This is how I learned to write.

At the beginning of my freshman year of high school, we had just read Lord of the Flies over the summer. Every year, the initiation for every student comes in the form of a five-paragraph essay about Lord of the Flies, due the first week. Generally, the purpose of essays like this are to prove you’ve read the book.

Our dealer was a fierce English teacher, Mrs. Hancock. Fear of Mrs. Hancock stretched across generations of students. Married to the headmaster himself, she was able to readily punish freshmen with failing grades for mediocre, unserious writing. And almost all high school freshmen are mediocre, unserious writers.

More than any other subject, failing at English felt like failing at life itself. English isn’t about learning a subject (it’s our native language!) so much as learning how to breathe. I was set on proving I had a pulse. For the brain, writing is like squeezing a lemon, learning to let your feelings run clear and forcing thought to yield its sharpness.

When it came to Lord of the Flies, my thoughts and feelings were dealt a fat, red C+. She told me it was well-written, but all over the place. She said I had no clear thesis or direction. At age fifteen, that sounded about right. There were five paragraphs, but they read more like stanzas to a freestyle poem.

I needed to serve my time in symbolism and syntax before I could start freestyling essays. We cut our teeth writing about a thousand disappointing five-paragraph essays. English teachers always seemed a little more disappointed than other teachers. That’s a good thing, because A+ writing is rare from anyone, and should be a lot to expect from a high schooler.

I started to like the idea of becoming an economist for a living. It had a nice ring to it. There’s an uncomplicated gravitas to the word “economist.” By comparison, “writer” is about as serious as you make it. But in reality, I spent more time in AP Econ gazing out the window, watching custodians mow the soccer field under the evening sun.

One day, my junior English teacher slipped into the classroom. In what felt like a rejected scene from a writer’s fantasy sequence, he quietly told me my essay blew everyone’s out of the water. He then announced he’d be using it to teach the class. Suddenly, eighty teenagers were lugging around copies of my paper like required scripture. That was pretty much all I needed.

It dawned on me that life wasn’t about “finding your passion” so much as finding the one thing that made you feel a little better than everyone else. Needless to say, I wasn’t getting that by collecting trophies for my athletic achievements.

Motivated by ego rewards, I found the self-belief to express my ideas and make myself vulnerable. Anyone can be a good writer if they’re doing it from the heart. You can cultivate a good use of syntax, metaphor, and diction, etc., but only insofar as a scrupulous hunter sharpens an arrow. True precision relies, like words, on the integrity of a feeling. 

At the end of the year, Mrs. Hancock informed me that my college essay, while “well-written,” didn’t actually say much about college — or me, for that matter. Instead, I had written a defense of consumerism, basically a love letter to Target. But by then I felt my wanton disregard for the assignment was justified by understanding the rules enough to bend them. So, in true copywriter fashion, I set the brief aside. I figured I had something to say, and maybe, if I said it with style, I’d get away with it.