Writing My Book Was One of the Most Challenging, Heart-breaking, Shame-inducing Experiences of My Life. Here’s What I Learned.

When I was a kid, I loved to write.

I forgot about this until my best friend Sean visited me in prison. I told him I had just started writing a book.

His face lit up with a knowing that I myself did not have.

“You’ve always liked writing. Remember you wrote the script for Frank’s driver’s ed video? And you did the entire group English project for me — you, Rob, and Vinny — for Mr. Voss’s class. I wish we still had a copy of that. And you wrote a draft for the high school play too.”

It’s funny the things we forget.

One of my happiest memories of childhood was straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

My friend Adam and I were fishing off a stone bridge, our short legs hanging over the water. We were using a stick with a piece of string and bread as bait. It’s astounding how well this worked.

Sometimes simple is more than enough.

I just started talking, telling a story that I was making up on the fly, with no idea where the plot was coming from and where it was going. It was the two of us and a crazy (for nine-year-olds) adventure on the golf course with a…