“Writing Outside the Checklist” by Emma Rice

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

the only one who still chatted with her imaginary friends in second grade, because even then my fictional characters were talking to me. Mentally, I used to narrate my actions as I walked through my house and looked for a snack in the pantry…in third person. Stories, plots, and characters have run through my head since I was five years old, silently playing with my stuffed animals after my parents turned the lights off. No college offers a major in ‘storytelling.’ At least not one that I could find. So that’s why I’ve turned to the next best things: writing and theatre. When people are sad, or lonely, or looking for understanding, they turn to stories. I’ve turned to stories ever since I could breathe, before I knew what either stories or breathing really were. It seems only right that my future should orient around sharing the characters who soar in my imagination. I haven’t finished my story yet, though I’ve tried to write it a hundred times. Maybe it’ll take me a lifetime of drafts to find where it will take me. I’m not worried, as I’ve lived my life hopping from one narrative to another, glancing over Alcott and wallowing in Rowling. I know my next story lies not in Hemingway (though I wish), but in college, where I can learn and develop and discover new ways to share my stories. Yet I know I’ll always be that little girl with characters in her head and ink in her veins, talking to her stuffed animals when the house is asleep. Stories have always made me laugh, cry, smile, gasp, shriek, and mourn, but in the end, they made me who I am today: a dreamer, an artist, and a storyteller. By the way… College essay? Check.