The first time I ever wrote the character named B Crofter, I was 19 years old. I’d just transferred to Cornell and I wanted SO MUCH to take a real live college creative writing class, but the introductory option didn’t fit my schedule. The only course of action left to me, obviously, was to pretend I had ever written fiction in my life, in order to produce the sample the advanced course instructor required to choose the students for his class.
I submitted the thing I hammered out to the slot in the prof’s office door, hands trembling, the staple loose in the corner of the three slim pages. These were the sum total of fiction I’d produced in my entire life, and I called them, in a handwritten addendum, as casually as possible, an “excerpt from a longer work.”