My Semester in 300 Words

There are times in the course of a young editor-at-large’s life he is tasked by the Arts Board to pen a vanity piece for its year-end publishings. He may be burnt out from thesising with nary a Celsisus in reach, or busy frequenting Western Front to study for his pharmacology final. He may, despite having risen to the occasion before, find himself presently lacking in the idea department.

My past vanities seem to concern how I’ve spent my time during the semester they were written. Last fall, I was riding my bike everywhere. Sophomore fall, I was twiddling my thumbs in my room, apparently. When this organization called on me to exchange my editor’s hat for a writer’s once more, to return — in a manner reminiscent of the venerable Vin Diesel in “Furious 7” — for one last job, I turned to my schedule this year to brainstorm.

In certain respects, my journalistic voice has atrophied. My role at 14 Plympton St. as of late has been largely curatorial; I work with original material from other writers each week, crowdsourcing my cultural opinions from the pieces I edit and producing little of my own. But this does not mean I haven’t been writing. Nay, my authorly energies are devoted elsewhere: For the past two and a half months, I’ve composed at least 300 words and emailed them to a circle of friends, who in turn do the same, every single day. All of my entries are written in the same Google Doc, which now totals almost 70 pages and over 32,000 words.

If I directed this much energy to my thesis, I would be finished by now.

We’re allowed to write about any topic, be it the most pressing problem in the world or what we ate for lunch. We workshop essay ideas, dabble in verse, scream profanities unspoken during the day. The only rule of our practice is that you reach 300 words, but I find this floor often easy to exceed. When you’re allowed to jabber about whatever you want, the words start to flow better than you budgeted time for. And jabbering, I have found, is my speciality — I spent 1,000 words alone on the 17th of November describing how much I resonate with Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski.

Certainly, there are evenings when I’d rather go to bed than open Google Drive. And the vast majority of my entries are quite frankly rubbish, resembling pages from the Lampoon. But exercising consistency — especially when too busy or tired or inebriated — invites vulnerability. Some of my greatest therapeutic insights and revelations of selfhood started with the thought: This would be a neat topic for my 300 words today. My longest entry traced my relationship with mental health in college. My favorite let me lament homesickness in the form of a letter to my dog.

But far and away, the most rewarding part of this hobby is reading the entries of others. Perhaps I’m biased, but my friends are the most interesting people I know. And to hear their voices each time I check my inbox — to see the world the way they do, to learn more about what makes them happy and wistful and curious and alive — has been my greatest joy of 2023. How lucky am I, to look forward to opening Gmail?

You might ask why we don’t just talk to each other in person like normal human beings, to which my response is simple: the sacredness of a writer’s space. When granted 24 hours of latitude to reflect on and incubate your thoughts, you hold them in a new light and grasp more fully their texture, their delicateness. You find within you a voice cultivated seldom elsewhere.

This is, in part, a normative vanity. I recommend each person reading this find a partner or, better yet, an entire group to start writing with; your willingness to read is the only limiting factor. But mostly, this is a vanity vanity. The 300-words adventure is time consuming and arduous, as all journeying is, but it’s also exactly that: an adventure. My days are rife with discovery and friendship and warmth because of it.

Make no mistake — editing is just as fun as authoring, especially when you work with the most talented and considerate arts journalists on this side of the Charles. Reading the works of my peers on the Arts Board is as much a pleasure as 300-word entries.

To my chairs — you give this board life. To my fellow EALs — what a ride. And to my 300-word comrades — you’ll see this in your inbox tomorrow morning. Cheers.

—Outgoing Editor-at-Large Charles W. McCormick can be reached at charles.mccormick@thecrimson.com or, if you’re feeling frisky, Twitter (@chuckmcc1).