This week, I published my 500th post. I can say without hesitation that I never would have predicted I would be a writer. In school, I always aced my classes in English, Writing, Composition and Language Arts. I made stellar grades on all papers and written assignments. Then again, I aced all of my academic classes so these classes were no different.
I found them incredibly boring. For all 12 years of school before college, we studied nouns & verbs, subjects & predicates, past tense & present tense, spelling, grammar, and the “proper” form for citing sources. I was really good at this – having learned it in grades 1 through 3 and then basically repeating the process for the next 9 years.
The only time I was ever excited about writing was when I read good writing. And I read a lot. I read newspapers, cereal boxes, novels, biographies, history books, text books, science fiction, short stories, Westerns, murder mysteries and classic literature.
What I never learned in school was how to write something that someone would want to read.
That learning started for me in sales. I watched the people I admired, like my bosses and our superstar salesmen. When they crushed it, I tried to copy what they did. Over my 25 year sales career, I got good at writing proposals, delivering pitches and presenting auto groups audiences.
I was no Steve Jobs – but I stole a lot of ideas from him.
So when I started this blog, I used those same skills to write posts. And I found my posts resonated with my readers. In the beginning, I would ask my wife to review and critique my work before publishing.
She was an English major and a natural writer. Whenever I read anything she wrote, it was as if I was being physically pulled into the story.
My favorite critique she gave me was when she said, “You have found your voice. This sounds exactly like you.”
And that my friends, is why I start sentences with “And”. I sometimes write sentences that have no predicate. I repeat words on purpose. I make up new words.
I am certain I could write the way I was originally taught – with absolutely no grammatical errors and perfect punctuation.
But nobody would want to read it. Not even me.