Writing Demystified
Find your unique voice––clear, simple tools for everyone.
I live in the Dallas area and am neither famous nor commercially successful—however, I’m truly happy, get to do mostly what I want to do, and I write even though my number one (and mostly only) fan is my mom. I do love you, Mom. As I’m surely past the age of realizing a dream to become Oprah’s next big author, I write now because I can, and because it feels good. It is the thing I do that stops time, clears the noise from my head, and makes me feel purposeful. Hopefully, something on this website will encourage you to follow your passion, and to ignore all those who told you how you weren’t doing it right.
About
When I started teaching in the fall of 2002, it was an act of desperation, born out of a sincere desire not to work in retail or wait tables for a living anymore. I had finally decided that the romance of “starving artist,” was a far better fable than the reality I’d been wrapped in for several years. It was time for me to “get my life on track,” and teaching seemed to be the only thing I could slip into from where I was. Fortunately, I had several years prior managed to get a masters degree, which opened some opportunity in the field of teaching English.
Having heard so often, “those who can do, those who can’t teach,” I feared teaching would relegate me to the dreadfully anonymous drudgery of a frustrated and perhaps talentless wannabe. But, wanting to keep a roof over my head leveled my pride, and off to an east Dallas high school I went, scared out of my mind and ready to fall flat on my face. At the encouragement of a kind friend, I signed up to teach a couple of composition classes at the local junior college at the same time.
What happened was not what I expected. I loved the students, and became a bit indignant at some of the travesties of our public school systems and the standardized tests which, in my opinion, are only lowering the quality of the education our children receive. Feeling better suited for the college environment, I was teaching college full-time within a couple of years, abandoning my efforts at conforming to the rules and asinine practices of public school education. Those who continue to work tirelessly and thanklessly in the trenches of our failing public educational bureaucracies have my most heartfelt respect.
I believe that most people who hate writing hate it because at some point in their early school experiences, they were told to stop being creative and expressing themselves uniquely, and forced to write into a mold too narrow, limited and idiotic to allow for any freedom of ideas. Few escape the horrors of the 5-paragraph essay, and thus, writing becomes a chore rather than the amazing tool of self-expression it actually is. This website is a compilation of the best tools I found to unlock the creative voice inside a wide range of different individuals, and to give them back the thing that has always been theirs: language. Perhaps some of these exercises will help you too.
