I entered NPR’s three-minute fiction contest this week (stories that are less than 600 words and can be read aloud in under 3 minutes) and I wanted to share my entry. It’s not my finest work, but it was a fun little challenge. This round required the writer to include laughter and crying at some point in the prose.

The Writer Who Wasn’t

Emma had all the ingredients to be a writer. She grew up in a house
that smelled like old paperbacks and acrylic paint and Wild Turkey.
She made A’s in English class, usually without reading the assignment.
She romanticized anything and characterized everyone and questioned
everything. She frequently documented the uncertain details of her
life (first in black-and-white marbled Mead journals, then in hot pink
diaries with golden keys, then in moleskin notebooks and finally,
online). She declared Blume, Austen, Plath and Jong her favorite
authors at 16, 19, 23 and 26, respectively, and she furiously
underlined paragraphs that pertained to (or completely explained) her
life. When someone praised her prose, she would say, “Oh, that? That’s
nothing.” (And they would laugh and laugh and laugh that such an
innate young writer was so modest.) She moved to New York City the
very second it was possible and necessary. She collected books like
girls her age collected Saturday night stories (but she only read the
ones about New York). And she played with words as if they were a
normal distraction from reality, daydreaming in double entendres and
euphemisms and puns.

The problem was, Emma didn’t want to be a writer.

She believed “becoming a writer” meant a lifetime of blinking cursors
and solitude, financial uncertainty and rejection, loathing and
frustration. She had read far too many heartbreaking stories about the
lives of writers to ever envy their course.

Upon moving to Manhattan, Emma chose a profession that wasn’t wrapped
up in Word documents and fresh ideas and sentence structure. She chose
one consumed with Excel spreadsheets and equations and formulaic
conclusions. (Emma loved words more than numbers, but numbers were
historically more reliable.)

New York was such an intense, curious, fascinating place that the
finance job did not prevent Emma from chronicling her experiences, and
so she wrote, but only for herself. (She knew that when you began to
write for someone else, everything changed.) Emma’s blog was full of
tiny love letters to the city, read by a dozen or so people every month,
most of who stumbled upon it by searching the phrase “how to avoid
becoming a writer” (the title of an old therapeutic entry she wrote
some time ago). It pleased and amused her that other people thought to
defy their creative fate as well.

Every Sunday, Emma called her mother, and just as they were ready to
hang-up in good spirits, her mother would always ask, “Have you
written anything wonderful lately?” This prompted unwarranted vexation
from Emma, who would always say something like, “Yes, mother, a rent
check and a grocery list.” And her mother’s hollow laughter would
quickly fade into genuine sobs and protests. “It’s a gift, Emma! It’s
a gift! For the love of God, please use it.”

Emma often wondered if her secret online memoirs were selfish. She
knew there was potential to be wildly discovered, but the blog
remained a modern, reliable way to write without the upshot of
frustration, rejection or abhorrence of the craft.

One Sunday, after what seemed like 10,000 Sundays, her mother, whom
she loved more than words, said in a desperate plea, “Please write
something for me, Emma.” And so Emma tried writing for someone other
than herself. She found it initially ominous, but wrote fervently
about a mother who constantly ricocheted between laughter and tears at
the fate of her talented and defiant daughter.

When she just couldn’t write anymore, she mailed the piece to dozens of
publications and never to her mother. And when they contacted her, she
earnestly replied, “Oh, that? That’s nothing.”