personal essay

Colonel Mustard in the Hall Closet with the Traumatic Childhood Memory #FLASHBACK2SCHOOL

Musings

Essay Prompt: “Write an essay somehow inspired by super-huge mustard”

As students of writing, we are constantly reminded that we should try to write an hour each day. And if we can’t manage an hour, we should still write a little bit each day, even if only in the twenty minutes that exist between our alarm clock and the breakfast table. The best reason I’ve ever gotten for this advice (thanks Aaron Reynolds!) is that we sometimes, without even realizing it at first, find inspiration in the most mundane, everyday moments: that routine trip to the dentist, the leaky bathroom faucet that needs to be repaired, a freeway traffic jam on the drive home from work. Over time, I’ve come to realize how true this is. Because many of my best stories were indeed inspired by major life-changing events, like international travel, natural disasters, and hospital stays. But sometimes these stories—including the novel that I’m currently writing—are stitched together from much smaller details. Sometimes we even find inspiration in containers of bulk-size mustard.

Allow me to explain. In May 2012, two separate “everyday moments” happened. Those led to the beginnings of a complex novel-in-progress, which then branched out to a comic series and a trio of short film scripts. But first, I went home for a couple weeks after my first year in grad school. One afternoon, I was having a conversation with my mother about smoothies when my dad misheard us (as he often does) and thought we were discussing movies (as we often do). I went scrambling for a pen and a piece of paper, and the seeds for my hybrid invention known as the Smoovie were planted. Fast-forward another week or so, when I was back in San Francisco for the summer. A few friends and I decided to head to Golden Gate Park during the 75th anniversary celebration to participate in the festivities.  As the evening wore on, we decided to buy food at one of the booths. The cheapest item was an extremely overpriced hot dog, which I purchased and then topped with condiments from the self-serve table displaying bulk containers of ketchup, mustard, relish, and the works.

Another week later, my summer class (the now-retired “Brevity,” taught by the incomparable Cooley Windsor) began. For my first piece, I wrote about a Smoovie that featured two dinosaurs fighting over a single foot-long chili cheese coney. It’s a fragmented, non-linear narrative that reawakens a boatload of childhood trauma for our protagonist and ends in a sinister shot of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, teeth-bared, a smear of mustard on his chin. This short piece, combined with a flash fiction piece I had written a year earlier, was the basis for this novel, which spans the course of 21 years in one boy’s life and has now grown to 65,000+ words and counting. Never mind the fact that I started such a project in a class called “Brevity,” though the story’s humble yet defiant beginnings do continue to amuse me. (Thankfully, my professor was equally amused.) The realization that a simple container of mustard could have started it all is even more intriguing. And what if I hadn’t ordered a hot dog that night? What if my father hadn’t made a comment that gave birth to an idea, which then gave birth to a disturbing, prehistoric progeny with a penchant for carnival grub? It’s likely the novel would still have existed in some shape or form as I continued to be inspired by uneventful occurrences that happened to me later that year. But it’s likely that it would’ve been vastly different in many respects. Would it have been worse? It’s impossible to say. Maybe I would’ve been hit in the head by a golf ball that summer and been inspired to even greater heights.

Nevertheless, it’s in anecdotes like this where we realize that art does imitate life. All these random, inconsequential moments lead into other random moments, causing greater moments that branch off and later prove to be life-altering—the collective whole adding up to more than the sum of its parts. Writing consistently every day ensures that we don’t let these moments slip by undetected, that we look more carefully at the things we initially deem as unimportant or uninteresting, that we allow ourselves time to be inspired by the ordinary before discarding it from our brains at the end of the day.

I know all this. I know now why the daily ritual exists. And yet, full disclosure: I still don’t write every day.

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Note: This is the final essay in a 3-part blog challenge inspired by this NYT article about the new wave of creative college admissions essay prompts. Read more about the rules and logistics of the challenge and my reasons for taking it on in this previous post. There, you will also be able to find links to my other essays and those of my friends when they become available.

* Find out how Ren and Elizabeth were inspired by super-huge mustard, and thanks for following along with us this week! I have more blog posts planned for the end of the year, including some Top 10 lists (who doesn’t love lists?), so keep on keeping on.

So Where is Waldo, Really? #FLASHBACK2SCHOOL

Musings

Essay Prompt: “So Where is Waldo, Really?”

This is a trick question! I call shenanigans. Obviously “Waldo,” who answers to several dozen variations of his name across the globe (can we say assumed identity? On the run?), has the ability to pop in and out of random scenes amidst the strangest crowds of people with just a blink of his bespectacled eyes. He can be everywhere at once. Wining and dining on one page, while riding a mechanical bull on another. (I made those examples up—has he done these things before?) Like the Charlie Browns of the world, he also seems to possess a very limited wardrobe. Needless to say, this is the real question we need to ask: Who is Waldo? Yes, what exactly is the deal with this mysterious Waldo/Wally/Willie/Walter/Ali/Charlie/etc character? Just what is he guilty of? How many candy cane-striped shirts does he own anyway? And most importantly, does he want to be found or not?

With such an elusive character, it’s impossible to know for sure—at least until one of the members in his similarly clothed entourage decides to talk. But humor me for a minute. Allow me to speculate. I’m sure it would be fun to imagine that Waldo is wanted for a long laundry list of nefarious deeds, teasing law enforcement officials in a brilliant game of cat-and-mouse as he trots across the globe. But I don’t personally think he is guilty of any terrible crime(s).  I think he’s just a kid—just trying out different names and locales until he finds the one that fits. Like the kid who grows up in the same small town from which no one ever seems to escape, Wally wants to travel, to find his corner of the world. He wants to be noticed, but a part of him remains afraid of the attention. He’s a contradiction, like so many of us are as we are still coming of age.  We haven’t quite figured out who we are, so we experiment; we do things that don’t seem to make sense in conjunction with each other. We don a wacky trademark outfit so we’re easily recognized. But then we negate it by hiding in the company of other people, people who are even louder and wilder so that we can still remember what it’s like to get lost.

I can relate. During a recent classroom discussion, a professor of mine said that you have to watch out for a kid who decides without warning to up and change his name. I neglected to mention then that I’d done that very thing twice—once in sixth grade (Sandy) and another in ninth grade (Suzun)—so I’ll cop to it now. Here’s my full confession: I didn’t fully understand back then why I was doing it, but suddenly it makes sense. It’s probably worth noting that those were both years in which I had just started a new school (middle school and high school, respectively) and in many ways, just beginning a long journey into the unknown. The landscape had changed, and with it, a new sea of faces awaited. I wanted to be one of those new faces. Likewise, I understand what it’s like to wish to be both lost and found, all at once. I grew up dreaming of fame and fortune, aiming to shock and intimidate at every turn. But at the same time, I valued the idea of privacy and the need to blend into the crowd. There were times when all I wanted was to be ordinary and unseen. A contradiction…maybe.  But one that is both natural and understandable.

Waldo, Waldo, everywhere. Indeed.

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Note: This is the second essay in a 3-part blog challenge inspired by this NYT article about the new wave of creative college admissions essay prompts. Read more about the rules and logistics of the challenge and my reasons for taking it on in this previous post. There, you will also be able to find links to my other essays and those of my friends when they become available.

* Read what Ren and Elizabeth had to say regarding the age-old question, “Where’s Waldo?”

This December, My Friends and I Are Going Back to School!

Musings

You heard me. My friends (Ren and Elizabeth) and I are hard at work on our college application essays—our creative college application essays.

Inspired by this New York Times piece on the increasingly whimsical and thought-provoking questions that elite colleges employ to stretch their prospective applicants’ imaginations, we (writers in our late 20s to early 30s) are challenging ourselves to take on some of the REAL essay questions being pondered by current high-school juniors and seniors.

We’ll be answering the same three questions and posting our essays here. Follow along—or better yet, join us.

Dec. 16: “If you could be raised by robots, dinosaurs, or aliens, which would you pick?” 

Dec. 18: “So where is Waldo, really?”

Dec. 20: “Write an essay somehow inspired by super-huge mustard.”

Here are the rules:

  • We write as our current selves, not as 17-year-olds.
  • Work in personal elements where possible (these are personal essays), but be as creative as you like.
  • Upper word limit per essay is 750 words. No lower limit.

Logistics:

  • We post our essays to our writer blogs by 5 PM Pacific on their respective due dates.
  • Link each essay back to this challenge info.
  • Once each person has posted her essay, share the direct link to that essay with the other challengers, so that we may link to essays on the same topic.

Before the fun officially starts, I have a confession to make: despite being a college graduate, I have never written a college admissions essay!  Why? The only university I applied to when I was a senior in high school simply didn’t require it as one of the application materials. I did also apply to the Honors College within the university, but their requirement of a generic “writing sample” allowed me to submit an excerpt of a retrospective short story I had been writing about a girl who drops out of a high school. It was written in the first person like a personal essay and I made sure to include a note that made it clear the piece was a work of fiction. To this day, I have not finished that story, but it wasn’t the only piece of fiction I wrote back then with a dropout as the protagonist.  I guess you could say it was somewhat of a fantasy for me back in those days—even my contribution for the writing portion of our TAKS exam* was about someone who had dropped out of college in her freshman year but couldn’t bring herself to come clean to her parents. Once again, I had to preface it with a note stating that the best way I felt I could answer their prompt was through this imagined scenario. This pseudo-essay was ultimately deemed “highly effective” and given a 4, the highest possible score.

To add to my clearly complicated memories of high school, popular culture in America has always treated The College Admissions Essay as some sort of rite of passage for teenagers transitioning into adulthood.  There is so much focus on it—not only in the news but also in the fictionalized stories we discover in YA novels and teen soaps.  Everyone is struggling to figure out what to write, how to define him or herself, and how to stand out from the rest of the pack as they vie for acceptance into their so-called “dream school.” As school was certainly not something I dreamed about with anything resembling positivity in those days, this very notion was foreign to me. Of course, when I started applying to graduate schools six years later (this time around, I applied to 8 separate schools and got into 4), I wrote plenty of personal essays. But by that time I was no longer a teenager—I was a completely different person at a completely different stage of my life.  It was not the same.  And for personal reasons I won’t waste time delving into here, I also refused to walk at my high school graduation. So yes, despite (begrudgingly) completing all the necessary credits and passing the exit exam with flying scantrons and #2 pencils, a part of me did feel that perhaps I never really graduated from high school.

I was personally inspired by and a bit envious of the situation described in the New York Times article because some of these newer, more delightfully bizarre essay prompts are exactly the type of thing that invite and reward creativity and innovative thinking, one of the few things I excelled at in high school. While my friends and I were conceiving the idea for this blog series, we did briefly consider writing our essays as our teenage selves. The idea appealed to me; however, I was such an unbearable and obnoxious person back then (as I am constantly reminded of any time I read a blog post written back in those days—some of these things still exist online!) that I felt such an undertaking would be counterproductive. At the same time, I make the promise to approach my essays with a certain amount of innocence regarding the future and what it might mean for me as I go “back to school.”

* The TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) is the 5-part exit exam everyone had to pass in 11th grade to graduate from a public high school in Texas back when I graduated from high school in 2005.  It replaced the TAAS test that most of us had been raised with, and is currently being phased out by the STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) test. I believe the writing prompt for that year was about the ramifications of keeping secrets.