In My Own Voice. Reading from My Collected Works. More Assorted Selection

In this book, I take you to a place where every writer ought to go, but so few even know it exists. I am talking about reading aloud what you've written. The whole point of writing is to motivate a fellow human being, to seize their mind, their brain, their entire being, and suffuse it with your thoughts, your point of view, your unique take on the human condition, all its manifestations, and the improvements you offer.

I am a fanatic about that human voice... at ensuring that it be heard, and that it do its unique work transforming a situation from A to B, and on to C.

I am a fanatic in the matter of grabbing the mind, holding that mind, changing that mind. A writer's life is about struggle, pain, and the triumph of truth.

What's so important about hearing prose anyway? Won't just reading it do?

What is the reason why you write in the first place? Is it merely to pass a few hours in harmless endeavors? Writers can be a force for human improvement. This book is for the fighters, the dreamers, the visionaries, the people who have a better idea, and will do whatever is necessary to implement it, and achieve the broadest possible change and recognition.

I have selected for my further remarks about the necessity of not just how to read your poetry but your prose aloud, five articles of my extensive composition, articles which I may have been the only person alive to read aloud, as if before the discerning auditors of the ancient coliseum, when a writer would step forward and assail the audience with the best language on Earth, the written language, brought to life by its creators and its affectionate followers.

When you write, you must be in that amphitheater before those hopeful and critical crowds. You must take every skill you possess so that the auditors of your privileged audience may be touched by the fire that you bring. Now, as you ready yourself to bring the words to life, you transcend beyond mere writer, beyond a slinger of words and phrases, and you become the Messenger of God, touched by nobility and the hand of possibility.

Why did the creator give us a brain, and the capacity for touching souls, and transforming situations of no merit whatsoever into our new, better realities?

I'm going to, now, make sundry remarks on the five stories I have chosen for this all important point... the best prose, the best poetry, is read aloud and necessarily involves you, the reader, the performer, the enlightener. Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage". What he meant by that was that each of us have within us the power to transform, to change, not just in picayune ways, but radical, and that this ability does not just exist here, but everywhere you bring it, in whatever format you use.

If you dream for transformation, or transcendence, for the better thing that your choice language may open up to the rest of us! Your language and how you deliver it is the engine of the change you say you want.

I have chosen just five articles out of my vast array, and I intend to give you some worthy instruction about what I've written, what you've read, what it all means, and how you can benefit.

Let us start with a story of fortitude...