First, your parents nurture a love of reading in you from birth. You read books like you eat potato chips, one is never enough. In elementary and middle school you discover poetry and try your hand at that for a little while, but your poems always sound hokey and cliche, so you stick with reading it instead.
In high school during your free period, when your peers are talking and working on homework, you read your book. You are always reading a book. Some people will ask you about the books you read and others will make fun of you for it. You ignore both as best you can.
Your freshman year you read a book series that changes your life and you wonder how any books could ever compare to the experience you had when you first read this particular series. Because of this you end up reading the same book series six more times and nothing else. Finally, after reading the series for the seventh time and contemplating an eighth, you realize that you need to move on.
You read new books and they're good, but the experience is never the same as the one you had with that one book series. You try to recreate it as best you can, but it's never as magical as it was that first time.
Your junior year you come to realize that if you want to recreate that first reading experience, you'll have to write it yourself. After years of reading, you decide to try and write your own stories with endings that are exactly how you want them. Your first stories are a bit silly and immature, but they give you the writing bug. After this you can't seem to stop. You write late at night after everyone else has gone to sleep and you stay up far later than you ever have before. Your stories begin to follow you into the day and you are constantly thinking about story lines and characters until you empty them onto the page. Your characters begin to invade your mind so much that you feel like multiple people all at once. They develop minds of their own and sometimes they compel you to write things you never thought of before. This only adds to the magic of your writing experience. The only way to clear your head, you realize, is to write. So you do.
The time comes when you are supposed to apply for college, so you apply to a few that you know have writing programs. All your life people have asked you what you want to do and who you want to be, and you've never really known. The only thing you know now is that you like to write, you need to write, so that is what you are going to do.
You get two acceptance letters and decide to attend the school that has the best English program. You state your major as English with a Creative Writing Emphasis and hope for the best. You are afraid to fail, but you are also afraid to succeed.
You begin college and it is both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Finally you are surrounded by people who love reading and writing as much as you do, but these people are also intimidating and far more brilliant than you could ever dream to be. You try your best to keep up with them. You realize that you aren't as good as your family believes you to be, just as you've always suspected. Still, you do your best and hope that it will be enough.
When people ask you about your major you tell them and they always ask the same questions. "Oh, so you're going to be a teacher? Are you going to be a journalist? What kind of writing are you going to do? What can you do with that major?" You will hear these same questions over and over again for the next four years and sometimes from the same people multiple times. Each time you try your best to give them an answer that they can understand. You try your best to make your dreams seem worthwhile to them, but each time you can tell that they just aren't getting it. Eventually you have one answer that you give to everyone so they will stop asking so many questions.
At school, you sit quietly in class and listen to the braver, smarter people speak. You want to speak, but you cannot. You fear your peers' disdain more than you admire their intelligence. You listen to your professors and try to soak up as much as you can. You are a sponge. You hope you are a sponge.
Your first two years of college fly by in the blink of an eye and you wonder where the time has gone. You enter your first ever fiction workshop and cross your fingers and hope for the best. You come to understand that your stories are average, but you also recognize that average is better than terrible. You just need practice. You keep writing.
You reach your senior year of college much faster than you ever thought possible. You worry about the future every single day. When people ask you what you are going to do after you graduate you give them a sheepish smile and shrug your shoulders jokingly. "Write, hopefully," you tell them. You are terrified. They ask you more questions about your writing, but you know they don't really care to hear the answers, so you give them the vaguest ones you can think of. By now you have reached full on quarter-life crisis mode, though to be fair you've been having one for the past six years. You doubt everything about yourself and the path you've chosen. You wonder if you even like writing. You haven't been reading as much as you used to. You have absolutely no idea what you'll do once you graduate. You wonder if you should apply to graduate school, but you really, really don't want to. You barely survived the last four years in one piece and you're not sure you could survive anymore. You wonder if you could ever get published without a graduate degree. You wonder how in the hell you ever thought becoming an English major was a good idea.
In your final English class of your undergraduate career you read beautiful, devastating things by writers who you could never dream of competing with and you remember why you love words so damn much. Because they make you feel things in a way that nothing else in the world ever has. They have made you cry and laugh out loud and become so angry that you cried again. Very few things have the ability to make you cry, but words always do. To you, reading a beautiful paragraph is like staring out at the ocean at sunset or being on top of a mountain. Words have become your escape and your home and you can't imagine not being able to use them. And still, you wonder if this is enough. So you do the only thing you know how to do. You keep breathing. You keep going. You keep writing. It will have to be enough.
This is how to be(come) an English Major.
Love & Chaos,
Sam
The time comes when you are supposed to apply for college, so you apply to a few that you know have writing programs. All your life people have asked you what you want to do and who you want to be, and you've never really known. The only thing you know now is that you like to write, you need to write, so that is what you are going to do.
You get two acceptance letters and decide to attend the school that has the best English program. You state your major as English with a Creative Writing Emphasis and hope for the best. You are afraid to fail, but you are also afraid to succeed.
You begin college and it is both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Finally you are surrounded by people who love reading and writing as much as you do, but these people are also intimidating and far more brilliant than you could ever dream to be. You try your best to keep up with them. You realize that you aren't as good as your family believes you to be, just as you've always suspected. Still, you do your best and hope that it will be enough.
When people ask you about your major you tell them and they always ask the same questions. "Oh, so you're going to be a teacher? Are you going to be a journalist? What kind of writing are you going to do? What can you do with that major?" You will hear these same questions over and over again for the next four years and sometimes from the same people multiple times. Each time you try your best to give them an answer that they can understand. You try your best to make your dreams seem worthwhile to them, but each time you can tell that they just aren't getting it. Eventually you have one answer that you give to everyone so they will stop asking so many questions.
At school, you sit quietly in class and listen to the braver, smarter people speak. You want to speak, but you cannot. You fear your peers' disdain more than you admire their intelligence. You listen to your professors and try to soak up as much as you can. You are a sponge. You hope you are a sponge.
Your first two years of college fly by in the blink of an eye and you wonder where the time has gone. You enter your first ever fiction workshop and cross your fingers and hope for the best. You come to understand that your stories are average, but you also recognize that average is better than terrible. You just need practice. You keep writing.
You reach your senior year of college much faster than you ever thought possible. You worry about the future every single day. When people ask you what you are going to do after you graduate you give them a sheepish smile and shrug your shoulders jokingly. "Write, hopefully," you tell them. You are terrified. They ask you more questions about your writing, but you know they don't really care to hear the answers, so you give them the vaguest ones you can think of. By now you have reached full on quarter-life crisis mode, though to be fair you've been having one for the past six years. You doubt everything about yourself and the path you've chosen. You wonder if you even like writing. You haven't been reading as much as you used to. You have absolutely no idea what you'll do once you graduate. You wonder if you should apply to graduate school, but you really, really don't want to. You barely survived the last four years in one piece and you're not sure you could survive anymore. You wonder if you could ever get published without a graduate degree. You wonder how in the hell you ever thought becoming an English major was a good idea.
In your final English class of your undergraduate career you read beautiful, devastating things by writers who you could never dream of competing with and you remember why you love words so damn much. Because they make you feel things in a way that nothing else in the world ever has. They have made you cry and laugh out loud and become so angry that you cried again. Very few things have the ability to make you cry, but words always do. To you, reading a beautiful paragraph is like staring out at the ocean at sunset or being on top of a mountain. Words have become your escape and your home and you can't imagine not being able to use them. And still, you wonder if this is enough. So you do the only thing you know how to do. You keep breathing. You keep going. You keep writing. It will have to be enough.
This is how to be(come) an English Major.
Love & Chaos,
Sam
