Lilly

When things don’t go as planned, you have to get creative. My English teacher pulls this stunt on us this semester: He has us write a short anecdote for him, something we’d told others in casual conversation before, a short narrative from our own lives or maybe one we’d heard from someone else. It is a refreshing departure from the usual academic tone that we students are forced to strike in most of our writing; I have my story immediately, a cute account of getting picked first for a team at soccer practice. He gives them back to us a few days later and says, “Now there’s a twist to this assignment. Each one of you is going to take your anecdote and turn it into a developed work of short fiction.”

It is safe to say none of us had been expecting that. My head starts spinning. How was I supposed to take this single tiny scene and detail it enough to actually have a plot? My teacher explains further. The anecdote doesn’t have to be central to the plot of our story, but it should be noticeable to him, having already read it. The narratives themselves, he says, could be about whatever we wanted. More freedom! Too much freedom, I catch myself thinking at one point, doodling and pondering character development in physics class. (The picture of the responsible student.)

I don’t remember how or when or why inspiration struck. I remember little scrawled phrases all over the margins of my notes, like “second person” and “man, Jackson, how you know my name?” and once, in all caps, “HE CAN READ MINDS.” At some point my story is born. It is drafted in my English notebook during discussion hours and in the notes app on my phone between classes and strung together in a document on my laptop, some late night when I know I won’t be able to sleep until I bring my characters to life.

They are alive enough to me that I worry about them when I finally title the story—“Amygdala”—and hand it over to my teacher. The classmates I had enlisted to read it beforehand had assured me it was a good enough final draft, but I’m never without my misgivings when it comes to my own writing. You get to know your own characters well enough that you start getting anxious about whether you’re representing them properly. Is Jackson going to come off right? What if he’s misinterpreted—I know he doesn’t mean that—I know how he thinks.

(I get especially attached to Jackson. He isn’t quite me—I actually appear elsewhere in the story—but there’s a little bit of “me” in him. That tends to happen.)

A week or so later my teacher hands our stories back and I don’t have time to read his comments because I’m already bordering on late to P.E. as it is, so I stuff it in my backpack and hurry out of the classroom. It’s not until much later that night, face illuminated by the blue glow of my laptop as I contemplate writing this piece, that I remember.

I would reproduce every word of his notes if I could. I almost cry, reading them, because it had been so long since I’d written anything creative and I hadn’t realized how much it’s been weighing on my mind—whether the characters and plotline I had created were going to be “good enough.” And this time, for the purposes of this assignment, they were. He calls my narrative “excellent.” I had been praying for much less.

When things don’t go as planned, you have to get creative. Sometimes I forget that my form of creativity—writing—is a lot more powerful than some people give it credit for. I have to remember that. I owe it to my teacher. I owe it to everyone who’s ever nurtured me as a writer. I owe it to myself. I owe it to Jackson. ♦