The Book That Created A Writer by Kaylan

The Book That Created A Writer by Kaylan - May 2017 Scholarship Essay

"The Virgin Suicides," by Jeffrey Eugenides, got me to write.

I’ve read more books than there are days in the years, great -- amazing -- books, that have made me laugh and cry and squint as I tilted my head slightly. I have read books that marked a maturity I walked into and could never walk out of, and books that gave me sentences I still have written in notebooks and agendas and diaries. I have books in multiple editions and books so annotated and dog-eared they’re crumbling.

"The Virgin Suicides," though, got me to write.

Okay, sure, I’ve written since I was little: newspaper articles for dogs about dogs and poetry about the very vague understanding I had of romance. I truly believed I had written some pretty hot stuff. Postmodern princess over here with an obvious penchant for the words “totally” and “awesome,” and what I thought to be gritty and explicit prose. In early high school, I wrote a short one-act play I physically cannot get through now without recoiling. And soon after the playwright scene, I returned to writing poems, about dogs again (we graduated from newspaper articles, here).

Then, imagine a shining light emerging from the heavens, bringing Eugenides himself with his two hands wrapped around a gleaming bright copy of The Virgin Suicides. Or something like that. And I read it. And not only do I love this book -- and everything about it -- I re-read it throughout the years with the same admiration and excitement.

There are other books that have sparked creativity and motivation in me, such as "Nine Stories," by J.D Salinger; "Dogfight, A Love Story," by Matt Burgess; and "The Bell Jar," by Sylvia Plath, but never this urgent need to write. I was genuinely inspired, and what formed was the first short story I was ever proud of. I continued to write short story after short story, and now I’ve even been published. "The Virgin Suicides" taught me a whole creative writing seminar in those few hundred pages, chock-full of lessons about the reward of risk, that extensive description can be important and vibrant, and that prose can read like poetry. Dark content can be humorous. The narrator can be a mystery. Foreshadowing can be obvious.

After trying to emulate Eugenides' techniques and experiment with a style much like his, I realized that I have my own voice. I realized I have things to say that I want people to read. I realized that there is a world beyond writing about my own pet dachshund.

I never knew I could hone creative writing into a craft, continue to love it with a passion, or actually do anything with it. Now I know that literature can impact an individual so deeply that they want nothing more than to make someone else feel such passion about their own work. "The Virgin Suicides" has not only brought meaning into my life, but has encouraged me to bring meaning into my writing. It, very simply, got me to write.