This was written in May 2007.

As a writer and reader, I take autobiographical portraits a little too seriously. I’m not going to do the David Copperfield version, though I plan to be detailed. This is, as far as I can write it, the path that led me to my chosen avocation: creative writing.

I was in search of a career path from a young age. That “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question was one I took very seriously. In first grade, I decided I loved dancing around and singing the soundtrack of The Little Mermaid, so perhaps I’d become a singer. In second grade, I realized “singer” was much too narrow a career path for someone of my many talents, so I then changed to “acting.” But by third grade, I remember telling others—in a very precociously obnoxious voice—that singing and acting were things any old person could do. I wanted to do something unique. I wanted to create. Having been inspired by Disney, I thought the perfect outlet for this vast creativity I assumed I had would be through animation. I’d been obsessed with the Disney musical animated films of the early nineties—what better way for me to spend my adult life than having fun? I watched the “making of” specials of Beauty and the Beast and saw how the animators brought Belle to life and thought, “Wow.”

Then came the travesty of my nine year old life. Pocahontas was released when I was in fourth grade and my dreams of animation were shattered. “It’s not historically accurate,” I practically bawled to my parents. “How could they make a movie that’s a lie?” I understood the difference between fiction and non-fiction, of course, but I was appalled that Disney would confuse a generation of children with lies. (I hardly considered myself a child when I was a forthright nine year old.) The real Pocahontas was only thirteen! John Smith had red hair! How could the animators commit such an atrocity? (I’ve always been prone to shameless melodrama; no wonder my second grade teacher saw acting promise in me.) The answer was somewhat better than I’d been expecting: the animators don’t create the story, they simply add the pictures, like an illustrator. It’s the writers who create the story.

Well, that settled it. If I wanted to use all of my wild creative capacities and have fun, I’d have to become a writer.

I’d always been a voracious reader, but no more than any middle grader with a library card and an appetite for adventure books. Between fourth and sixth grade, I started consuming more books than I ever had before. I pushed beyond grade level into larger and thicker chapter books. I invaded adult sections, tearing through the shelves for anything with key words to signal to me the book might be good: adventure, excitement, mystery, fantasy. (To that end, however, I skipped books my other precocious friends were reading; those “Austen” and “Vonnegut” people never got a second glance from me until much later.)

The realization of my future career happened when I was twelve, in seventh grade. I finished reading a children’s series book—one of those serialized, flash in the pan sort of publications that most teachers disapprove of—and I recall vividly thinking, “I could write that.” It didn’t seem so hard. I knew I aced every spelling test and certainly by reading enough books I understood how to punctuate and use quotation marks effectively. That year I wrote something akin to a first series book of my own by telling the story to myself each night before falling asleep and typing it up the next afternoon—instead of doing my homework.

My fascination with the process deepened. In keeping with my personality, I realized that the only way for me to improve as a writer was to read and research. To teach myself all I could learn about the craft—in a way that my normal education wasn’t teaching me. I read more and more children’s fiction—mainly historical adventures or books with quirky female protagonists.

In the summer of 1998, the summer before my eighth grade year, I heard a rumor about a Star Wars film being released in 1999. The re-releases of the original trilogy had captured my imagination and reinvigorated my love of those movies, which—like the Back to the Future movies and the Indiana Jones movies—were part of that “adventure” genre that I’d always found exciting. The clear plots, the quirky characters, the clear-cut villains—I’d absorbed it all as a kid. In hearing about the Star Wars movie, I decided to do some “research.” I found 500-800 page novels in the book store—Star Wars novels—and devoured them as a twelve-year-old, acquainting myself with this world of the movies. I began, in an odd way, to analyze the films more closely and even analyze the styles of the different writers. I began to voice my opinions about George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and their creativity to others, and when Star Wars: Episode I came out in theaters, I was at that first show telling college-age boys, “Anakin Skywalker will turn to the Dark Side in the third movie, not this one. Jeez. The six movies will represent his character arc, from innocence to temptation to evil to redemption. Jeez.”

I began adopting the tone of the movie reviewers I saw on television; I started picking up the newspaper and reading film reviews and imitating the way the writers criticized film when I spoke to my friends. I rented and watched Oscar-winning films with my parents and began memorizing years and names so at any given moment I could spout, “Oh, yes, Forrest Gump won for Best Picture, and Tom Hanks won for Actor; he won the year before, for Philadelphia, didn’t you know?” By the time ninth grade came around, I was a full-blown, overly pretentious thirteen-year-old critic, and had completely gained the reputation of nerd. Thus started my high school experience.

The first text we read in my ninth grade English Honors class was The Odyssey. I was floored. How could that have been written so long ago? Those ideas are still around and being used! At the same time I was marveling over Homer’s genius, I found my sixth grade sister’s Scholastic Book catalog sitting on a table at home. I leafed through the discount books and found one little known one crammed in a back page. The description? “A boy discovers he is a wizard and embarks on an adventure-filled school year filled with danger and excitement.” The details of that particular description elude my memory, but I can easily remember the words “adventure,” “school,” and “excitement.” I had my mother order it. Immediately. This was September 1999. I subsequently devoured Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in one night of reading. I fell back on my pillows at two in the morning, thinking, “Wow. Now that would be easy to write.”

However, the next school book we read in English class was A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin. “Wait,” I said to myself. “A boy…wizard. A school of magic. Dragon. Hmm. This seems… familiar. Did LeGuin steal from Rowling?” I checked the publication date — almost thirty years before Rowling. I started thinking about it more closely, but even as I wondered, I realized that LeGuin’s book was different from Rowling’s, on some level I wasn’t comprehending. As always, when I was curious and didn’t know the answer to a question—I researched. I read. I found all of the Earthsea books and read them. I kept my eyes open. I read books more during the fall of 1999 and the subsequent winter break than I ever remember reading before that time. It was an adrenaline-filled rush of what I was calling “research.”

That December, I discovered Rowling had written two more Harry Potter books (which I immediately checked out from the library) and heard, to my surprise, that a fourth was expected the following summer, in 2000. I pushed on after that, reading through lists of “recommended reading” from the library, encountering children’s, young adult, and adult books along the way. I kept asking questions. Which book came first? What is being ‘creative’ and what is ‘stealing’? What is intellectual property? What is a trope, a motif, a theme, symbolism, metaphor…?

Meanwhile, school was going well. I was getting good grades while also secretly writing novels instead of doing my homework—I’d do my homework in odd snatches here and there, maybe one night a week and between classes, but I’d always hand it in, impeccable, on time. For some reason, school was absurdly easy for me; consequently I never learned to study. I did algebra by instinct and repetition, wrote history papers as if I were arguing about the finer points of a movie I’d seen last week. And somehow it was all working out — I never stopped to wonder about it, never stopped to think that college or anything else could be harder than that. After the PSAT, I started to get college brochures in the mail. Columbia University had a summer creative writing program for high school students. I vividly remember grinning at that. Finally! Something… challenging. Some way to test myself and to pull out all of the secret writings I’d been doing for my high school years. I wrote a short story for the writing sample and submitted it—and got in.

The summer of 2001 I spent immersed in poetry and fiction writing workshops. The first day of the workshop the professor asked, “What is your goal in life? What are your ambitions, your dreams?” I seriously thought about it — more seriously than I’d thought about almost anything of late.

We read poetry and wrote poetry—mine were melodramatic and emotional, but I didn’t care; reading poetry taught me more than attempting to write it ever had. All the poetry I’d ever read was Keats or Yeats or the Beowulf poet’s—definitely of a different era. I’d never read anything modern before. Then we read short stories. Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver. I’d never heard of these people—I’d barely ever heard of the “short story” before. Guy de Maupassant and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories, sure—we had to be taught what “allegory” and “allusion” were, of course—but never any more modern authors. My middle and high school reading lists up until then had made me think that to be a writer one had to be many things I was not — old, dead, willing to write several hundred pages of iambic pentameter — so I had started to wonder whether this career was for me. But through this class I began to see my dream becoming real, tangible — very, very reachable. Most interesting of all were student stories. Other students who actually loved to write! None of my high school friends enjoyed writing anything—let alone critical essays, which were fast becoming my lifeblood—and most of my high school friends were determinedly “undecided” about their future aspirations. But these writers! Idealists and dreamers, all, and I felt at home. If this is what college is like, I told myself, I need to get there—now.

By eleventh grade I was determined to write my end-of-year free-topic five page paper on something having to do with my secret obsessions of Star Wars and literary criticism. I told my teacher I was interested in exploring the theory of Star Wars. He looked at me seriously. “Well, then, you’ll need to read Joseph Campbell,” he said. “Who’s Joseph Campbell?” “A literary theorist. It’s a little advanced for eleventh grade. We don’t start teaching theory until college level, but…” I, naturally, was undaunted. I analyzed the Star Wars trilogy using Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book discussing the universality of the hero myth in cultures across the world based on familiar and frequent reoccurring tropes, themes, and motifs. I realized then, because of that paper, that there was a discipline for my obsession. That people actually study and write books and papers and argue about this stuff—for a living.

That was it. I was an English major after that, no question.

That summer, of 2002, I took a college-level writing course at Yale and I was fully committed to going to an Ivy League by the time college applications came around that fall. Princeton had a creative writing major, Brown had a program, too… I Googled and discovered a few unknown names. Johns Hopkins? Carnegie Mellon? I added them to the list. But ultimately, I figured, it was all moot; I was applying Early Decision to Yale and I was going there. After all, my life experiences had taught me that I always got my way. School was a breeze—so too would college be. I’d gotten into Yale’s summer program, after all, I’d gotten into Columbia’s; a poem of mine was published in a national journal—and I hadn’t even thought it was that good! I would get everything I wanted.

The acceptance letter was going to be posted online on December 14th. I was online on December 12th, chatting with a friend who just found out he’d gotten in Early Decision to NYU. “We’re supposed to find out on the 14th but when I logged in, it was already posted. You should try it.” So I did. For the hell of it. My fingers tensed over the mouse. This was it, my moment. I could practically see it now: “Congratulations, Erin!” I clicked the button and waited for the page to load the .pdf.

“Dear Ms. ——-, We regret to inform…”

My life, my future, seemed to shatter, splinter around me. All of those plans! Those dreams! My angsty, over-emotional teenage years had yet to actually hit me — I’d been on a dreamy, exciting rollercoaster of books for so long, I’d forgotten that terrible things could actually happen to real people. Where was my happy ending?

The next two weeks were hellish. I scrambled and wrote essays and college applications and applied quickly to programs I only half thought about. On top of it all, I lost my grandfather. Having to deal with that trauma on top of the traditional teenage trauma of applying to college while still shaking from a rejection… I had never felt so miserable. I couldn’t write; I reread old favorite books for the sheer sake of escaping—something I’d never had to do before. I’d always scorned kids who read fantasy to “escape” — I’d only read it for fun, for “research”; there I was, desperate for a happy ending, for someone to love me, for my life to be picked up and placed on the correct path through divine intervention, little-old-wizard intervention — something! Anything! Life had always been so good and predictable. I began praying I’d stumble on a time machine so I could skip to August and find my life was already all figured out for me. I didn’t want to face the same dangers and tests the heroes I’d always read about had to inevitably face; I just wanted to jump to the end of my own story — because college, at that time, felt like the end, the finish line of life. Up until Yale’s rejection, I’d been so busy breezing through life I didn’t realize that a little bit of bottom-dropping-out trouble was something I and everyone else have to weather at some point. I just wanted to give up.

My lone consolation was that the only people who knew I’d been applying Early Decision at all were the people involved in the application process. Had I subconsciously kept it a secret (kept all of my college choices a secret) because I was afraid I would fail? Because deep down I knew that one day I might face the Chasm of the Unknown and I didn’t want anyone to give me their pity. I was too proud, too full of myself to want anyone’s sympathy.

In January I resumed normal life — only it wasn’t normal at all. On the 6th I started interning at a publishing company in Manhattan as part of my senior internship experience (the W.I.S.E. program) and I was confused for a college student immediately. On Mondays I filed away writers’ paychecks, then read hundreds of pages of slush; on Wednesday I assisted with design and found a kindred, font-loving spirit, then learned how publicity works. People kept asking me what school I went to, then when they didn’t recognize my high school’s name as a college, I had to add, “Um. I’m a high school senior. Not a college senior.” That was new. My newfound humility of December made me keep my head down and my fingers working. I tried to be as normal as possible even though my future was a dark gray blur.

Juggling the internship as well as a few AP classes was tough. I had to miss 2 days a week to commute to Manhattan. My internship mentor was also my English teacher and kept chuckling when I promised him I’d give him a 5 for his records without a worry. “You need that in-class time to do well on the exam,” he said. “You miss most of the book discussions.” But I didn’t care. Knowing how to write, to blather endlessly on anything using the perfect balance of SAT vocabulary and intellectual quotation was the one thing I knew I could handle. I suffered weary depression and senioritis. I learned all I could about publishing and the world of writing books — storing it away meticulously — and kept telling myself that I could just keep on going, keep on pushing past graduation and the loathsome summer and get to better and brighter things at college.

I got my first acceptance letters from the “safe” schools and tossed them aside. They weren’t to places I really wanted to go, anyway. That odd college Carnegie Mellon wanted me, flashing its thick paper and fancy words about “selective programs” at me but I still held out. NYU then wanted me. But Brown didn’t, Princeton didn’t — and I couldn’t fathom why. I’d accomplished so much, why didn’t someplace good want me? I got 5s on my AP exams, aced my Regents, I was graduating second in the class. Why not me? But, a colder part of me nagged, why do you want to go there so much in the first place? Do you even care about those schools at all? If the goal is to be a novelist, I kept thinking, shouldn’t I just go somewhere I can be happy as an English and Creative Writing major? Or, more importantly, can’t I just go somewhere I can feel — at home?

I visited Carnegie Mellon on a weekend whim. It was rainy and cloudy and cold and it was April. “Pittsburgh is like this a lot,” my student host told me. “I never leave home without an umbrella.” I stood on the campus, on the quad, and I recall vividly looking at the grass and the yellow brick academic buildings. None of it seemed drearily washed out — it all seemed so… alive. It was the weekend before their annual Spring Carnival, too, and one of the parking lots was being carefully transformed into an actual student-built carnival, complete with complex booths. There was something goofy called “Buggy” involving students pushing very short girls uphill in aerodynamically-designed go-carts. There was a band without pants. How quirky, I thought. What an odd place. My student host told me the rumors about Carnegie Mellon. “They say we’re nothing but smelly CS nerds here,” she said. “We’re a lot more diverse than that, as you’ve seen, but that other thing is true — we’re definitely all a bunch of nerds here. Everyone you meet — we’re all obsessed with something. But that’s what seems to bring us all together.”

Everyone at CMU is obsessed with something? I thought. I was most definitely home.

I could get into my experience the last four years at Carnegie Mellon, but that’s a novel in and of itself. Every semester at CMU has shown me something different about both myself and the world at large. Ever since coming to CMU I’ve realized a great many things: I love technical things, but from a distance, the way one loves the sunset but doesn’t wish to travel to the sun. I love biology — my high school obsession is still a New York Times Science Tuesday love — and I love challenges, but I’ve learned to seek out the enjoyable ones. What’s the point of a challenge if I can’t enjoy myself along the journey? I know now that I’ll never really understand coding — not because I fundamentally can’t, but because I just would rather do something else. I tried the sorority thing for a year, disliked it, and left. I did community service but wasn’t consumed by it; I even dabbled in a Mechanical Engineering course I ended up pretending I never took at all (or at least it doesn’t exist on my transcript). I was an Orientation Counselor for one year, sharing my enthusiasm with new freshmen — but didn’t go back after I realized I was getting to old for that kind of thing (the cheering, the partying — not for me). I spent one Spring Carnival as a Booth Chair, building a booth on the Carnival midway and getting a sunburn to prove it; I spent two Carnivals pushing Buggy (pushing that little girl inside the aerodynamic go cart), and I held up a trophy at the end of my first year and cheered. I dated, I danced, and I met the man I’m going to marry. (He’s proposing to me next month — kind of strange how these things turn out, huh?)

Academically I still love English and I love history. I still, of course, love essays and consider them my lifeblood. As a freshman I impulsively told my first academic advisor that I was going to complete a Senior Honors Thesis and he smiled and nodded, “That’s great,” in the way academic advisors smile and nod at precocious freshmen. And yet this year, I did it. I successfully completed my Senior Honors Thesis entitled “Girls Who Save the World: The Female Hero in Young Adult Fantasy,” combining my love of critical theory and essay writing with my lifelong obsessions with adventures, strong female characters, fantasy, and heroes. I’ve also loved being a double major in Creative Writing — I’ve gotten my poetry published in the school’s undergraduate journal, and I’ve won awards for my fiction and screenwriting. And I still write — on my own time, still reaching toward that goal of becoming a successful young adult novelist.

When you ask me to tell you about myself, I really can’t just tell the simplified version. Even what I’ve written here has been super summarized, or so I keep thinking when I reread what I’ve written. Capturing a life in prose of any length is tough — I just hope I’ve given you a big enough slice!

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