About 'On Writing'

A narrative series (monthly, more or less) often centered on writing my novel Hiram Falls but mostly stories about things I've learned along my writing career.

Photo by Young Writers Project intern Cecilia Giordano, a peach of a person.

(Note: I realized I never sent this out last month to explain a big part of what I am doing with the redesign of my my Substack beyond Hiram Falls, my novel. I am now including a much wider range of Stories and tips On Writing. In the spring, I will be holding workshops, writing sessions and challenges. I hope you enjoy. For the next few weeks I’ll be publishing on Tuesdays and Thursdays to catch up with all my new posts. Then I’ll go back to just Tuesdays.)

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On Writing is a narrative series that shares what I’ve learned over the years about writing from 52 years of working as a professional in various capacities.

I’ve worked on newspapers and the Associated Press, I’ve worked on magazines and business newsletters. As a writer and editor we’ve won numerous awards, changed laws and put some folks in jail. We did our diligence and wrote with power.

I’ve worked with over 100,000 kids and coached over 2,000 teachers in my 12 years running Young Writers Project. I built and fostered an online community for teen writers from all over the world and cloned that site for use as private web classrooms for schools all over Vermont and in New Jersey.

I’ve built a writing community for adults where people shared their work for feedback. From that, and my experience with kids at YWP, a collaborator from England and I wrote part of a book on the power of small web communities.

I’ve run countless workshops for kids and teachers. On slam poetry. For Story Center on digital storytelling. For over four years, starting in March 2020 with the beginning of the Covid lockdown I held weekly writing sessions for dozens of writers from around the country until last November.

For nine months, a doctor and I ran weekly writing sessions for adults dealing with opiate addiction.

And, oh yes, I wrote a novel, Hiram Falls. It took five years and I had some major failures. But I learned from those. And have some tricks that worked for me.

And along my life’s writing journey I’ve learned so much from other writers and editors — people with far more skills than me — and from kids, mostly in seeing how unafraid they are to express themselves if given a safe, non-judgmental environment.

I’ve learned something about how people can write better, how they can get closer to the essence of their stories, how they can write with strength and clarity, how they can find their writing voice.

I want to pass on what I’ve learned and, I hope, to not only entertain you, but also help you polish your writing voice.

I will help you look at design, how something looks or feels or works and how that affects the formation of ideas or creative decision making or the way a final piece turns out. I will look at establishing routines, at looking at your own work objectively, at revising — the secret to good writing.

I will look at writing from a variety of perspectives -- the writer, the student, the teacher, the reader -- and will spend much of my time examining writing in digital spaces.

I will try also do what I do best — telling stories. Like this one:

One of the best writers I worked with was a columnist at The Akron Beacon Journal named Bill O’Connor. He wrote a column on city life.

"Writing is easy,” he said to me once. “Really. You just write one sentence at a time and relate it to the previous. So the second sentence relates to the first, and the third to the second, and so on.

"The hard part is finding that first sentence."

So enjoy this series. It’s free.

Keep on writin’