I’ve had the clandestine identity writer since I first scribbled in crayon on the living room wall. But there was always one small problem: talent. So the first thing I needed to do was to go out there and get me some of that God-given talent that God hadn’t given me yet. Here are the lessons I’ve learned.
Lesson One: Getting some skill
I took a noncredit course at the New School in New York City called Finding Your Voice In Non-Fiction. It seemed perfect. For 10 weeks 20 of us sat around and critiqued each other’s essays. This confirmed something I had suspected: Some people were better writers than me. I could tell. Their writing had whole sentences and nifty words. They had nice little paragraphs and compelling stories about something that really happened to them.
I learned how to identify what made their writing enticing, which made my drivel more readable. This was a challenge, of course, but there was an even bigger realization helping me: There were people who were worse than me.