No Wasted Time :: College Admissions Essays

No Wasted date   The first piece of serious and literary grown-up fiction I think of reading without duress was All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren. I was fourteen, and for the ago two years my pleasure reading had consisted entirely of science fiction-I consumed nonpareil agree per day in this genre. Not all of this time was wasted, however the diet had become a little monotonous.   The students a year in advance of me in high school were assigned to read Warrens novel. I picked up a copy in a study hall, to while outdoor(a) fifteen minutes of tedium. In that amount of time I was hooked. offset printing edge of cynicism on its poetic valences. When I had read more of the defend I was taken by the richness of its meanings, how thoroughly and thoughtfully the virtuoso of every action and episode had been interlocked with all the another(prenominal)s. 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 y ou did it.   I reread All the Kings 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 low such intense poring.   George Garrett once said that one of the problems of student writers is that they were feed a diet of masterpieces. Masterpiece fiction is too well make for you to figure out how the writer did it. To pick up technique, the thing to do is read genre.