WRITING HAS MORE TO DO WITH MATH than luck, talent or training. It’s simple statistics: discipline and exercise make a writer. This MAY be more naïve hope than natural law, for I started writing with no particular education, talents, mentors, or skill inheritance in the realm of literary arts. I was 23 when I for the first time in my life searched a blank page for an internal prompt (a failure on so many social and personal levels, it physically hurts me). Or maybe I just wore a helmet of adolescence cinched so tight that my self-awareness suffocated. We are lucky that “the kids these days” are smarter. I work with them, so I can confirm the fact. My students have internal prompts and thank God they do, for this fact saves me from the hopelessness that would otherwise drown me in the New York Times every morning. As a professional, I work in the field of Experiential Education – which is exactly what a dictionary would suggest.  But at the end of the day, quite literally, I want to be a writer. And aside from about seven years of weekly blog posts (before “blog” was awarded the word of the year), I have no training in the field.  I’d rather be thrown on a pyre than re-read my first essays: the compound-curse of the dynamic evolution of revising and static nature of web. I am finally old enough to have learned that you have to know the rules to break them. I would like to get back to the math, science, rules and discipline of writing. But my ultimate aim is to write more – and cringe less.