I read that you want to write a book. And I read that you have been a mailman for 27 years.

I want to read your book!

I have a friend who recently retired from the USPS. She has wonderful stories to tell about her experience as postal service worker. I have another friend who recently moved from a temporary job with the post office to a full-time one. Pretty sure his stories are also interesting to.

Where to start? Start at the beginning. Start your first day of work or several days before. Start at why you chose to be a postal worker... That is, if you chose it. If you fell into it as many do, that’s an interesting story too.

Whether a story is interesting or not depends more on how well it is written than what the subject is about.

This is something I learned from a journalism professor in a feature writing course. He assigned us to find someone whose job we thought would be boring. I chose a woman who had been a janitor at the school for 30 years. She herself thought there’s no way I could make an interesting story out of her life. But I did. I asked her about her job and you know what? She had a lot of interesting stories to tell that she didn’t think we’re interesting at all. She explained why she actually enjoyed her job and that was fascinating.hmmm I think I need to dig back through my papers from 1979 to find that piece I wrote. It would be paper of course, so that would mean first a lot of cleaning and filing for me to find. So I will put that on the back burner.

The point is it’s all about how the writer writes. If you have a sense of humor, as it is obvious that you do, there will be no question that your story will be interesting.

So just start writing. And keep writing. No matter what. You’re going to have to edit and revise anyway so don’t worry about that. Just write.

When you need an editor, give me a holler.