How To Become A Writer

Read a lot. Start with Highlights for Kids, sports illustrated for kids, then find a book series. You are too young to read anything with sex and you don’t really know what sex is. The cartoon penis in the book your mom read you in the fourth grade, “Where Babies Come From” scares you. You do not see a real penis until your freshman year of college when you witness a drunken boy peeing on the side of a pizza place on your way home from a fraternity party. This only adds to your fear. You Google image search “penises.” When you are asked in a game of ten fingers if you have ever seen porn you answer yes. You give up eating hot dogs but couldn’t bear to part with popsicles.

In seventh grade you start writing poetry after reading “Where the Sidewalk Ends” the first line you think of is about the new girl who moved in down the street- I wonder if they wonder the way I wonder about them. You never meet her and the rest of the poem sucks, but you feel accomplished.

The same year your father’s boss at a civil engineering firm dies. You never met the man but you are torn up by the thought of death. You think about death constantly and in seventh grade you have convinced yourself you are suicidal. Crying yourself to sleep every night and eating orange sorbet with your stuffed bear Pinkie becomes a regular thing. You start writing poetry about death and loss, well, as much about the subjects as your seventh grade self would know. Luckily our mom is able to talk you out of your dark phase by explaining that your great capacity to feel others pain means you have a larger heart with an even greater capacity to love. This makes you feel good and you stop writing emotional poems. You fold the lose leaf notebook sheets into small rectangles and put them in a purple jelly pencil case that you hide under your elementary school diaries in your desk. You forget they are there for a few years and find them again your freshman year of high school you never showed your parents your writing and are very glad. After you read each poem a few times you realize your life would make a fairly interesting Lifetime or Hallmark Channel movie. You would like a non-coke whore version of Lindsay Lohan to play you, but she would have to cover up her freckles. You’re okay with that, she would look better without them anyway.

Join the forensics team. When people ask you if you cut up bodies like they do on CSI: Miami you tell them it is not that kind of forensics. Of course they ask what other kind of forensics exists. They are perplexed by the idea that there are more than one kind of something and that they do not know it, damn know-it-alls. You tell them what the dictionary says, the art or study of argumentation and formal debate. They think this sounds dumb and the other would like totally be way better, dude. You shake your head and will deal with this reaction for the rest of high school and even in college when asked what extracurricular activities you were once involved in. You love forensics more than volleyball and this breaks your fathers heart while simultaneously eradicating your coaches daughter reputation, thank God. Forensics allows you to perform what you read. You go to nationals with a prose piece by Sylvia Plath, but you do not break. You were not there to win- losing is a part of the experience too. In your category, Oral Interpretation, you have two pieces you read from a little black binder: prose and poetry. You only get to write your introduction but that’s okay because you like reading other people’s words more, they all see so much more put together- especially the authors who committed suicide.

While a member of the forensics team you start taking more English electives: Short Fiction, Women and Literature, Literature into Film, and Poetry. You dread Women and Literature everyday, mainly due to the fact that the teacher is a reality check to what you may be in the future if you stay the wild independent feminist you are. She is old, alone, the proud owner of seven cats, and spends her days dying her hair different shades of purple or reading the feminist prose canon. You shudder at the thought although nights filled with romantic comedy marathons and Chinese food sounds better than crying yourself to sleep when you find out your husband cheated on you with the babysitter/ secretary/ your daughter’s first grade teacher/ your best friend.

You are happiest in poetry. The class valedictorian sits across from you, future West Point graduate / President of the United State, and asks you for writing advice. This makes your head big but its okay because you are the best writer in the class, maybe even your grade, maybe even at your all girls private Catholic high school. You can write about anything except abortion, never abortion.

Apply to five colleges. A safety school, an ivy league school (for shits and giggles), one with a strong program of what your parents want you to do, one with a strong program of what you want to do, and a party school in a bad area. You end up going to the school you hated, the ones your parents wanted. You are an art and design major with a double minor in art history and history of art. You are going to be a museum curator. You have to be a museum curator. You have been asked this question millions of times and every time you have the same answer. At first you didn’t know what you wanted to be so you made up this answer. Now you have used it so many times you start to believe it yourself. Your greatest fear is the possibility of another answer, another choice. You are afraid of change. You write a short story about your fear of questions and answers. It is too good. You delete it.

Freshman year of college your fears subside when you take a college writing class. You read books, write essays, pretty mundane easy stuff. You get a B+ because you half ass all your essays. To feed your creative writing dragon living in your belly you write a poem every now and then about the change of seasons, a mail box, and leaf. The rumbling and aching subsides, but only temporarily. Feeding the dragon is when you feel completely electrically alive. This feeling scares you as much as it excites you. Take a calculus to remind you of what it feels like to be dead.

Over the summer you start a blog. You have no followers and the only person that views it is you. That’s your own fault however because you set it to private. You are not ready to own your voice so you start writing fan fiction, anonymously, under the pen name of Penny for the poorly written, directed, and acted Disney musical “Newsies.” Like romantic comedies, fan fiction follows the same plot- you would know being an expert on ro-coms, especially those starring Meg Ryan. This boy saves damsel in distress plot bothers you and you begin writing about serial killers. Your parents find out and make you stop, but they can never mute your voice. No one can.

Sophomore year you take a creative writing class, you do not need it to fill any requirements but you tell your parents you do. They would not like you taking credits that are not working towards something, towards your future, towards your Harvard prom date future mail order husband they want you to marry but you find lacks personality more than an IKEA dining room table. You enjoy the writing class more than your entire art and design course load. The dragon in your belly gets excited but you write a mediocre story called “If These People Go To Heaven I Want To Go To Hell” and it is full. The class makes the belly pains more frequent and intense.

Start reading again. Being single has made you gravitate towards Nicholas Sparks’ novels. You read the last page first just incase you die before you finish the book- this means you have a dark side. You learned this while watching “When Harry Met Sally,” a Meg Ryan ro-com of course. Being single has also inspired you to write about your ex-boyfriend. You never change the names of the people you write about. Like that bitch Taylor Swift people won’t be your friend or date you because they do not want to be written (or sung) about; or at least that’s the reason you tell yourself daily for not having many friends or lovers. You rather have a lover than a friend. You rather be a writer than a lover or a friend. This never changes. If you are a writer it is inevitable you will lose all your friends and lovers only to die alone with 50 cats. But at least someone knows you existed, for a short period of time because you wrote about it, and you never changed their names.