Welcome to Honing House

A place for writers to discover their stories and how to tell them better.

This is Daniel J. Cecil, broadcasting to you from my new office in Amsterdam, the rainy grey skies looming out the window, and the mist of another lockdown clouding the brain.

I’m writing to you, specifically, because at some point our paths have crossed in a meaningful way. Perhaps we suffered as comrades through the monotony of a 9-5, or attended classes together as cohorts, or taught students as colleagues. Perhaps we’ve labored over the proofs of a literary journal together, shared writing with one another, or even sparred in a park making every effort not to pass out from exhaustion.

Whatever the origin of our friendship, I’m reaching out because you’ve expressed interest in hearing from me about my projects.

Well, here’s a big one. Today I’d like to introduce you to Honing House.

First, a little anecdote

Last May, I started taking guitar lessons. 

This isn’t my first go at the guitar. As a music-loving teen I picked up a Stratocaster and learned the intros to a few Led Zeppelin songs, as well as the entire Nirvana unplugged album from a book of tabs and some Radiohead tunes.

This was the 90s, after all.

I played a few years into college, had a few licks under my sleeve, but gave up around sophomore year — I wasn’t practicing diligently, and the “Doors-influenced” band I was in had failed to take off, much to my and my bandmate’s surprise.

Ah, young idealism.

Anyway, it was time to hang up the strap — that is, until my wife gifted me an acoustic guitar for my birthday last year.

The humbling first plucks

This dreadful pandemic has, in so many ways, been difficult. A horror show, really. I’ll be writing about this elsewhere. However, it has also been, at least for me, an opportunity to carve out some extra time to pick up things once left behind.

The guitar was one of those things.

Being bad at playing the guitar, and needing a lot of private time to build up my chops, it was the lockdowns and my own general reluctance to be in busy places that provided an almost perfect environment and mindset to practice for hours a day (avoiding other work in the process, of course). Still, this fresh dive into playing the guitar was something I was reluctant to do on my own. The frustration of trying to teach myself the basics as a teenager, and the thought of going through that slow process alone, didn’t seem smart nor productive for a guy in his 30s.

Time is ticking, fella.

So I emailed a professional musician giving guitar tutorials who I found on Google and set up my first lesson.

I’ll be honest: it was humbling, as an adult, to sit in front of another adult and reveal a certain amount of ineptitude. But it was also freeing. Practice was frustrating. Sometimes, my body just wasn’t ready to get something right. But then a chord or way of holding the guitar neck with my thumb just right would click and what I’d practiced for hours, had struggled through, became easy. Natural even.

That feeling was like floating on air.

Strumming towards the point

Fast forward eight months: my fingers are now calloused enough to press the strings firmly at that point where the nail meets the finger’s tip. I can produce a pretty decent sound from this guitar that feels almost too beautiful to hold. I grip the pick correctly. I’ve even learned how to play a song or two after many, many hours of chopping at the strings — which my wife has been warm enough to continue encouraging … even after the thousandth try. 

I’ve been a writer as long as I can remember so naturally these lessons with the guitar have me thinking about analogies. How playing scales is similar to moving around commas to make solid clauses. How practicing dynamics — forte and pianissimo — is like restructuring a piece so that it springs from the page with a different volume.

Drafts that go nowhere. Revisions that go on for years. Stories that work. Stories that don’t work.

Exercises, sometimes, in futility. But over time, things begin to click, and the struggle becomes not so much of a struggle. The exercises work. They bring about change.   

The joy, in the end, is the discovery of perseverance.

Finding the right tuning

While I was in graduate school exercising some of the muscles mentioned above (and getting stronger in the process), I was also busy teaching young writers how to start stretching muscles and tendons at the beginning of their own long-distance journey. I gave them everything I knew at the time, and sometimes offered things I didn’t know. We were working together to figure it out. Trial and error. Being fearless and vulnerable. It felt a little bit like magic.

What I remember most fondly about my early days of teaching was how, during one of my 8:00am, highly-caffeinated lectures, I was talking through some hidden inner working of a story, or maybe diagramming a particular story shape on the white board, and when I looked up into a sea of young faces I saw one of them glowing with a certain radiant light. This light, this joy, was like nothing I’d ever seen before.

I had to know what it meant.

Later, talking to this student during office hours, I was told what I’d witnessed — an ah-ha moment. A particular problem in their work, which they hadn’t seen before, had become crystal clear. They suddenly knew what they had to do.

Sharing my love of literature with a student, seeing them get it, whatever it is, and in the process of getting it also getting themselves, was also an ah-ha moment for me. It was the discovery of what some might call a vocation.

I taught for five years at the University of Washington before moving back to Amsterdam. For a time, I fell back into copywriting and left teaching behind. Practicing the guitar this year, becoming a student myself once again, I realized I missed making those ah-ha moments a reality for others (ah-ha moments being something strange and alien in the corporate sector). And the more I thought about it, the more the desire grew to teach again.

So, I gave up my corporate copywriting job and started making plans for Honing House. 

Heading into the last verse and beginning anew

Honing House is, in short, a place for writers to discover their stories and how to tell them better.

As a start, Honing House will offer workshops and one-on-one coaching in-person (when possible) and virtually (always) to create a local and global community of writers with a passion to learn. Two workshops are scheduled for February and March of 2022, with more coming soon. Hopefully, some will even be able to take place in person.

In addition to Honing House I’ll be sending this newsletter, Dispatches from the Honing, on a monthly basis. This newsletter will offer craft advice, as well as news about my personal writing (I have a few stories being published in the coming months). I’ll even share the work of my students as it makes its way into the world. 

In the future, I plan on Honing House hosting live events, expanding its roster of teachers, and maybe even printing a thing or two. I’ll also add more frequent posts from Dispatches offering in-depth craft advice for paid subscribers. More to come.

I do hope you stick with this newsletter for a bit, share it around, and if you’re so inclined, join one of the Honing House workshops or set up a free chat about one-on-one lessons with yours truly.

Oh, and if you’re a writer interested in teaching a workshop at Honing House, I’d love to hear from you — the more the merrier. Drop me a line.

Till next month!