Rocco Maiolo's Ramblings and Musings

In three days I'm about to start teaching a whole new crop of high school kids the craft of writing. This will be around the twentieth time. 20 X 25... that's 500 students. That's a humbling thought because every time prior to meeting my new students, I feel that I'm not qualified to teach them. I do write and I have been published professionally (as an educator) and as a freelancer in real magazines and periodicals, but -- lest it sounds like I'm exaggerating -- my total published pieces are around 10. Maybe a dozen but definitely not twenty. When I was a kid I wanted to be a writer. I read this book from Scholastic Press (I think): The Mystery of the White Oak. Not a famous book by any stretch. I'm sure it's been long out of print. Years ago, I Googled it. It took me a lot of fancy Boolean search logic before I finally found it. Anyhow, it was the first chapter book I read if you don't include Bobby Coon by Thorton Burgess. Interesting sto...

You don't realize how good pulp fiction writers are until you try your hand at writing. It's not until then that you realize how difficult it is just to plot an engaging story -- let alone create characters that your readers are going to react to, throw in theme, setting, mood... Holy crap, it ain't easy. When I was at university studying English, I didn't even know who was on the best seller's list. Who cared? They had nothing important to say to the human soul; they were totally forgettable ; they were pulp fiction writers. We were reading Auden and Steinbeck and Pound and Shakespeare and Austen -- writers that mattered. Well, 20 years later, I'm not so sure that Grisham and Crichton and King and Archer don't matter and/or won't have contributed something to culture when literary history judges them. Back to my original reflection. It's not until you try writing a novel or even a short story that you realize how impressive someone like Steve Ma...