That’s Why They Call It Play

As March was winding down, I was in a discord call with some friends and the conversation drifted towards our writing habits. How often we did, in what capacity, and when it came time to talk about my addiction, the only words I could really manage were “I just write. I don’t think about whether it’s good or bad, I just put something on the page and figure out the rest later.” I spent the next two weeks thinking about that in excruciating detail, and here we are in the throes of April. During seventh grade, I had transferred to a new school midway through the semester and hadn’t gone through a lot of their county specific testing for class placements in their Gifted and Talented program. (At some point, we will find time to unpack the history and current state of the American education system as it relates to nerd media, but one topic at a time.) I had a handful of weeks of classes before said assessment occurred, and during that intervening time, I had this distinct memory of my English teacher pulling me aside after class and telling me, “Hey, have you thought about doing more creative writing?” I was then promptly handing a middle school appropriate version of Antigone saying, “You’re gonna be reading this next week when you switch classes, so you might as well get a jump on it.”

And with that simple nudge, I did end up doing more creative writing. I wrote short stories and treatments. I made a portfolio that I have somehow kept over the better part of a decade and a ha…