dialogue. Barb saw it right away when we started chatting, and she was like, Okay, I’m going right back to work. I’m going to redo this thing. And the next time around, it was perfect.

Barbara Hinske:

And the wonderful thing about Lindon, and I’m sure your coach as well, is it you don’t just get the little one liner. This doesn’t work. Just like, okay, well so what, you know, need more emotion, You need to draw this part you. So it’s like you get a little bit of a roadmap, you get a good roadmap of where you need to put your efforts, which is so helpful. I don’t know if either of you watch so you think you Can dance or any of those shows where they talk about, well, you need to do this or that. And I’m like, they describe it in a way that means nothing to me. I’m like, you know, could gimme that feedback or American Idol singing. And I’m like, I would have no idea what to take from that, how to implement whatever that criticism was. That’s not what I get. I get something concrete, which even I can understand.

Linden Gross:

Well, and again, I think that part of it is when we’re in the situation where we’re talking during a writing coach session, I will have a suggestion and then we will talk out how that could translate to a scene or to improving a scene. So it’s not just me dictating or soloing on this, it’s a partnership, it’s a creative partnership. And again, that makes it fun. Yeah.

J. W. Judge:

All right. So is, we’re doing two episodes with Linden. This is the first, I have one more topic that you’ve touched on briefly here before we move on to what’s going to be our second episode. And y’all talked about Barb’s process of knowing some of the major plot points that you’re going to get to, but you don’t have an outline, but you’re also not flying in blind. You’ve got an idea of where you want to go and then you’ve gotta fill in all the very many blanks. So Lindon, I assume that other authors you work with have different process that vary on this entire spectrum. How does that affect your approach as a writing coach and the flexibility and malleability that you have to to be able to communicate and work with folks in their different processes?

Linden Gross:

Well, for starters, it’s not just the different approaches, it’s the different kinds of books. So I have two or three clients who are writing novels, and then I have a number of clients who are writing books to promote their business. And then I have a couple of people who are writing serious nonfiction. And then, so part of it is what kind of book are we working on? Part of it is, it’s always about what works for the person I’m working with. So I know what I’m comfortable with as a writer. I know best case scenario, what I’d probably be comfortable with as a writing coach, that actually doesn’t matter all that much. It’s what is going to work best for the person I’m working with. And so with some people I have a woman right now who’s a college professor. She’s a head of her department who’s writing an amazing book about, of racism, racism in America today.

And historically, and I had worked with her as an editor on her book and had to literally tear it apart. I had it all over my kitchen table in little pieces. I had printed it out and had to shuffle and reorganize the whole thing. So I know from working with her in that capacity that she needs a serious outline. She can’t see to the pants, she can’t be aster on this because that’s clearly what she did the first time around. And so we have been working for probably three months now for her to solidify her argument. She’s taking this manuscript in a very different direction, that’s a more current direction and less of a just academic book. And finally, I kind of finally said, I think you’re ready to start writing just last week, because she had finally, there was an argument that made sense that was coherent, that was a premise that she was arguing.

And she has made a good case, excuse me. And with the nonfiction book, a lot of times it is that piece of what’s your opening argument as the attorney? How are you supporting that? What’s the case as you follow through? And what are your closing statements? It’s a good analogy so that you can convince your jury, which is your readership. So with her, she knows that she has this organizational kind of issue. And even in working with the outline, I had her mean, we’re talking a really detailed outline where she had to come up with the first sentence of each chapter, the transition sentence, the arguments in the middle, the substantiating information. So we really know the roadmap of where she’s going, because otherwise she takes a detour and starts heading to Alaska when we’re trying to get to New York. So again, that’s what she needs.

Is she dying to start writing? Yeah, she’s pretty relieved that she can finally start writing this book. But, and then there are other things that you start seeing. For example, one of the things I noticed in my own work many years ago is we all tend to start from the top. So when we’re editing something, when we’re looking at our own writing, when we’re looking at an outline and working on it, we all start at chapter one. So by the time you get to the middle of the book, you’ve now expended your best brain power on the first half. And the second half tends to get short shrift. And I finally had to say, Okay, your assignment, and this was a couple of weeks ago, your assignment is to start at chapter seven, because chapters one through six are pretty tight, and chapter seven through 11 are looking a lot weaker because you clearly are getting there when you’re more tired.

So let’s give them the love. And so again, it’s sort of what the work demands, what the person requires. Some people don’t have outlines at all. The other main novelist who I work with, who’s writing little bit romantic comedy, mixed with a little bit of intrigue. So it’s very similar to Barb’s style of kind of a mystery light meets a romance light. He basically starts with an idea, bashes out a whole manuscript, and then starts back at the beginning and the story morphs and shifts. And that’s his process. He has little to no outline it, and that’s what works for him. And so that’s what we do.

J. W. Judge:

Is that what I think? Yeah, that’s perfect. And I think that’s actually a perfect lead in to what will be our second episode about different types of editing and editing processes and all that sort of thing. But so before we leave off here I want you to tell people where they can find you if they’re interested in the work that you do and have done.

Linden Gross:

Wonderful. So I have a number of websites, but the, I have linden gross.com, which is a little tough to spell, so I’ll spell it out. But one stop writing shop.com also gets you to the same place. So it’s l i n as in Nancy, D as in David, e n, G as in George, R as in Robert, O S S S in sam.com, or just one stop writing shop.com.

J. W. Judge:

Perfect. Thank you so much for your time.

Linden Gross:

Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

This article was originally published on One Stop Writing Shop's blog at https://lindengross.com/2023/01/19/how-to-work-with-a-writing-coach/ .