Writing in the Tragic Kingdom
by Ariel Wetzel

I'm probably the only person to have written a piece of flash fiction on the back of receipt paper in the shadow of Cinderella Castle . In fact, I'm sure I am the only one. In that moment, I combined words as no one had before. I love that writing is an avenue to uniqueness.

My biggest growth as a writer was my job at Walt Disney World. In theory I was a college intern. In practice, I rented strollers, lockers, and wheelchairs for 6.25 an hour. Spring quarter and summer vacation sacrificed to become the strollers mermaid. My three years of college education funneled into an existence that threatened routine and stasis. Instead, I wrote about it.

Why would a snarky, hippy twenty-year-old want to work at a theme park in the first place? My writing got me there. Sure, I was looking for a story, but primarily, as a writer, I was purveying the marvelous. Disney was the one place where magic was sold as a tangible commodity. I'd always know this; I was geeky sci-fi kid, so the saying "it was like going to Disneyland " roused doubled excitement. When I started growing up my own fantasy creations became more poignant (isn't that the opposite of what's supposed to happen?), I wanted to know how Disney did it.

So I went there to try things out myself, to see how Disney did it. Jimminy Cricket said, "a dream is a wish your heart makes." Disney was dripping in that follow your dreams mantra, and I imagined that a theme park was an ideal place for a fledgling writer. It was right there in the name! Theme park .

I didn't go down to Florida all starry-eyed with premature bliss. I expected to work hard in a thankless job. But anticipating hardship wasn't quite the same as feeling it, and I had prepared a backup plan in the event of loathing my internship. I contracted myself--I invested school credit in an independent study and told everyone I knew I wasn't going to quit no matter how much my job sucked--to commitment so I couldn't crawl home as a failure.

It was rather similar to how I obliged myself to keep writing. If I wanted to write something, I'd go into a project skipping and trailing daisy chains. Once I met the real hard work, I'd cry and want out to go home. So I tricked myself into contracts: l would set an insane goal like trying to write a novel in thirty days and turn the project into an independent study so I'd face disappointed parents and a pocked academic record if I failed. For other projects, I would tell everyone what I was working on, and make public promises of churning installments for their reading pleasure. Their virtual boos and hisses were much more disappointing than a perpetual white page I stared at in solitude.

The whole solitary writer thing never worked for me. I was an extrovert, so if I did end up locked away with my computer on a project I'd name my computer and start stroking it lovingly so I could have some company. I formed a network of friends and writers to back me up if I needed it. Sort of like how I had a support network of underpaid fellows beside me when I worked at Disney.

Going to Florida was a rebellion against my feminist, creative writer persona-my way of doing the unexpected as a writer. I worked at Disney to try something out and figure out how something worked. Whether I'm working on a novel or memoir, the best way to learn how to do it is to actually try it. In the process, I discovered writing is as layered as the Magic Kingdom , where an underworld exists; there, water from the Cinderella Castle moat drips and Mickey Mouse without his head is a small brown woman.

Ariel Wetzel is a senior at Fairhaven College .  She studies creative writing, gender studies, and science fiction, and is especially interested in the intersection of technology and gender.   She blogs on feminism and geek culture on her website, http://www.lake-desire.com.