The set up is pretty blatant: Suggestions from a published author must be better than your approach to writing, which is to sit down, be natural and let the words flow. But you’d rather believe in the myth and all the thoughts that come in reading their tips. You think: “Here’s someone who has figured it all out. Who actually writes with a purpose, an end in mind.” And what comes from that is self-centered, but exactly the point – a complete condemnation of your own work.

I’ve turned to them at times when I’ve gotten stuck. Natalie Goldberg was my supplier. She gave me a few of her best pills – little read ones – when I was working on deadline and there was just no other way to deliver a good story. I could have taken my time and tried to write clean, but I needed it right away and I had some extra cash.

Like the thousands of others who make a living with this lonesome craft, it’s sometimes hard for me to make myself sit down and actually get to work. Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones is the best in this category by far. She actually seems to care about the craft. She has the good stuff. And the come down isn’t as harsh as it is with other books.

My first writing classes in college were scenes worth depicting as we’d done so many imaginary scenes – deserted beaches and vacant country fields. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, our class worked from writing prompts developed on a whim by our professor. While we wrote, he sat on a desk up front and timed us for 10 minutes or sometimes wrote along, but he always seemed to be curious about what we were writing in our private notebooks.

Those sessions took place 10 years ago. Though I don’t know this for sure, I’d guess many of those voices have been silenced by the constant failure and the general difficulty it takes to make a career as a writer.

During the day, I make my way as a public relations executive and trade magazine editor at PlattForm Advertising in Lenexa, Kan. My job involves writing, everyday, so that my job seems more hobby than actual work. This morning, for the first time, I was invited to share what little I know about the writing practice with the Client Services division, a team of about 40 souls who is on the front lines of serving clients in the fast-paced career education industry, day in and day out.

My favorite writers did not believe they have anything to offer fellow writers or anyone hoping to pick it up. They believed they wrote the way they wrote and that to tell anyone about the approach that worked for them was not only a worthless proposition, but somewhat egotistical. “Who am I to tell someone how to write?” I somewhat prescribe to this philosophy, too. I also know I can write better than I can explain how it’s done, so it was with some hesitancy I agreed to lead the group without really knowing exactly what I expected to do or to happen.

I got up at 4 a.m., assembled a word-heavy slide presentation, put on a tie and coached them in the principles of business writing. Given the department’s size, about a quarter of the agency’s employees were in the room, and they didn’t feel confident in their writing abilities. I asked, before I started, who among them considered themselves above average writers. No one raised a hand.

The presentation turned from imparting a few suggestions about writing to encouraging them to believe they could write clearly, even if it wasn’t their greatest interest. We talked about tense, stronger verbs and action words, needless words and phrases. We talked about considering the audience, writing concisely and with clarity, and how e-mail and other business communication that is poorly written can cost companies money.

But more importantly, they learned writing isn’t magic – that it takes commitment and repetition. I told them someone in their lives probably spoiled writing for them. Possibly a heavy-handed English instructor in high school or a professor in college that wrote something derogatory in the margin of a paper they’d written or told them they should never try to write anything again. I’ve seen students belittled for something they’d written in high school. This doesn’t happen in calculus or vocal music or other courses. The teachers generally are more tactful in trying to persuade someone into a different field. Why is that way? I don’t know, but it is.

Based on their reactions, I’d like to think they left with some real excitement for the craft or at least a willingness to try. What a shame it would be to see another great writer – or even someone who enjoys writing greatly – to be lost due to discouragement. You can help employees to write better for business purposes, but no matter the format or the experience level, it always takes soul and courage.

“Writing is like taking a good shit … it all comes out at once.”

Told you.

Those are the immortal words of Park University Professor John Lofflin. While his statement might be offensive and a picture best left unimagined, the sensation he alludes to – with a pen and words used in substitution – is something I strive toward everyday (and something other writing instructors try to say, but not so blatantly).

An instructor clever enough to reveal a trick of the trade with such endearment must reach a student on a much deeper level than what can be accomplished in the lecture environment. At 20 or 21, I walked into Copley Hall on the Park campus in Parkville, Mo., with a distant look and no sense of purpose. I’d attended classes at the University of Kansas for a semester, spent a year-and-a-half in community college, the finally enrolled at Park. On a shelf overlooking the river bluffs, I’d never stepped foot on the college’s campus though it was less than a mile from the house I grew up in if a line could be drawn across the Missouri River.

Copley resembled a hidden cabin that might be found among other limestone-fronted outbuildings or shelters on a public lake. Government regulation caused the entries to be broadened for handicap access, so at the north and the south ends, heavy doors were added along with ramps and railings that resembles a retreat where couples could have an indoor wedding against the backdrop of a stone fireplace and windows that open up to glistening water or dangling tree branches perfect for wedding party photos.

Inside, the building smells faintly of polished wood floors and the moisture that the limestone has held in through the years. The hallways are so narrow that the shoulders have to be turned when another body passes. Those halls, as some old buildings do, includes random steps up and down, windows painted shut that open only when an elbow has nearly been put through the glass, a rotary telephone stacked on old Yellow Pages, and cork boards push-pinned with flyers.

After its original life as a boy’s dorm, the hall was converted to the university’s communications offices and classrooms. Professor Lofflin’s office was on the second floor, across from the newspaper offices – a quaint meeting room with an old, orange-vinyl couch and an assembly room where the staff could “paste up” the newspaper on production days.

I spent the majority of my college experience in these offices in a variety of modes, but ordinarily either participating in deep conversations, writing, or laying out the campus newspaper, The Stylus. Pasting up the newspaper is an old-fashioned process that involves printing each page of the newspaper in three sheets and gluing them to boards – all lines matching – with glue sticks.

For a 12-page publication, the process takes a full day with several people working non-stop. Fits and starts are the norm. The room is congested and then empties out according to class schedule. And it was at a moment when the room was clear when Lofflin walked across the squeaky wood planks and offered his analogy.

I’d already known him to talk my language. He’d grown up in same area I did with the same type of people in the neighborhood. And he’d decided to try to make sense of the world in the same way I was: with written words. We were discussing column writing and some difficulties I had when he offered the “shit” analogy. He brought out a box of old Pitch magazines that carried his photo and by-line beside his opinion column and began talking with great care about his experiences drawing material from the world around him to put that column together monthly. All the while, he was teaching in an uncommon way, but with real care and brilliance. There was no teacher-student veneer or superficiality. I was on board. I learned a lesson of a lifetime.

He imparted on me the need for lifelong learning that I sometimes think about when self-checking books at the library – when I choose to listen to Lennon or write on a Sunday afternoon when the kids are asleep and most guys my age are watching football. Not that I needed it, but I’ve come to find similar advice in other instructors’ books.

Lofflin’s philosophies that writing is a trade that can be learned are reflected by Roy Peter Clark. His theory to keep the pen moving during timed creative writing practices are reminiscent of author and writing instructor Natalie Goldberg’s concepts in books like Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind. In fact, I turn to her work to revisit what it was John was trying to tell us.

Goldberg writes about freeing the mind so the words flow straight from mind to paper with no self-editor kicking in to stop the progress of putting the words down. The concept is to write fast and connect with “wild mind”, flashing on the first thoughts that come to mind before society all the forces we’ve embedded that tell us, “No, you shouldn’t be writing that”, can be ignored and the Creator in you has the voice.

Working on deadline another time when the office had cleared out, Lofflin told me he couldn’t be a great writer because nothing terrible had ever happened to him. He said until it did, his chances at writing something meaningful were sparse. He was kidding, of course, but there is some truth in his statement.

Burned leaves suffuse the backyard air with white smoke blowing from matted piles. The smell is sharp, dry and Maple sweet when breathed deeply. Somewhere in this syrupy smell is a connection to the lazy fall afternoons of my childhood.

Under overcast skies, we’d scrape the grass-tops with rakes and after pull after pull have brown, crinkly and uneven piles to jump in only to rake up again and do it over. We were fortunate to grow up in a place affluent with trees, all kinds, that would dump all colors on the back lawns – yellow, red as bright as the center fire in the burning leaves, purple on big, broad leaves and orange from maples.

To see the colors turn from green the previous five months to such a vivid tapestry was a living miracle for us in a town where miracles dissipated the decade before. The change of seasons was the only dream that hadn’t been taken and it came and went sorrowfully, as all autumns do, but the majesty lasted until the last leaf fell and hope blew out with it. For what trails fall in the prairie states is an unforgiving winter that asks for the city people’s repentenance on January and February nights for committing the grievance of living here. But the people never give in. They draw near to fires, shed themselves with blankets atop sweaters and warm clothes and slippers, and sit close together to gain from body heat and listen to the wind howl past windows and door crevices.

Last week was more than likely the last this autumn that the windows will be open. Only two weeks deep into November, our house is now completely shut in until sometime next April or possibly May, when the volume and energy of three children and their assorted pets kept in by the tired walls can finally be released into the neighborhood streets.

In the mornings, when the weather permits, I like to sit in the arm chair by the open window that opens up to the front porch and drink the day’s first coffee. With the doors closed, I feel it all pushing in on itself especially when the dusk folds in the prairies and rolling wheat fields already harvested and put to bed until next year.

I’ll make my own place to sleep, upstairs, where I can look out on this gray scene – the naked trees – where someone will have to grab me by the wrist to pull me back into the day, to bliss or a chance at it. But is bliss a possibility for someone with characteristics that me so easily summarized:

• Birth mark – left cheek
• Indention – right cheek
• Level eyes, neither green or blue
• Slovak nose down the middle
• Face collected in a soft chin
• Fair hair more interesting dyed with color

Let me dissipate with the leaf smoke into a vice that I can depend on, something with a definite future. So what happened to the lovely little boy playing the leaves, so closely resembling my son? So alive and in the moment, careless and hopeful? Pay attention to me. Happiness is as withered as fall.

Given that the word count was 800 words, I spent entirely too much time finishing my assignment, but I wanted to end the year on a good note. The last two have been the best for my professional career, and I also saw advancements in my personal writing. I’ve come to discover what I consider important in my writing, what some other writers refer to as voice.

Voice, as I’ve learned, is being comfortable with thoughts and order, and only shallow concern for the reader. I would estimnate it is as much about self-discovery as it is vision or style.

Voice is also not stagnant but rather constantly evolving and its central conceits are the same. In this way, it can be similar to someone’s soul or perceived character. What I think I know about it is significantly less than what I feel and can not put into words.

Every writer who stays with it long enough will step from the banks and into calf-deep water and get deeper and deeper, the more steps they take, the rocks beneath getting sharper, mossy and more unstable. Those are the wilds of the mind, then – the unpredictable where real discoveries are made. But who would have thought to find themselves in the dark water, holding their breath?