Yesterday I mentioned one of my favorite words: autodidact––basically, someone who is self-taught. I’m quite fond of the term because it captures the mojo of some of my favorite writers––staggering talents like Harlan Ellison and Charles Bukowski. Though both flirted with formal education, both ran contrary to anything relating to structured learning. (In case you’re wondering, that’s a fancy way of saying Bukowski dropped out and Ellison was thrown out).

That old-school, hard-luck, blue-collar everyman vibe never fails to fire me up about my own paltry scribblings. So I’m hoping I can pass a little of that enthusiasm along, because tomorrow I’m meeting with a job-shadow student from a local high school––an aspiring writer, I presume.

In years past, I’ve been known to occasionally upset the parents of my college interns by telling their kids to radically change their majors. So many times I’d meet with a student who is so deeply entrenched in one field of education––because of family pressure, financial expectation, whatever––but their actual dream is to do something else. And along the way, they’ve gelded that dream. Put it out to pasture. Crated it up and sent it off to the glue factory.

But tomorrow I actually get to meet with someone whose dream is still officially undeclared. Unencumbered. A rare day, indeed.

I’ll basically be telling him (or her) to become a literary Keith Richards––someone whose first and only job was pursing that original dream, minus the drugs, of course. And that college is fantastic, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of what you really want to do with your life.

Any words of advice for a high school student who wants to write?