Writing Outside the Checklist By Emma Rice
I make checklists for everything. Homework assignments, chores, and gift ideas alike have all found themselves listed in orderly rows in my notebooks or on neon sticky notes. But when it came to my college essay, I quickly found that I didn’t fit into neat lists with tiny boxes (or stars, for what’s urgent), or into the three different college essays that I wrote over the summer. This was especially infuriating, because I see myself as a good writer and a creative person–someone who should be able to write about who they truly are. In fact, my joy for creative writing has become the axis from which all of my other interests have sprung. I began writing my first story in a yellow 3 by 5 inch notebook with a half-broken pencil and I never finished it. Yet in the process, as a ten-year-old, I imagined myself appearing on television, getting interviewed, and inspiring other little girls who wanted to become authors. Published as a ten-year-old? No check. That story—about a particularly belligerent princess who dislikes dresses—sits at the bottom of a fabric-covered bin behind the door of my bedroom. I think. Yet that excitement of experiencing something I’d created ignited a love of stories that led to years more of reading, writing, and thinking. I have yet to make money from writing. I’m not hoping to be published as a teenager because I know that I have too much to learn and improve on before that happens. That has never stopped me from sitting for hours at a keyboard with sore eyes, tapping madly at 3 am on a summer night as my fan’s soft gusts flutter the papers around me, or scratching random bits of prose in illegible Sharpie on the backs of shopping receipts, or daydreaming during shallow conversations as I imagine myself running barefoot through the halls of a decaying castle… And off I go again. Although I haven’t always been a writer—typing took too long when I was younger—I have always been a daydreamer. I was 8
