Young Shakespeare Anonymous

At the tender age of five, I became a movie director. At night, I could entertain myself for hours at a time, lying flat on my back, in the dark, watching self-written films inside my head. These were the most exciting adventures, acted in the worlds inside my brain. I took them everywhere with me, like a snail carries its shell. Eventually, my inner cities became overcrowded with talking cats and noble knights. My tenants threatened to spill out - there was no more room left inside. The question was where to put them.

Fortunately, the solution soon presented itself as I learned to write. Entire notebooks were filled with chicken-scratch narratives and their accompanying illustrations. I finished many a novel before I even graduated fifth grade, and in middle school, I wove increasingly intricate storylines about unicorns and boy bands. To this very day, I continue to write, cramming computer hard drives and spiral notebooks chock-full of words, filling them like jam jars with the sweetest of preserves. When I took on a creative writing major at school, my fantasmic creations got a life of their own, outside my head and beyond the page as we began studying playwriting.

I staged my first short production in tenth grade, the...