My First Writing Book Is Done!

On “Career Day” at a high school, a Coast Guard officer was giving a presentation. He was talking about a nighttime rescue of a group of stranded sailors. In high seas, under stiff wind, every minute was a hazard, and what made it worse was the sailors were confused and frightened…and the helicopter didn’t have room for all of them.

The kids were hypnotized by the story, imagining the whiplash of waves and wind, the darkness and the chill. One girl raised her hand. “Sir?” she asked. “If you didn’t have room for everyone…how did you decide who to save?”

The officer got very quiet. “It was a horrible thing to have to do, and every minute we were out there we risked the lives of the rescue crew as well. So…what we did was rescue the ones who swam toward us. Some were so confused and frightened that they swam away into the darkness. As much as we hated to admit it, we couldn’t save everyone, so we saved the ones who came into the light.”

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CHOP WOOD, CARRY WATER, my first writing book, has just finished its first round of pre-reading, and now, today, is available for the very first time.

But I wanted to speak about the philosophy behind it: find the smallest critical piece of a process, the thing which, if mastered, will change the most other things. “A sentence a day” is small enough to…