1. Write for your high school paper: desultory articles about school spirit and cookie-cutter op-eds ripped from The New York Times. You don’t like working on the paper, but figure it’ll look decent on your Common App. You’re simultaneously writing college essays about your “moral backbone” and “zeal” for “what I’m passionate about.”
Fail to make editor-in-chief. Hate the paper for wronging you, since, of course, you were the one snubbed despite being so passionate about it. Failure breeds failure. Contract COVID for the first time. Don’t put anything about your role in the school paper in your Common App.
Nonetheless, write an opinion article about modern art for the paper. It’s a hit. “EVERETT THIS IS LITERALLY THE MOST INCREDIBLE PIECE OF WRITING I’VE EVER READ U JUST BLEW ME AWAY I’M SPEECHLESS,” a friend texts you. You smile. Find a new vocation: to be the senior belletrist with nothing to lose and everything to say. Get into Yale.
Realize you can’t actually say anything you want. The editors-in-chief block or edit to shreds most things you write.
2. Read. Joan Didion suffices. Read her over spring break and again when you don’t make editor-in-chief. Fall in love with how she leans over the abyss and tells you what she sees, how she casually writes the best prose you’ve ever read, and then moves on without bothering to look in the rearview mirror.
3. Await Yale and all of the creative liberty its student publications will afford you. Scroll through The Yale Herald and The New Journal online. Write more and write badly, but make sporadic gems. But mostly write badly.
4. Cross the stage with your class in single-use polyester gowns and watch two classmates give the graduation speeches you wanted to give. Eat a massive family brunch and then fall into a slimy sleep until dusk.
Try to write over the summer before college. Spend most of it alone. Re-reading Didion only gives you the migraines she writes about. Abort a draft called “Sighs of Disenchantment,” the title of which you gleaned from One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s a book that made you want to write something that would move another with equal force.
5. Begin college. Greet unknown faces and forget their names as soon as they say them. Tiptoe in shower shoes to your bathroom shared with eleven others and helplessly watch your face break out with volcanic pimples. You tell your parents and extant friends from home that you’re “adjusting” and “having fun.” Start classes and realize you’ve forgotten how to read. Compulsively schedule meal dates, but eat most of them alone. Contract COVID again.
6. Run to the publications. Your new havens. Sign up for e-mail lists. Meet other writers and be terrified to talk to them. Remember you haven’t written in months. Run back to your dorm room.
7. Pitch an article. By e-mail. You take one of the open pitches—reviewing the new Olivia Rodrigo album you haven’t listened to yet—but it’s already taken. Another magazine rejects a pitch about Yale influencers due to a lack of “editorial support,” but naturally you don’t take it that way. Submit to another magazine. Get rejected again, this time at a Halloween party, by email. You shuffle away in your Grease/Matrix/James Dean costume (a leather jacket with black jeans).
Get a couple small pitches. They’re cute, but quick, and you want to write more. Really, you want to get published more, as in physical print. The semester is almost done, and you’ve been telling people you’re “a bit of a writer” (a diminutive phrase with feigned humility). You’ve got two online pieces and fewer than 2000 words to show for it.
8. Understand writing has given you many things, but it will never love you back.
Question if you should still keep writing. Write about that question. Don’t find an answer yet. Write about your calls to home friends, the dining hall chicken, and your interminable coughing. Write about bad parties and post-games. These are just for you. You don’t feel better about your problems, but now your problems are on the page, and that’s different.
Discover writing’s new purpose. To live outside of your head. To condense the fog. To see and understand.
9. Live a little bit more. Go to more parties of varying quality and meet more people of varying compatibility. Occasionally enjoy it. Become closer with the people in your dorm entryway. Eat fewer meals alone. Rediscover Didion and read her differently. You feel she’s changed; you know she hasn’t. Finally get a substantial pitch.
Still feel awkward. The cough that haunted you in September has made the long haul to December. Don’t sleep enough. Procrastinate your work until you force yourself to write. You hate it. You delete it. You write again.
