As a youngster of about six or seven, I was challenged by my teacher to bring a rice dish to class—the idea was to see how creative we could get, and how many dishes we could amass in our little classroom. Overachiever that I am, my fried rice dish featured scallions, spam, eggs, sauces...and it was stir-fried to perfection. Maybe the spam was a questionable choice, but all in all, it tasted pretty good. I placed my masterpiece in a Tupperware container nestled gingerly in my backpack and walked to school like I was transporting the Ark of the Covenant.
In class, we talked about our concoctions before chowing down—fifteen rice dishes in total. Lunch was a little carb-y but back then we didn't worry about our metabolism. It was almost as fun "Guess the Jelly Belly Flavor" day!
But one dish in particular had us scratching our heads.
One of my classmates had brought a container full of hard, lightly burnt kernels. When it was her turn to present her dish, she shrugged apologetically and said she thought she'd pop the raw rice grains in a pan like popcorn. "It didn't really work," she said, before passing out little cups full of the seared raw rice grains.
Clearly, she hadn't really even asked her parents for help. And did the dish even count as "cooked"? We took a few dubious nibbles. The rice tasted only marginally better than it looked. But it did have a nice puff to it. We finished our cups and looked at each other, unsure what to think.
We were surprised when our teacher polished off her cup and clapped her hands...she was downright effusive. "Who would have thought," she said, "to cook raw rice grains on the stove top! What an incredible take on the assignment!"
Even the girl who brought the popped rice was perplexed by our teacher's reaction.
And to think my rice dish barely got a reaction from anyone. I thought about my teacher's words for years and years afterward, especially when I decided to commit my life to making art. I don't think a week goes by without an image of that burnt rice "popping" back into my memory. It was, perhaps, the most valuable lesson in creativity I'd ever learned. I came to understand that what that girl had done was unteachable: Her mind worked in a way that defied convention.
What the girl had done was unteachable: Her mind worked in a way that defied convention.
In business, they call it "thinking outside the box." Applied to creative writing, it means accessing the subconscious to create energetic work that can only be found in your words—and nowhere else on the ever-loving planet. Every day, when I sit down at my writing desk, my goal is at once simple and extremely ambitious. Rather than simply laying down words, I try to dig deep into my subconscious, and pop that rice.
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