Dear Young Writers,

You know who you are. You’re reading this on your phone, computer, tablet, or maybe a soggy newspaper you found in a gutter.

Maybe you’re in college or in high school. Maybe you’re a middle-schooler with a munificently grandiose vocabulary.

Either way, you’re a writer. And you know you’re a writer, deep inside. So I’m writing you. Because you’re confused. You don’t know what you’re doing with your life. You’re embarrassed to talk about who you are.

Writers are viewed as oddballs in our American culture. And it’s a shame because it’s not this way everywhere.

In Europe, for example, if you tell someone you’re a writer, the Europeans get dreamy eyed and converse about “War and Peace” and “The Brothers Karamazov.”

But in America, when you tell someone you want to be a novelist, they look at you as though you have just broken wind in a school board meeting. To many people, wanting to be a writer is like wanting to be an astronaut.

Thus, I am going to share with you a few thoughts about

the field of professional writing. Things many writers don’t want you to know: such as, how to find a complete three-course dinner by rummaging through the municipal garbage.

Because, you see, professional writers are sort of like stage magicians. It’s all an act. These “magicians” continually try to pull literary rabbits out of their hats. Only, instead of calling them “rabbits,” they obsess over whether they should use the word “bunnies,” “hares,” “cottontails,” “lagomorphs,” or in extreme cases, “chinchillas.”

Thus, the first thing I can tell you about writers is that none of us know what the hellfire we’re doing.

I don’t want to generalize, but this is true for every single writer alive. Don’t trust any author who says they know what they’re doing. They are full of chinchilla.

Writers are not nuclear engineers. We confusedly type words…

My mother always told me to smile. Especially when I didn’t want to. She often told me to smile when I was sad, when trying on school clothes, or whenever I was forced to eat beef liver at gunpoint.

“Smile,” she’d say. “You have a lot to be thankful for, young man.”

A mother knows how her child is feeling by looking at their face. Are you in pain? Upset? Angry because your Little League team lost the opening game? Your mom knows. Because your face tells the story.

Turns out, you have 43 muscles in your face. Your face contains more muscles than any other body part. The only anatomical region coming close to having this many muscles is your back, which has 40 muscles, excluding the muscles of your bootyus maximus, which are the heaviest muscles in the body. This is totally true. Your buttocks, skin and muscle combined, weigh 33 pounds.

So, why is your face so muscled? Because. Your face was not just made for

photographs. Your face is a precise signaling system.

You can communicate entire paragraphs with only your face. It’s how you were designed. Don’t believe me? Try getting lost in a foreign country without cell service or a functioning GPS. By the end of the day, your face will be tired.

As it happens, the default mode of your face, according to research, is smiling. Recent studies discovered that we are born smiling. Doctors used 3D ultrasound technology to find that developing babies smile in the womb.

Once born, babies continue to smile. Even when crying, they are flexing their smile muscles. And babies keep smiling throughout childhood. A child smiles, on average, 400 times per day. Whereas the average adult smiles fewer than 20.

Something else researchers discovered is that a smile is catching. It’s called the “yawn effect.” Just seeing someone else smile stimulates your empathetic reflex system. If one…

Yesterday, I visited the house where you were born. And I got chills.

I’ve chased you all over the US. I visited your grave in the Washington National Cathedral, I got chills there, too. I performed in a historic theater where you once lectured. Chills. I drove past the house where you died in Connecticut. Chills.

You see, I don’t have many heroes. I dislike the idea of personal idols. I have always felt that if you put someone on a pedestal it’s not fair to them, and it’s doubly unfair to yourself.

Because you can never measure up to an idol. Once you idealize someone you have degraded yourself. You have made the beautiful unattainable.

No matter how hard a man tries, his idol will always be “smarter,” “more exceptional,” or “better-looking.” All chances for growth diminish beneath the poisonous drug of comparison.

But you were no idol. You were never on a pedestal. You were always down here amongst us sinners. Groping your way through your own inner darkness and

silence.

You never had children, but you were maternal to me. I read your books as a young man, fatherless and lost, ignorant and uneducated, the victim of paternal suicide and I would imagine that you were my grandmother, sharing nuggets of wisdom only with me.

You were an artist whose medium was the English language. Your words were balm to me. And still are.

You once said: “We can decide to let our trials crush us, or we can convert them into forces for good.”

And: “Relationships are like Rome -- difficult to start out, incredible during the prosperity of the ‘golden age’, and unbearable during the fall. Then, a new kingdom will come along and the whole process will repeat itself until you come across a kingdom like Egypt... that thrives, and continues to flourish. This kingdom will become your best friend, your soul mate, and…

Sunset in Avondale Park. The dogwoods are in bloom. Little League teams are in the park, suited up for practice. Kids are fielding grounders, running bases, or standing in the outfield and seriously picking their noses.

Only a few hours ago, an armed 41-year-old Lebanese-American rammed his truck into a synagogue full of children in Michigan. The gunman was killed. A security guard was injured. Eight first responders are being treated. The kids are safe.

The suspect’s family members, reportedly, had been killed in an Israeli attack earlier this year.

And I am trying to understand this world. Within the last 5 years, there have been nearly 40 major shooting incidents at houses of worship. In the last five years, there have been 181 major shooting incidents in schools. And those are just the “major” ones.

I simply don’t understand.

Tonight, baseball team parents are sitting together on the bleachers, watching their kids play in relative safety.

The parents form their respective cliques. Moms sit with moms. Dads sit with dads, providing an important contribution

to the game by slow clapping and telling their ballplayers to “Show some hustle!”

Meanwhile, there is a homeless man who goes largely unnoticed in the park. There are several homeless people encamped in Avondale Park, in plain view, but they are invisible. He sits on a picnic table. His eyes are bloodshot. His clothes are rags.

A little boy in a baseball uniform walks by, on his way to the concession stand. The old man is surprised when the kid approaches him of his own volition.

“Hi,” the boy says, casually.

The man’s eyes register a kind of surprise. His teeth are missing. He returns a greeting.

“How’re you?” the boy asks.

“Good,” the man lies.

Then the boy presents his hand for a handshake.

And I am thinking about my late friend Myron. Myron was homeless for most of his adulthood until he…

This week the headlines were pretty dim. Fighting in Iran, surging oil prices, and just when you think current events couldn’t get any worse, it’s time for the Oscars.

But then, those were only the headlines you actually heard about. Not all news headlines see the light of day.

Such as the story of Chicago Girl Scout Troop 26286, in Englewood, grappling to sell enough cookies to stay afloat.

A few weeks ago, news of their problem broke. The troop needed to sell at least 2,100 boxes just to cover basic membership fees and keep the troop alive for one more year. The story made the nightly news. All of Chicago got involved. People were ordering cookies all over the nation.

As of this week, the troop has sold 26,000 boxes.

And in North Carolina, Kerwin Pittman, a former inmate who spent upwards of 11 years incarcerated, and one year in solitary, became the first ex-inmate to purchase a prison.

The 400-bed prison, formerly Wayne Correctional Center, is in

Goldsboro. The former correctional facility will be transformed into transitional housing and occupational development for former inmates re-entering civilian life.

Kerwin knows firsthand how difficult reintegration is. When he was first released, he said, “I had family support, so I had housing. But a lot of my friends didn’t have any place to go. Or if they did, there was a time limit on how long they could stay.”

In Rio de Janeiro, a new initiative using seed-firing drones has successfully reforested an area the size of 200 football fields in record time.

The drones fly overhead, buzzing above the Amazon, planting approximately 40,000 trees per day. That’s over 1,600 trees planted every hour. In the time it took you to read this, several new trees were planted.

How big of a problem is deforestation in Brazil? Over an 18-year span, foreign and domestic logging companies in the Amazon destroyed an…

As a kid, I remember going to the beach. I remember walking the shore, wearing my little swimsuit. I remember the glorious and inimitable joy of having sand in my crack.

My biggest objective, of course, was finding seashells. All children care deeply about shells. This is the main reason you visit the beach as a kid. It’s about looking for shells.

What are you going to do with the shells? Nobody really cares. You haven’t worked that part out yet. All that matters is looking for them.

You do this if for no other reason than because, hey, we’re at the beach, y’all! Isn’t this great?! Wow, check out these shells! Whoa, look at that one! It’s orange! I call dibs!

It didn’t matter if the sky was overcast and foreboding. It didn’t matter if the water was muddy, or if the shore was littered with clumps of dead seaweed that smelled like a Port-a-John.

You’d find your little shell, pluck it from the sand, then dust it off like you’d just found a thousand

bucks.

I, personally, had no organizational system for collecting shells. No buckets, containers, or nets. Thus I was forced to carry my collection in my hands.

Which wasn’t a big deal until you had collected WAY more shells than you could carry. Soon, I would be walking along the shoreline with an entire armful of shells. Big shells, little shells, and all shells in between.

Then, at some point, toward the end of the day, reality would hit. You’d look at the beach and realize there were gazillions and gazillions of shells beneath your feet. There was no way you could ever collect them all. Furthermore, what the heck were you going to DO with these shells?

So, I would let them go. I would scatter the mass of shells to the wind, flinging them into the air, watching them disperse like rain. The…

Dogs know stuff. Yes, I know they’re just animals. I know their brains are only about the size of tangerines. But I’m telling you.

Take my dog Otis Campbell. I don’t often write about him, but I should. Because he’s our main dog. Our other dogs are his supporting actors.

Otis is the alpha of our family pack, ranking just below my wife. I am ranked somewhere near the rear of the pack. I eat supper last.

I wish you could see Otis right now. He is half awake, half asleep, sort of standing watch over me. That’s what he does whenever I write. He watches me, without moving.

And I’ve always wondered how dogs can remain deathly still, watching you, without falling asleep.

It reminds me of a guy my father once knew. The man could sit on the front porch without moving a muscle for days. The only way you knew he was alive was by his cigarette—it moved occasionally. My father said the man had been told by doctors to drink spirits to steady his

nerves. It worked. Sometimes he got so steady he couldn’t move.

That’s who Otis reminds me of. So that’s who we named him after.

Otis is a good dog. He has witnessed every random emotional event we’ve ever undergone in this household. He has been present for our entire lives.

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly eight years since Otis came to us from an adoption center. We found him when a local pet shelter had a meet-and-greet.

The place was a circus. You couldn’t hear what any of the volunteers were saying because of the collective noise. Each kennel had a fanciful poster with the dogs’ names emblazoned in theatrical letters. Some of the puppies were dressed in little costumes to look like lion tamers and tiny Little Bo-Peeps. The volunteers referred to these costumes as “curb appeal.”

My wife…

The Girl Scouts were setting up a folding table by the doors of the hardware store.

“Omigod,” I said to the cashier. “It’s March.”

The cashier looked at me flatly.

“Debit or credit?” she said.

“This is March,” I pointed out again. “Don’t you know what this means?“

She said nothing.

“It means cookies,” I said.

She cleared her throat. “Sir. There’s a line.”

I paid for my wares, then hurried out to the Girl Scout cookies. I did a quick inventory check, using my cookie-sonar to investigate the boxes on the Scouts’ table.

I was not looking for Trefoils or Do-si-dos, Tagalongs, Lemon-Ups, or Adventurefuls. Neither Samoas nor Toffee-Tastics. I was looking for a uniquely mint-chocolatey cookie which is an American institution in and of itself; a cookie that tastes like I’m about to transition to wearing sweatpants full time.

“Do you have any Thin Mints?” I asked the little girls.

The girl who answered was very matter-of-fact. Her name was Mary Kate. And from the looks of her sash, she is an overachiever.

“Yes. We have Thin Mints.”

One of the

Scout moms whispered. “Ask him if he’d like some.”

Another Scout answered. Her voice was quiet. Her name was Amelie. She was also a highly decorated officer.

“How many boxes?” she asked.

I wanted to say, “I’ll take as many as you can sell me without losing your jobs.” But I showed restraint. I only asked for seven boxes.

I am a big fan of the Girl Scouts. In a modern age when nearly every classic American pastime is belittled and threatened, I like knowing the Girls Scouts are still kicking.

This nation has lost sit-down family dinners, newspapers, even the sport of baseball has undergone modern rule changes. (There is no clock in baseball.)

The Boy Scouts have been the victim of culture wars and bankruptcy. Dr. Seuss has been taken off the shelves. But the…

Our shower drain kept getting clogged. It was a big problem. We had to hire a plumber. He came out twice.

God love him, the plumber did not look happy the second time. Namely, because our house is 100 years old. Meaning, five generations of people have been bathing in this house. The drain pipes have been whisking away one century’s worth of funk water.

“No telling what’s in those pipes,” the plumber said in a quiet, ominous voice, gazing into the treacherous blackness of the drain hole.

The plumber and his young assistant, Charlie, spent an hour working on the problem. The plumber is not a tiny man. He did a lot of bending over while Charlie would laugh, pointing at his boss’s partially exposed gluteal cleft, and saying, “Crack kills, boss.”

They located the clog.

Charlie found me in my office. He was breathless and excited. “We found it!” Charlie said these words in the same weighty tones NASA engineers would use to say, “Houston, the Eagle has landed.”

Three of us stood in a tiny bathroom, looking

at the source of the clog, lying in the plumber’s hand.

“I’ve never seen a ball of funk that big before,” said Charlie.

The clot was a rat’s nest of human hair about the size of a golf ball. The hair was old, so it just looked black and green.

“Probably your wife’s hair,” said the plumber.

He’s probably right, I was thinking. My wife has the longest hair in our house. Moreover, I’ve seen the aftermath of her showers. Whenever she washes her hair, the shower stall looks like she’s just finished bathing a border collie.

So, I told my wife about the ball of funk. She became very defensive.

Her main defense was, “It wasn’t MY HAIR!”

I had to laugh. Her thick, brunette hair comes down to her mid-back. Who else’s hair could it be?

“What about…

What if I told you that you are enough?

Moreover, what if you woke up this morning and, for the first time ever, you actually felt like enough. What if you loved yourself? And I mean really loved yourself.

Do you love yourself? Let’s find out.

Are you a perfectionist? No? Yes? Have you ever asked WHY you’re a perfectionist? Have you ever wondered why you strive to be flawless so that nobody will find a reason to judge you?

Or are you a people pleaser? Ever wonder why? How did you become a doormat? Why do you fall all over yourself to ensure everyone will like you? Would showing them the real you be that bad?

Or maybe you’re critical. Maybe you nitpick those you love. Heck, maybe you nitpick yourself. Maybe you look in the mirror and think, “I’m so fat and ugly.”

Perhaps you see photos of yourself and react with true disgust, thinking, “I’m so old and wrinkled. Look at all this flab underneath my neck, jiggling like Jello salad.”

Maybe you don’t like your nose. Or

your teeth. Or the shape of your bootymus maximus.

Then again, maybe you dislike yourself in much simpler ways. Maybe you’re embarrassed about your bank account. “Omigod. Is this ALL you have in savings? What a loser.”

Maybe you don’t like where you are in your career. What a freaking disappointment you are. You should’ve been MUCH further along in your field by now. Instead, you’re just a supporting actor in someone else’s made-for-TV drama.

Maybe you don’t feel smart enough. Maybe you are socially anxious. Maybe you think you’re too much of an introvert. You’re a classic procrastinator. You feel invisible. You hate your hair. You wish you were prettier. Skinnier. Funnier. Happier.

Either way, your inner critic is always screaming,“You’re not enough!” You’ve tried to shut up this blowhard for years. But it doesn’t work. The inner…