MC Hammer, Writing Coach
The famous rapper and accomplished musician is also a diligent scholar who drops pearls of wisdom for working writers
MC Hammer has been using his social media presence on Twitter and more recently on Clubhouse to foster conversations about reading and to encourage the culture more broadly to make space for serious reading and engagement with longer texts and something more than “bite-sized” ideas.
He is also, as I learned this evening, an absolutely brilliant writing coach. Tonight, he dropped some wisdom that I will never forget.
Let me set the scene…
Several of my online and in-real-life colleagues were tuned in to Hammer’s Clubhouse chat tonight to listen in while our much-admired fellow historian Dr. Robin Mitchell talks with Hammer about her new, brilliant book, Venus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth Century France.
In a few ice-breaker minutes before the chat formally began, Hammer went around the stage and asked Dr. Mitchell’s friends to introduce themselves. One of our colleagues, Dr. Tiffany N. Florvil, began to discuss her book-in-progress. Hammer asked how long she had been working on it, and she answered “A long time,” something to which all historians can relate. Our discipline is built…
