Despite the fact that your parents loved you all throughout your comfortable upper-middle class upbringing, you still want to become a writer. Even though you didn’t grow up with an abusive stepfather raised in an opium den-slash-brothel, here are some ways you can elaborate on your boring personal experiences so you have something to write about in your personal blog, even if the worst thing that happened to you was getting waitlisted for the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Even if the only people who read your blog are your 20 closest friends, you owe them this!
Attempt to Sleep Around
Everyone loves to read about weird sexual experiences, so hop on Tinder and try to get some of your own! Focus on the men who look like they will cheat on you in a particularly horrible way. Even though you know that whatever happens will turn into a healthy, monogamous relationship because your parents set a good example, you should at least still try for something sort of dysfunctional!
Travel to a Foreign Country
Going abroad is a rite of passage for women who grew up in gated communities with only one Indian restaurant within reasonable driving distance. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up wrongfully imprisoned in Thailand like in Brokedown Palace, or at the very least, Bridget Jones’s Diary 2. But knowing you, you’ll only end up finding that you’ve forgotten your power adapter and can’t blow-dry your hair while you’re in Milan. Fortunately that still makes for a good blog post!
Make Someone Else’s Experience Your Own
If you don’t have your own personal experience, steal someone else’s! Elizabeth Gilbert and that girl who wrote a scathing letter to her CEO already did a lot of the legwork for you, so grab a leather-bound notebook and let other people’s ideas pour in! And if people figure out that you’ve been making it all up the whole time––just think about how interesting that personal essay will be!
Discover What’s Interesting in Your Boring Life by Just Lying About It
Add some spice to your vanilla existence through the art of embellishment! Your addiction to skinny almond lattes was pretty bad – you had one every day! No one needs to know that it wasn’t heroin and that the NYU Starbucks in the Village wasn’t a drug den in Bushwick. Everyone wants to read about a downward spiral more than they want to know it really happened. Of course, since it’s you, you know very well you’d clearly state that the article you wrote is fiction because you don’t want to mislead people but put it at the very bottom of the piece because clicks.
Just because all of your basic problems have been solved due to a good upbringing that you have no desire to rebel against doesn’t mean you can’t still get published!
