While the writers who have improved under my teaching will disagree,
I’d be the first to say I shouldn’t be doing this.

I’m a dyslexic former Marine who entered this profession with roughly a

remedial ninth-grade English education.

I never went to college. In fact, the only time I’ve spent at a college

is when they pay me to lecture about creative writing.

So I didn’t learn to write through academia.

Not that I didn’t try.

I read their books, listened to their lectures, and studied their terminology.

Most of it sounded like somebody had taken a useful idea,

buried it under six layers of jargon,

and then congratulated themselves for making it hard to understand.

​

So I struck out on my own.

I studied stories. Tore novels apart.

Examined scenes, characters, dialogue, structure, tension, pacing,

grammar, and every other moving part I could get my hands on.

 

I didn’t just want to know how something worked.

I needed to know why.

Why does writing a sentence this way make a reader feel one thing,

while writing it that way changes the impact completely?

Why does crafting a scene one way build tension while another way smothers it?

Why do certain rules of grammar exist? When do they matter?

What happens when you break them?

I tested ideas, discarded bad advice, and tried my damnedest to strip away

all the insane jargon academia loves to slather across everything.

After three decades, I kept what worked and rebuilt everything I’d learned,

the entire process, in language that made sense to me.

Then other writers started asking how I did what I did.

So I explained it to them the same way I had explained it to myself.
And one after another would say:

“That makes so much sense. Why has nobody ever explained it like that before?”

While I can’t explain why academia makes all of this far more complicated

than it needs to be, I can tell you that all that knowledge and effort became DrakeU.

​

No Jargon. No Bullshit.

Just clear, understandable breakdowns of not only how grammar and storytelling work,

but why.

Writing is hard enough. Learning it shouldn’t add to that difficulty.

Too much writing instruction is vague, overcomplicated,

or completely detached from the actual work of creating a story.

People who “teach” this stuff tend to offer abstract theories, inspirational speeches, and worthless advice like:

“Follow your Muse.”
“Find the Truth Behind the Truth.”
“Trust in the process.”

 

How the hell are you supposed to trust a process that nobody can even explain?

 

That’s not how I learn, and it certainly isn’t how I teach.

 

So my goal with DrakeU is simple:

I want you to understand your craft well enough that you stop guessing.
I want you to know why your story works, why it doesn’t, and what to do about it.
I want you to understand why grammar works and how to use it to impact the reader.
But most of all, I want to give you what I never found

when I was trying to learn all this crazy crap:

Clear. Direct. Practical information you can use today to become a better writer today.

Writing is hard. Anyone who tells you it’s easy is selling you something.

But I can make it less hard.

Don’t take my word for it.
Below you’ll find my free Show Your Story, Don’t Tell It! class.

Watch it and decide for yourself whether I can do what I claim.

 

I promise you’ll hear things about writing you’ve never heard before.
Better yet, I promise you’ll leave with something you can actually use

to become a better writer.