When I was seventeen, I was told to hunker down. I was in an acting class and had just spent about fifteen minutes improvising a scene played out on a tightrope between the life I was living and the one I’d just created for my character. Real Life Improv - that’s what my teacher called …
Rewrite your college application essay with today’s point of view answering the question, “Is there anything else we should know?”
I misinterpreted most things by choice at seventeen; I couldn’t define good riddance; I chose not to know the difference between stay and go, but played the victim like a champion. You should know we’re fine, and you should know things got worse. In my college essay I wrote about accepting loneliness, leaving out what …
Your First Breakup
By late August, we'd exhausted our summer nights with the sort of innocuous chatter that in hindsight can only be defined as endless foreplay - coyly beating around the inevitable. Chris would park his car outside my house, just barely seventeen, a shiny license tucked into the wallet kept safely in one of the deep …
Honesty
Many successful writers have contributed to advice books, advice blogs, advice twitter accounts, sharing their Expert advice on writing. And so many of them say: tell the truth. That’s it. Whether it’s fiction or otherwise, tell the truth. And I say to myself okay, I can do that. I took classes on how to tell …
You bring someone back from the dead. Who is it?
It would be nice for my mom to have her dad and my dad to have his mom. I think the whole 27 Club deserves a second shot, and imagine a collab between Kanye and Tupac, Biggie and Nicki. But I don’t think I’d bring any of them back and besides, the prompt calls for …
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Everyone has a special talent. What’s your special skill?
I can write my name. I can name all the countries of South America in under 10 seconds. I can forget what I’m about to say as I’m about to say it and sometimes I wonder what's stronger - head or the heart. I can whistle. I can read up to three pages of a …
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Your Favorite Piece of Playground Equipment
As a human destined to forever be under five feet, a fear of heights is a trait I made sure never to possess. As a child, if there was something I couldn't reach, which happened fairly often, I'd climb. I climbed kitchen countertops to get cups and plates; I climbed the shelves in my closet …
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The First Time You Were Worried That You Had Come Off Sounding Racist.
I was five and in Mrs. Pagano’s morning kindergarten class. Trichelle wasn’t there on the first day of school. I don’t recall how late into the year she arrived, but she was definitely the new girl and definitely the only black student. I suppose at the time I didn't realize my first reactions to seeing …
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Describe One of Your Bad Habits and Why You Secretly Get Joy Out of It.
I’m not a cigarette smoker, though I’ve dabbled. I’m not much of a junk food eater, but I love a good dessert, and I follow a few TV shows but I’m really not one to binge. But okay, I’ll admit it - I do procrastinate when it comes to the boring topics, pick at my …
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What’s The Stupidest Thing You Used To Believe Whole-Heartedly
I suppose many who were children during and after 1995 went through a phase very similar to mine, however, did not quite take it as far as I did. 1995 of course was the year John Lasseter and the geniuses over at Pixar created Toy Story. Was it a completely made up story created entirely …
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642 Things to Write About 