The Tale of the Wannabe Writer

When Anita Gulia was very young, she told her mom that she wanted to be a writer when she grew up, not realizing that some of her best days as a writer would happen before she was “grown-up.”

Writing and drawing went—literally—hand in hand for her, and the actions of drawing a triangle with a circle on top and writing “girl” next to it became inseparable as soon as she learned how. The first person she learned to draw was herself, and the first word she learned to write was her name. Instilled with a love of fairy tales in English and Italian at a young age, she found kindred spirits in their young female protagonists. Although her mom always said that she taught her older brother how to imagine and pretend, her own scope was often confined to what her own life presented to her rather than imaginative experiences. She began to write stories about girls named Sarah or Laila or Chloe or Aura or Dawn, girls who lived in houses that looked quite a lot like hers, whose families were quite a lot like hers, and whose reading habits were quite a lot like hers. Anita started writing many stories, but she never seemed to finish them.

One of her earliest writings, from third grade, was written at Italian school when she was distracted in class. Inspired by books she loved like The Borrowers by Mary Norton and The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks, she turned her friends into tiny characters living in a magical world beyond the walls of a house. She wrote one chapter and never revisited the story. In middle school, inspired by Ann M. Martin’s Main Street book series, Anita made an elaborate plan to write a series about middle-school girls based on her friends, with each book told from the perspective of a different character. Her scope, as it has been for years, was still limited to realistic fiction (loosely based on her life) and fantasy (loosely based on the fairy tales she grew up loving).

In second grade, Anita discovered chapter book series like My Weird School by Dan Gutman. She also discovered that she could use the plentiful construction paper and printer paper at her house to create her own formulaic, predictably-titled series. Enamored with the idea, she did exactly that, beginning with a short self-illustrated book called The Lonely Eggplant. In excitement, countless other books about vegetables with alliterative names were constructed — books which would forever remain blank except for titles and cover illustrations.

When Anita was in fourth grade, she decided that she wanted to be pen pals with a cousin in New Jersey and a cousin in Florida. Although she was writing letters, her tendency toward fiction still crept in, and she romanticized the friendship she had with her cousins, writing from the perspective of a version of herself who was closer to her cousins than she was in reality. As had become her pattern, she gradually stopped writing letters to her cousins. The pen-pal saga had felt like her favorite epistolary novel, Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, but it differed in one crucial way: it lacked a perfect resolution.

Much of Anita’s writing followed three criteria, particularly as she grew older. First, the stories she wrote were heavily inspired by the style and content of what she was reading. Second, when she discovered the option of leaving a story open-ended, she reveled in it. Third, she functioned best with a deadline. The first example of a project involving these three criteria for Anita’s writing occurred in fourth grade. She had to choose a page from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg—a book composed of full-page images with only titles and short sentences—to write a short story about. On a page entitled “Mr. Linden’s Library,” below an image of a sleeping girl holding a book with ivy growing out of it, were the sentences, “He had warned her about the book. Now it was too late.” Anita’s love for fairy tales made it obvious that she would choose this page. She wrote about the girl being transported into the book in order to defeat the dragon in the book, and she decided, for the first time, to leave the fate of her character unknown. However, this cliffhanger of an ending was not out of laziness or forgetfulness like usual; Anita intentionally ended the story when the girl’s boyfriend was shaking her in hopes of waking her up. She wrote the story on an Alphasmart, a combination between a typewriter and a calculator, and she had to submit it to her teacher by a deadline so that the story could be printed and put into her portfolio. Thus began the blessing and the curse of deadlines as motivation.

In college, Anita started writing many essays, and she always had to finish them. When she could, she wrote one-minute comedic songs about her life, and she found that she could finish writing these songs if she gave herself a deadline of midnight. When given the opportunity to do a creative project for a class, she loved to write something with an open-ended plot. She produced parody upon parody and proclaimed that she thrived as a writer when she had an existing work to satirize. In spite of all this, Anita still did not usually consider herself a writer, even though she was now “grown-up.” She looked back on the days of boundless creativity and internal motivation, and regretted the fact that she only seemed to be able to write things that adhered to her three criteria. When inspiration struck, she felt like a writer, but when she was staring at a blank paper, she felt quite the opposite.

But instead of continuing to see her three criteria in opposition to boundless creativity and internal motivation, she realized that they were simply a different way to go about the process of writing. More often than not, she was faced with the reality that producing writing, whether good or bad, was really the only requirement for being a writer. And even though she encountered much more writer’s block than her younger self had, Anita still fulfilled that requirement. She wrote personal statements influenced by the realistic fiction of her childhood. She wrote good night texts as long as letters, ending every day with the perfect epistolary resolution. She wrote a fairy tale for one of her classes, inspired heavily by the Italian culture she knew and loved.

She also wrote stories about a “grown-up” writer named Anita Gulia whose writing journey had been quite a lot like hers.