Stan Sinberg is an award-winning columnist, playwright, travel writer, humorist, radio commentator, website content & brochure writer.

I began writing my first novel when I was seven, about a family that inherits a gold mine in Alaska and drives to Alaska from New York to see it. (I didn’t know if you could actually drive there in a car, but I got lucky). I dropped it some 33 pages later when I trapped the family in their car via an electric wire on the roof and an encampment of hungry wolves waiting for them to escape, and I couldn’t figure out how to extricate them from the situation. It didn’t occur to me to “unwrite” those pages. I imagine that seemed like cheating to me.

My novelistic ambitions derailed, I next decided to be a humor columnist for a newspaper. While my friend were reading the biographies of Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, I studied the collected works of Art Buchwald. (The dominant newspaper humor columnist of his day, for you young ‘uns.) I thought getting paid to spew your opinion three times a week was the greatest job in the world, and I wanted in. (Even if my opinions at the time were along the lines of “I like vanilla!”) Adding humor was a way of making your point in a subversive way, and maybe changing someone’s mind before they realized it. Somehow I’ve always known that - even when I was seven.

My writing career has taken on many forms since then and landed me in a wide range of publications and formats. A lot of it has been humorous, some of it has been serious, and there’s my business writing, consisting of blogs, websites and brochures, which I consider another form of writing altogether.

But no matter how different the nature of the writing, the common denominator is to respect the reader, tell a good story and engage the audience.

There are a lot of writers who will tell you at the drop of a pen (or laptop) that writing is torture and akin to “opening a vein.” I’m not one of those people. I love writing. I find it fun, challenging, stimulating and like trying to solve a puzzle of my own devising.