2008 THIRD PLACE: No Entry fee Category

 

The Tired Dog

By Kelly Christensen

 

The answer was a series of cartoon dogs in ascending order of enthusiasm: the first was lying down, exhausted and sad, like he'd been chasing a boy on a bike who had out-pedaled him, and the last was sitting up with wide eyes and lines showing his tail wagging.  The question was "How do you feel about writing?"  I was supposed to circle the appropriate dog.  Though there were no wrong answers, my second grade teacher Mrs. Barber had said, mine was the only paper that got returned with "see me" at the top instead of a smiley face.

            Fearful at having messed up the unmessable test, I waited for my verbal lashing. 

"I want to talk about your answers," Mrs. Barber said.  I nodded.  "Did you mean to circle this dog?  Is this how you feel about writing?" she asked and pointed to the dog I had circled, the one next to the thoroughly exhausted dog. 

            "Yes," I told her. The class writing assignments were tedious, arduous even, but not miserable, so my dog was just shy of the one who lost his boy.  

            "You also answered that you're good at writing."  She said this as though it were a contradiction.  Grinding through the tedium didn't mean I wasn't good at it.  I nodded again.

            "Most people usually like the things they are good at," she puzzled politely at me.  If most people did, it was because they were good at fun things like sports and games.  At seven years old, I knew writing was work.  People liked my stories, and I loved their admiration, but that didn't change the fact that it was work to put them on paper.

            "I guess I just want you to think about that," she said before dismissing me to recess. 

For the next several years, I did.  My elementary school teachers groomed me to believe I had a natural well of talent.  Without effort or ambition, I enthralled my teachers and classmates with stories, went to writing workshops and edited our class yearbook.  By the time I won an essay contest in fifth grade, I assumed that my life's path as a writer would be smoothly paved before me.

My high school papers earned A's and it was an unthinking and natural step to major in English at college.  It wasn't until my senior year that there was an opening in a creative writing course.  With no constructed essays, no theses to prove, no one else's direction to follow, at last I was in the class that would leave me fulfilled.  I would write for the sake of writing, and not for an assignment.  I had waited my entire life for that course and entered it weak in the knees.  

So it was with great surprise that I turned in my first story sick in the stomach.  I let blank pages sit with nothing more than a file name on my computer, waiting for inspiration.  I felt that fiction, true writing, had to be inspired and would not conform to a schedule.  Deadlines grew nearer without an inspired word, and finally the dread of dropping a letter grade frightened me enough to fill a page with gibberish.  

I sat through the peer critique, revulsion at my hurried words deepening as each student-marked page came back.  The rest of the semester passed laboriously, and though I forced myself to write paragraphs before every assignment was due, I couldn't bear to look at them a again to edit.  I could only type stunted character descriptions or respond to writing prompts, but never develop a story.  At the end of class, I had wasted a semester, watching it pedal away with each pile of slop I shame-facedly turned in. 

I realized that without an assignment to complete, recognition to earn, I had nothing to say.  What I had known since second grade when I circled the disinterested dog, was that writing was work, and I'd never had the inclination to work beyond what was required of me

The professor gave us each a single piece of advice at the last class.  To most students, he said to flesh out characters, watch punctuation, or embrace non-conventional plot structures.  But for me he had only three words, which constitute the best advice I've ever received and have gladly taken: "Lower your standards."