Junior year in college, my girlfriend Laura and I both applied to get into the Big Writing Class. There were always more applicants than seats in the BWC. I don\u2019t remember exactly what I wrote as my sample, but I remember it was something dreamy and shaded in mystery. It took place in the woods. There was fog. And there were unicorns.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Laura wrote a piece about a writer who noticed that he had a freckle on his right ear. This sent him into a tailspin. I remember one line of dialog in particular\u2014it was something like: \u201cHow can I be a writer, if I can\u2019t even notice details on my own head?\u201d And I remember that line because I had said that line, one angsty afternoon, looking in the mirror, spotting that freckle, and going \u201cWhat the hell?!\u201d<\/p>\n
So my unicorns didn\u2019t make the cut. Laura\u2019s piece was great, and she earned a chair. And let\u2019s take a moment to appreciate the awesome meta-ness of the situation:<\/p>\n
Laura had written a story that drew from a real observation. Meanwhile I had zipped past a detail in my own life that was literally (literally!) about noticing things, and opted instead to write, well, goofball nonsense.<\/p>\n
To be fair, it wasn\u2019t the fog or fantasy that made my piece bad. My mistake was writing a story without a true moment or feeling. Growing up I’d had the idea that the only writing that counted was 100% imagined, and that led me down this fanciful path. But the lesson I took away from the class I never took was that details matter, and that in art, drawing from reality is more than fair game, it is the game.<\/p>\n
(And that\u2019s why I hope you enjoy my novel in progress, about a unicorn named Dan who wears glasses. Boom!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Junior year in college, my girlfriend Laura and I both applied to get into the Big Writing Class. There were always more applicants than seats in the BWC. I don\u2019t remember exactly what I wrote as my sample, but I remember it was something dreamy and shaded in mystery. It took place in the woods. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays-and-such"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capellman.com\/cecil1215b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}