Out of all my time here at Auburn, one of my favorite experiences was the time I wrote a spectacularly bad story.
It was sophomore year, and I had just moved into Aubie Hall. I met all kinds of cool people, including Matt Diaz, then a junior who worked for The Circle.
If you've never heard of The Circle, well, you're not alone. The Circle is one of Auburn University's best-kept secrets. A group of English majors, photographers and other creative people spend each semester working on a huge magazine of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and photography.
You might have seen them handing it out on the concourse at the end of each semester. It's cool, and more people should come to their semester-end gatherings.
Diaz and my roommate Matthew Pollock both worked for The Circle. Pollock told me they were running into the same problem. They needed more stories to fill the space in the magazine.
I immediately turned to another roommate, Abraham Schnake, and challenged him to a contest.
We would each try to write the worst story possible and submit it to The Circle. The winner was the person who got their worst story published.
I was thrilled with the challenge. After spending my life trying to write quality work, it would be fun to cut loose and produce the worst piece of fiction anyone had ever read.
It took only an hour in the library to create my monstrosity. It had everything a good bad story needs: epic battles, evil clones and overwritten drama.
I loved it.
The protagonist was a thinly disguised version of Schnake. Writing bad fiction about my own roommate was too amusing to pass up.
I was proud of my efforts. One of the more exciting passages read something like:
"Schnake swung his sword upward and deflected every missile up into the sky. Instead of hitting the rebels, the missiles instead hit the evil empire's ships in orbit. Brilliant!"
That's the level that I was writing at.
Imagine a 10-year-old hyped on Mountain Dew after sitting through a nonstop showing of the old "Star Trek" films and you'd have a good idea of my state of mind while writing this
story.
We submitted our stories to The Circle.
We waited eagerly to hear back from the editors, to see if either one of us had somehow passed the editorial gauntlet and gotten into the paper.
Of course the answer was no. They rejected our stories immediately.
The Circle may have been having trouble getting submissions, but it still had standards.
That wasn't the point of the joke, though. The real fun was taking an existing Auburn institution, like The Circle, and tweaking it by sending in God-awful stories. The best part was writing the stories and sharing them with our friends.
I got a laugh from talking to Diaz after he read our stories. He wasn't a fan.
Diaz was even less of a fan when we did the same thing the next year and wrote him into the story.
You can find enjoyment out of unexpected things, like writing silly stories for The Circle. This week, try doing something new -- something out of your comfort zone. I did, and it proved to be one of the better experiences I've had at Auburn.
If you're stuck for ideas, don't worry about it. The Circle will be accepting submissions in January.
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