I began my Writing as a Profession blog to share my authorial experiences with both fellow and would-be writers. Much of the content evolved into telling anecdotes about my professional encounters with famous people—every kind from William Faulkner and Robert Frost to Johnny Cash, Telly Savalas, Julius Erving, George Patton, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel. The list is a long one.
My image as an aggressive magazine editor and investigative journalist at Metro Hampton Roads Magazine in the 1970s belies the fact that I have written more than 350 poems aligned with a metaphysical perspective as well as the libretto for a classical music oratorio, The Awakening of Humanity, which premiered in France in 2019.
I also authored feature-film screenplays and three-act stage plays that were never produced. It is hard to summarize more than fifty book-length literary works and over one hundred stories, both fiction and non-fiction.
It is not ironic that at age 81, Chicken Soup for the Soul, a best-selling thematic anthology series since 1993, is publishing my account of how I became a writer. The series of more than 300 titles features inspirational true stories. The March 2023 edition that documents my beginning is Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Advice that Changed My Life. My article is titled “You Are a Writer.”
It is one thing to have a talent for writing. It is entirely another thing to devote your entire lifetime to creative writing. To write 100,000 words or more each year whether or not any of them are published. To undertake a novel that takes more than a year to research and a second year to compose in a genre unimagined by the publishing world. What is an excuse for such audacity? It must be a metaphysical calling without the recognition of a clerical collar.
If you have read any of my major works and wondered how this writer came to be, the Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Advice that Changed My Life article will reward you. Read between the lines. There is a possibility that you are a writer, too.
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