In my first semester of my first year of my first time in college, I wrote a story. It was an English assignment in which we had to select one of the three teenage girls from John Updike’s “A & P” and write about the events of the story from that character’s perspective. There was no analysis of the story, no essay, no study of its literary importance at all. The assignment was to simply read the story and write one in turn. I had never written a story before. Oh, I did well in English. I was a natural at it. High school “essays” flowed from my brain like water from a faucet and writing assignments were practically a joke. I relied on questionable practices and every shortcut in the book to get by in Math and the Sciences but when it came to writing it was just… instinct. Just a truth, albeit one that didn’t particularly matter at the time.
Many things happen in Updike’s story but I suppose what you really need to know is that these three girls walk into an A & P (a grocery store chain from the Eastern U.S.) in bathing suits, and the narrator, as a healthy, red-blooded American male, goes into detail about the event. He describes their dress (or lack thereof), their demeanor, and practically their every move from the moment they walk into the store to the moment they leave. There’s the attractive girl (the leader), the lanky girl, and the chubby girl. That one, the chubby girl, immediately caught my mind’s eye. I wanted to know what she thought, why she was there, and really, who she was.
It’s quite an experience to write from a fictional character’s perspective, especially when the character is a girl from New England in the 1960s. I am decidedly not a girl from New England nor was I familiar with the 1960s outside of the bits one absorbs from popular culture (did you know that it wasn’t just hippies and men in suits and crew cuts?) This would be my first experience with creation, with giving life to a concept—an idea of a person. And so I wrote. The truth is I don’t recall the process and really anything about the assignment outside of the fact that I turned it in to Mike (calling a professor by his first name? amazing!), and that I received a good grade on the assignment. He made little notes, pointed out the details that he liked and the grammar mistakes that slipped by, and that was it. For my first story it was a surprisingly underwhelming experience.
I would not write a story again until several years later, when the ideas of a “life plan” and career became meaningless and it became acceptable to indulge in hopes, dreams, and fantasies. It was then that I finally decided to explore this idea of a person—what he thought, why he was here, and who he really was.