Genres: Memoir (humor), Children’s Stories, & Non-fiction
What has been your most rewarding moment as an author?
Captivating my daughters with nightly imagined brief stories with consistent setting, characters, and fun-themed plots with kids at centerpiece.
If you could offer one piece of writing advice to a novice author, what would it be?
Develop/clarify the inspiring or most-entertaining main point that serves as the readers’ most memorable take-away. Then plan structurally from outward-in: How to open. How to close. What steps to take from the opening toward the main take-away. It’s fundamental storyboarding, plus use of pre-amble and recap-phrasing,
Harper Lee did this remarkably in To Kill a Mockingbird per her opening preamble and her concluding reflection about how true understanding of someone else’s perspective requires experiencing walking in their shoes.
What have been some of the biggest helps for developing your writing skills? Written resources, classes or conferences, fellow writers you’ve learned from or have mentored you, other?
Recognizing extraordinary writing—appreciating sentence structure and choice of words. Understanding and appreciating the writing style and consistency of accomplished great authors, particularly Pulitzer winners; noteworthy poets (e.g., Emily Dickinson’s “There Is No Frigate Like a Book”); and extraordinary lives, well expressed, such as Helen Keller’s self-description: “One can never creep when one feels an impulse to soar.”
Have you ever based characters on real people? Give us a couple of examples.
Not so much real characters, since my main character in the children’s book of pre-bedtime brief stories brought to life a balloon as a character based on the consistently-present balloon in the 1956 Oscar-winning (screenplay) French film, The Red Balloon.
What’s the best piece of writing-related advice that you’ve received?
An extraordinary college English professor advised: “Great authors write as a conversation with you. Consider experiencing them the way they anticipated you as they wrote: Read them out loud to yourself and experience the cadence and intention of their conversation. Then experience writing that way.”
AWARDS:
Recognized in 1974 by the scientific research society, Sigma Xi (publishers of Scientific American) as the most published undergraduate in the U.S. in major peer-reviewed scientific research publications.
Winner of a regional collegiate essay contest on 19th century nihilism philosophy title, “This Cul-De-Sec, Man’s Intellectual Quest”
Selected to author, direct, and narrate a series of classified video reports to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1984–1986.
Selected to author a briefing for President Bill Clinton’s reference when discussing the future of major international engineering companies (and affiliation with or relevance to engineering companies in Mexico) with newly elected Mexican President, Vincente Fox, December 2000.
Awarded a shared First Prize in a short-story competition among members of the Georgetown-Texas-based San Gabriel’s Writers League, October 2021
BIOGRAPHY:
David Dupree’s 40+ year career included managing three age groups of 46 teams of girls’ softball in Warren County New Jersey for nine years, overlapping with writing reports from traveling the world with U.S. Special Forces. Followed by serving as lead author and bid manager for major energy, chemical, and pharmaceutical industry projects for one of the world’s largest engineering companies (Foster Wheeler Corporation). Concluded his career of seventeen years as lead author and global team manager for Royal Dutch Shell’s bidding documents and written negotiations for the commercialization of Shell energy industry technologies and the monetization of experienced-based knowhow. Continues today as part-time consultant advising the prior global team that he managed for Royal Dutch Shell plc. And now, as a retiree, getting more immersed in writing for entertaining and sharing learning with others.
San Gabriel Writers' League 