Interview with Jack Hart, A Writer's Coach

Jack Hart is a managing editor of The Oregonian and has served as the newspaper's writing coach and staff development director. Formerly a professor of journalism at The University of Oregon, he has often lectured at Harvard's Niemann Conference for Narrative Journalism, and he teaches at writers' conferences throughout the country.

Tell us about your decision to write A WRITER’S COACH: THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO WRITING STRATEGIES THAT WORK?

I’ve been The Oregonian’s writing coach for nearly twenty years. During all that time, I’ve been collecting tips from some of the country’s best writers and editors. I thought I should pass that collective wisdom along.

What type of strategies will writers find help with?

The book covers three major areas: (1) Effective approaches to the writing process – developing ideas, gathering information, finding a focus, organizing, structuring, drafting, and polishing. (2) Specific tools for making writing more forceful, clear, colorful, to-the-point, rhythmic, and mechanically correct. (3) Habits that make writers lifelong learners.

There is such a collective wealth of information gathered, how long did it take you to accumulate the materials and write the book?

For years I not only ran The Oregonian’s writing-improvement program, but I also wrote a column for Editor & Publisher magazine and produced a nationally distributed instructional newsletter. So I kept files. Now I have thousands of examples I can draw on to illustrate writing strategies that work.

Your book states that the secret to writing well is in the process, not the finished product. What do you mean by this?

The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is that if you want to get better you have to change the way you work through the writing process. You have to improve the way you find and refine ideas, for example. Or the way you plan your information-gathering. You have to get more systematic about choosing a structure, and you have to recognize the difference between drafting and polishing.

What have you learned from novelists that have helped with journalism, and what do you think novelists could learn from journalists?

Novelists have helped me understand the protagonist-complication-resolution theory of story, which also applies to literary nonfiction. Novelists could learn a lot from the way journalists conduct research, maintain skeptical habits of mind, and reconcile different points of view.

My favorite section was the one about Color. What do you mean by Color in writing?

“Color” is an old newspaper term for descriptive writing that puts readers into a scene. A color story on a football game, for example, might focus on the fans, the tailgate parties, or the sights and sounds of the stadium, rather than the game itself.

Explain Mastery. How does one move from the "tools" of writing to mastering their genre?

Writing is infinitely complex. Nobody ever really masters it. But certain habits produce lifelong learning that gets a writer closer and closer.

Many of us work in isolation and therefore never see how others solve their dilemmas. What has been beneficial about working with other writers on deadlines? What practices have you established into your own routine because of this?

I’ve worked shoulder-to-shoulder with dozens of great writers, and I’ve learned something from each of them. I’ve seen how Pulitzer Prize winners such as Rich Read produce outlines that list each larger point they plan to make in a scene. Or how another Pulitzer winner such as Tom Hallman keeps reworking his theme as his reporting turns up new facts. Or how Julie Sullivan, yet another Pulitzer winner, forges genuine emotional attachments to sources and wins access to the most intimate details of their lives.

What does a day in your life look like?

I start each day by spending an hour or so with my newspaper. Then I move up to my home office for an hour at my own writing. Then I walk to the newspaper office, where I might teach a workshop for the staff, attend news meetings to see what’s in the works, consult with editors and reporters on pending stories, or sit with a writer while I work through the polish phase of the editing. Once a month or so I hit the road to work with staffs at other newspapers or to conduct workshops for writers’ organizations. I just spoke to a group of food writers. In the next couple of months I’ll talk with garden writers, travel writers, and wine writers.

Whose work do you read on a regular basis because their writing impresses you?

Friends and colleagues produce a steady supply of books that I always read. I just read the draft of a terrific novel by Bruce DeSilva, an old friend who’s the writing coach for the Associated Press. One of my former TAs, Lauren Kessler, now heads the University of Oregon’s literary nonfiction program, and I’m just finishing her latest book, Dancing With Rose. It’s terrific, too.

I also follow the best explanatory journalists closely. I’m particularly partial to John McPhee, Susan Orlean, Richard Preston, and other New Yorker contributors.

Do you have a dream for the future of your writing, something you would love to accomplish?

I have two books underway. One’s a novel, and the other’s a how-to on writing and editing narrative nonfiction.

Parting words?

I’ll borrow from Don Murray, a Pulitzer winner at the Boston Globe who went on to train generations of great writers at the University of New Hampshire. Don took his personal motto from Horace, who said, nulla dies sine linea – “never a day without a line.”