How to Write

Weed, California, October 2008: Outside, it's Autumn for sure. The air is crisp and chill, and I feel grateful to be in my room, where the morning sunlight falls in stripes through the venetian blinds upon the white-painted wall, and my desk lamp is a warm color here where I work.

I just entered a contest online with a copywriting guru, with a question about writing, and I jotted down for him what I know, and then asked the biggest question that I know.

So I thought: Lots of people don't write, but it's easy and fun. Maybe not everybody knows how. And actually, writing information or a story (or anything) is not actually that difficult, though many people think so.

So here, plain and simple, is how to write.

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Captured by the Black Bart Gang

Henrietta, Texas, 1956 or 1957: I'm not sure of the date. In the terror of the memory, some parts are vague, unreal. It was when I attended Junior High, which at that time was in the old, two-story brick high school building near the center of town.

Life was exciting and new. My friends and I were in the big school, with the big, grown-up kids in high school, and some of them had cars. My home life was shaken up, for my mother had married Dr. Strickland, and we'd gone to live in the flat of rooms above his office. This was on the other side of downtown, across from the hospital, and right on the main road, Highway 287, which ran through the center of town.

I had a friend named Bobby Mitchell, I had been to their house, and so I knew his older brother, Mike Mitchell.

Mike generally ignored me, or treated me with disdain. He was at that age when teen boys begin to think themselves wild and dangerouos, and that's what started the trouble.

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