M

y hands trembled as I carried my lap-
top in my sweaty palms, nervousness 
filling my brain. I walked with no 
urgency, trying to drag the process out as long as 
possible. I hoped for any sort of divine interven-
tion that would delay the event that was about to 
unfold: I had to present my writer’s notebook in 
front of my entire class. 
As I made my way to the podium, I placed the 
laptop down with a sense of trepidation, unsure of 
what would come next. I had presented in front of 
many classrooms before, but there was something 
different about this one — instead of the typical 
presentation, covering a topic from the class, I was 
presenting my fiction writing. 
This work was all my own, a journey into the 
depths of my creativity. Would my classmates like 
the style of my work, or would they find it bor-
ing? Would they understand the story, or would 
they pan its lack of plot development? I was trying 
something new but also very risky: showing what 
I thought passed for good fiction, which might 
have been completely opposite from what every-
one else thought.
Before we get to that story, let me backtrack for 
a minute. One day, in my 11th grade English class, 
I had a severe 
case of writer’s block 
while trying to write 
my writer’s notebook 
for the week. Every 
week, we had to write 
a one-to-two-page story 
about any topic we 
wanted and present it 
in front of the class, 
either sitting at 
your desk or at the 
class podium (you 
got more brownie 
points if you gave it 
at the podium). These 
pieces were a significant 
portion of my grade and 
much care had to go into 
crafting them. They had 
to be interesting; full 
of pithy literary 
description; and, 

more importantly, authentic. Try as I may have, 
I could not pull out an interesting life story from 
the depths of my brain that I wanted to share with 
the class. 
For my first entry, I tried to make watching a 
baseball game seem like an otherworldly experi-
ence, filled with an overload of visual description. 
On a trip the summer before my junior year of high 
school, I watched the Blue Jays game from the top 
of the CN Tower, the tallest building in Toronto. 
Watching from that far intrigued me. It was 
unlike any baseball game I had seen: The fans 
looked like mere dots in blue seats; the players on 
the field were barely discernible from the color 
of the grass. From that far up, I was unable to see 
the ball as a cue to what was happening in the 
game. Being the baseball buff that I am, my entry 
became about how the lack of visual clarity forced 
me to imagine what was happening in the game, 
and how I had to reach deep into my baseball 
knowledge to make sense of it at all. 
I stepped up to the plate and began to read my 
writing. While I thought this piece was quite cre-
ative, apparently my class and the teacher didn’t 
feel the same way, and I decided I needed to 
change tack. But to what, exactly? I wasn’t chock-
full of remarkable stories, and trying to make my 
boring life events seem interesting didn’t work. I 
went to my teacher for advice, and that’s when the 
spark hit me — I would pivot to writing fiction.
Given my history of writing creative stories, I 
should have realized it earlier, but I was too afraid 
to share my mystery stories with the class. Being 
the insecure eleventh grader that I was, I no lon-
ger had the burning desire of my seventh-grade 
self to share my fiction in front of such opinion-
ated teenagers. What if they found my ideas to 
be rip-offs, or too much like history class, or just 
plain boring? How could I keep them enthralled, 
without losing that all-important descriptive fac-
tor? I should write a story based off of Sherlock 
Holmes, with a continuing plot arc that would 
keep listeners coming back.
I would try to keep them in suspense with a 
murder mystery, with a few twists of my own. I 
wanted to set the stories in the modern-day, but 
the main character would travel back in time — 
incorporating my love of technology — and be 

forced to solve the mystery in order to return to 
the present. 
After adding in my love of history, I now had 
a story set in present-day England, with a brief 
flashback to the Victorian era, an enthralling peri-
od for me. The contrast between the technological 
advancements of the Industrial Revolution and 
the grittiness of 1890s London made for a perfect 
conflict and the presence of a modern-day charac-
ter trying to make sense of the past would make it 
more palpable for my contemporary audience. 
I thought I had a most pleasant idea, but I was 
still filled with doubt as to whether they would 
accept it. Standing at the podium, I was about to 
test that proposition. 
Though I was always uncomfortable speak-
ing in front of the class, I was more nervous than 
usual this time. I kept tripping over my words, the 
uncertainty still lingering over my voice. 
I started off the story in an old English coun-
try estate, with a man unsure as to his place in the 
modern world. He felt lonely and out of his time, 
looking for a way out of his boring life as a London 
banker. He wished he could be a detective, given 
his sharp mental skills, helping people solve their 
most pressing mysteries. Though he had plenty 
of money, he couldn’t find satisfaction, and was 
trying to fulfill it by buying a manor in the coun-
tryside, a respite from his busy city life. While on 
the house tour, he found a secret bookshelf in the 
study, and all of a sudden, he became absorbed 
into a roaring wind, and then a whole new world: 
1890s London. Thrown into this new environ-
ment, the main character decides to adopt the 
role of his favorite fictional character, Sherlock 
Holmes. To see whether this grand idea would 
work, you would have to wait for the next entry, 
and thus my series was born.
After I finally delivered the last word, I looked 
up to see what my audience thought, and to my 
complete surprise the spoken feedback was a 
lot more positive than I thought it would be. My 
teacher liked this a lot more, and I realized I did 
too. The formula was so plainly obvious I missed 
it: Write about something you are interested in, 
and that authenticity will shine through.

Wednesday, September 25, 2019 // The Statement
2B

Managing Statement Editor

Andrea Pérez Balderrama

Deputy Editors

Matthew Harmon

Shannon Ors

Associate Editor

Eli Rallo

 Designers

 Liz Bigham

 Kate Glad

 Copy Editor

 Silas Lee 

 Photo Editor

 Danyel Tharakan

Editor in Chief

Maya Goldman

Managing Editor

Finntan Storer
statement

THE MICHIGAN DAILY | SEPTEMBER 25, 2019

Reopening an old chapter in 
my notebook

BY ALEXANDER COTIGNOLA, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

ILLUSTRATION BY JACK SILBERMAN

