No Wasted Time :: College Admissions Essays

No Wasted Time   The first piece of serious and literary grown-up fictionalisation I remember accepting without duress was All the Kings manpower by Robert Penn Warren. I was fourteen, and for the past two years my pleasure evinceing had consisted but of science fiction-I consumed integrity book per day in this genre. Not altogether of this condemnation was wasted, but the diet had become a little monotonous.   The students a year ahead of me in high school were assigned to read Warrens novel. I picked up a copy in a schooling 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 good and thoughtfully the sense of e very(prenominal) action and episode had been interlocked with all the others. I had wanted to be a writer before, but I had cognize that this was what a book could do, or that this was how you di d it.   I reread All the Kings Men half a dozen times, for me it was a portal to a full-length 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 alike well made for you to figure out how the writer did it. To pick up technique, the thing to do is read genre.