There was a creative writing workbook, with exercises. You had to fill out questionnaires about “your” characters, with their favorite food or color. I felt despair: what kind of person had a favorite color? Then I thought, OK: that was why you needed your imagination, to think of someone different from yourself. The words, “tacos, beige,” written on a piece of looseleaf paper made me feel the foreclosing of every possibility of anything exciting ever happening to me in the rest of my life.
