College; the best four years of your life or, at least, some of the best. When you grow into an adult, steadily being hurtled towards responsibilities, careers, and life defining decisions. It’s overwhelming, exciting, suffocating, and nerve-wracking. As a creative writing major, I am thoroughly acquainted with this rollercoaster of emotions, especially when the casually interested question of: “Oh, you’re a creative writer? What are you going to do with that?” nearly triggers a quarter life crisis every time someone asks.

I’m a fiction writer; when you think about it, every thing I write is a lie. A lie to entertain, to convey meaning, to move readers to emotion but a lie nonetheless. Yet my goal as a creative writer—my answer to what I want to be doing with my degree, though its far more intellectual than anyone is looking for—is to find a truth in everything I write. Very vague, I know, but it is vague to be applied to every project I begin. To find a humanity, a baseline truth that stays applicable in both fantasy and realistic settings. The characters, the humans, find a moral truth that becomes their moral basis. There are no black or whites in humans, only varying shades of gray. How the character finds their truth greatly affects how light that grey will be.