No Wasted Time :: College Admissions Essays

No Wasted Time The first piece of "serious and literary" grown-up fiction I remember reading without duress was All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. I was fourteen, and for the past two years my pleasure reading had consisted entirely of science fiction-I consumed one book per day in this genre. Not all of this time was wasted, but the diet had become a little monotonous. The students a year ahead of me in high school were assigned to read Warren's novel. I picked up a copy in a study hall, to while away fifteen minutes of tedium. In that amount of time I was hooked. First edge of cynicism on its poetic valences. When I had read more of the book I was taken by the richness of its meanings, how thoroughly and thoughtfully the sense of every action and episode had been interlocked with all the others. I had wanted to be a writer before, but I had known that this was what a book could do, or that this was how you did it. I reread All the King's Men half a dozen times, for me it was a portal to a whole lot of other serious fiction, but the novel itself holds up very well under such intense poring. George Garrett once said that one of the problems of student writers is that they were fed a diet of masterpieces. Masterpiece fiction is too well made for you to figure out how the writer did it. To pick up technique, the thing to do is read genre.