How I Became a Writer - and how you can, too

I received the hard copy of my latest book today. It's called The Year of the Blue Snow: the 1964 Phillies. The book looked great and made me think about the number of published books that include my work. I contributed a biography of the great Cookie Rojas to the Phillies book, which was compiled by the Society for American Baseball Research and contains biographies of everyone who played for the star-crossed 1964 Phillies. That makes the eighth book for SABR I've written for; my articles have appeared in other team books, in Stars of the Deadball Era, and a compilation called The Perfect Game. My poetry has appeared in three published books -- there's my collection, Two Car Garage, and two anthologies, Poetry to Feed the Spirit and Love and Other Passions. I've also written feature articles for magazines, sports coverage for local papers, and a host of commercial writing, op eds, and of course, this blog. Considering that I spent most of my career working as a director, producer, and Head of Programming, I think it's a good publication record. I have at least three more books in the pipeline. How did I do it? I just started writing. I didn't start with grandiose plans about creating the Great American Novel. I didn't take a class, I didn't pitch a network, I just started writing about subjects that I loved. I'm a long-time SABR member and love researching baseball history so I wrote biographies. One day I wrote an essay in the form of a poem and I've been writing poetry ever since. I've found that the more I write, the better my writing gets. I look for feedback from other writers so I can learn from them. I learned that great writers write every day and reserve regular time to write so I try to do that too. Simply by doing these things, my work has appeared in almost a dozen books. So how can you become a writer? Start writing. It's that simple. And that hard. Remember, it's important to promote your work, too. You can buy my poetry collection, Two Car Garage,on amazon.com, bn.com, chbmedia.com, and just about any other web site that sells books.