I Have a YouTube Channel

Got long blocks of text? I can help with that

Maybe, you’re like me, and you love to write. Medium is not just a game to make money but you’re serious about improving as a writer.

I’m a story nerd who loves to read books. I study the craft of writing. I look at what an author does in a story to see what makes that story work.

Dialogue. Plot development. Description. Characterization. I like to find the elements in a story that make it have a powerful effect on me.

I’ve always told my wife I’d write a book if I had the right subject. When our son was diagnosed with autism at three, my wife suggested I start a blog to write about what I was learning about my son, being a dad, and autism.

So I’ve been writing a memoir for ten years.

Memoir-in-progress

I’m about 80 percent done. My son, now 14, just has to grow older, and I have to complete the emotional arc as a parent to finish my memoir.

In the meantime, I’ve started a YouTube channel focused on the craft of writing and invite you to join me in learning about the craft of writing.

Do you write bad titles? Boring openings? Let me help you with that.

Are you still writing long blocks of text? Those need to be trimmed.

Short paragraphs — and shorter stories — work online because we all have shorter attention spans when we click on a story — at least most of us.

My channel focuses mostly on online writing but it discusses how to use writing literary elements such as “show, not tell” description in your writing.

I feel everyone on Medium wants to write and earn $ for their stories, but the key to getting more “reads” is obvious to me: learn to write better stories.

If you write good stories, you create fans who want to read your next story and then the next story … because they’ve become a fan of your writing.

They know from experience you write good entertaining stories.

So it makes sense writers would want to learn about the craft of writing.

Strive to keep getting better

Learning about the craft of writing shows that you care enough about our stories and the readers who read them to work on your craft of writing.

I want someone to read one of my stories and feel like they’ve gotten something from how I dug a little deeper into what I thought or felt — and to feel I cared enough to think about what my story was really all about.

I share what I’ve learned from authors Mary Karr (The Art of Memoir), George Saunders (A Swim in the Pond in the Rain), Steve Pressfield (The War of Art) — so you hear not just me but the views of professional writers in my videos.

Some of my recent videos

I read a lot of personal stories on Medium and too many stories just “tell” what happens, and I explain what it means to “show, not tell” in this video.

Another important part of a personal story is the structure of a story. I made a video on the five plot elements of a memoir-style story … that you may have learned in a high school English course a long time ago.

I’ve found knowledge of plot structure helps me as a writer because I know what to do when I sit down to write and go from one plot element to the next.

Thanks for reading.

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