Creative Writing: Beowulf

Son of a fucking bitch. This is bullshit.
I scowled at my computer screen, irritated by the blank page and blinking cursor whose frequent flickering had the same stress-inducing quality as a giant neon sign that flashed “YOU HAVEN’T WRITTEN A SINGLE WORD.” It’s not that I didn’t have words – I did. Millions of them, spiraling and fluttering around in my head like a swarm of fireflies caught in too damn small a jar. The problem was that I could only use 250 to 500 of them.
I was going on hour number three of sitting in my empty living room, and my legs were well past the point of losing feeling. Focus, Jen. C’mon. You can’t fuck this up. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, as if the words I needed to write were printed on the back of

I wanted to paint a picture with detail and perfect shading, a masterpiece of art. I had it all planned out: start with a descriptive opening and deliver a play-by-play account of a Beowulf-worthy battle against the fiend from Hell itself, complete with imaginary wounds that bled – no, oozed – profusely. I mean, what better way to try and answer the Common Application’s prompt, which was a boring and broad “Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, etc.) that has had an influence on you, and explain that

From there I would talk about my love of Harry Potter, a series that stood proudly in the middle of my six-foot long bedroom bookshelf, the Holy Grail of my collection. And then I’d hit my readers with the kicker: not only do I read heart-tugging fiction that makes the audience gasp, weep, grin, groan, and guffaw in the span of a few fell pages – I want to write that kind of fiction. Or, if that doesn’t work out, I want to teach others to write that kind of fiction. Eat your hearts out, application committee. My planned personal statement was pure literary gold. If my grades and extracurriculars didn’t get me through the door with these colleges, then this paper would blast open those gateways like freaking Armageddon. You know what stopped me from putting that perfectly planned piece into