Six months ago I spent a day cleaning out the attic with my dad. “Pre-class cleaning!” He called it. Under piles of stuffed animals and old textbooks, I found a box labeled ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. A wave of curiosity came over me and I lifted the lid off the box, revealing carefully stacked binders, notebooks, and loose paper. I picked up a white binder that said “Emily’s Stories” in colorful letters on the front.
Inside the binder were five short stories and a decorated table of contents. My heart leaped as I read the titles. I skipped to “Ode to Romeo the Dragon”, a story about an old pet of mine, and a rush of warmth came over me. All of the joyful feelings that I felt while creating these stories for my fifth-grade class came flooding back, and I had a moment of realization I had been waiting for. This is what I love, I thought. This is what I should be doing. After spending the next few hours digesting what was in the box, I decided that now is my chance to follow my passion. While it may be cliché, I know my younger self would smile if she heard that I finally was going to follow my dreams and become an author.
An overarching goal of mine would be to share my art with the world. The art of storytelling is one that can only be appreciated when it is shared among people. I want my work to be passed between the hands of friends and family, and I want readers to be able to deeply connect with the characters and feel their emotions. I’m confident in my prose, but I think that this program would help me improve my character development and deepen the relationships between my characters. I would like to explore dichotomy more within my characters to be able to expand the reader’s understanding of their persona and more strongly relate to them. My hope is that the readers will be able to see themselves in the characters that I am writing.
I have a lot of practice interviewing and getting to know strangers due to my major in Journalism, so this is a skill that I would bring to the program. While I know that I would be writing fiction, I have gained and mastered an ability to know what questions to ask and how to build a character through written word, so I would not only be able to bring this skill but also learn more through the program on how to translate this to fiction. I am open to trying any genre community, but I think that my skills would best fit Young Adult and Romance.
In regards to my writing style, I can be very introspective and do not shy away from writing about difficult topics. I find that the best way to have difficult conversations starts with art, and I hope to be an author that inspires someone to take the step that they have been afraid to take.