Emily Jane used to dream of growing up to be a Hollywood stunt double. She did BMX tricks on her dirt bike to prepare for future motorcycle chase scenes. She used the wobbly wooden fence in her backyard to practice her high-wire balancing (in case she got hired for a movie where the heroine needed to cross between two skyscrapers without plummeting to her death). She also put in the necessary time and hard work on the trampoline to get her various flips just right. She acted in school plays, zeroing in on the visual comedy, action scenes, and pratfalls.
She considered being an actress, but she didn’t want to be like all the rest of the girls. Also, she’d heard that dealing with the paparazzi could be a real headache, so she determined at the age of eleven that her ideal career path was not acting, but stunt-doubling. That way she’d only have to do the fun parts of the movie, she wouldn’t have to memorize lines or kiss any strangers, and she could still go to the grocery store without needing to wear sunglasses indoors. In the blank books she collected, she wrote down plans, devised intricate plots filled with tense action sequences, and depicted death-defying Knieval-like scenarios for her glorious future career.
After a few devastating injuries (during unsupervised stunts with no medical personnel on hand), Emily Jane decided that maybe she’d been approaching this from the wrong side of things. Maybe voice acting was the ticket. Less dangerous. And she could still avoid being plagued by paparazzi. She was an avid reader, so she put her books to good use and recited all the dialogue aloud, rehearsing with an oh-so-natural inflection. She had a fair singing voice with decent pitch, so she focused on formulating just the right vibrato (which she figured was probably smack in the middle between high opera and straight Gregorian chant), then she threw in a hint of pop-star diva attitude. And some well-timed finger snapping.
With these skills honed, she fervently dreamed of becoming the voice for a character in a Disney cartoon. She watched the movies on repeat and sang along with all the songs, so she could stay in the zone. Someday, she might appear in one of those little behind-the-scenes clips they showed on TV before releasing the next big animated film. The ones where the vocal actors are joking around in the recording studio, and they look just like normal people with headphones on. Maybe a few kids who watched the Disney Channel obsessively would recognize her out on the street, but that would hardly be like dealing with paparazzi-level trolling. Besides, as a former aspiring stunt double, she still had a few tricks up her sleeve, so she was sure she could give those kids the slip before they managed to snap a photo that would somehow end up in The National Enquirer.
She wrote imaginary segments for her upcoming feature film. Song lyrics. Passionate tirades. Heartfelt apologies. Deep discussions. Casual conversations. Break-up scenes. Make-up scenes. She practiced bringing up tears on command, so she could cry at all the right times.
Later, as a teenager in California, she and a friend sang back-up vocals for a Christmas song called “Babe of Peace.” She was told it aired on the radio in Idaho. In college, she recorded an audio module for a language learning company. She achieved her goal of avoiding any and all paparazzi. But she never got her big break with Disney.
Eventually, after brief stints in the visual arts, piano, French—and even an inexplicable lapse into mortgage banking—Emily realized that the one constant through all of these endeavors was the growing stack of lined notebooks she had filled up with words. She came to understand that what she’d longed for all along was a way to enact stories for an audience, to share emotions and communicate experiences. Putting words on a page was a way to encompass the best aspects of all her former vocations.
So now, after a circuitous path, filled with reckless antics; delayed by sprained ankles; soundtracked by warbly, heartwarming tunes; littered with sketch pads, canvasses, paperbacks, and sheet music; pervaded by a certain je ne sais quoi; and underpinned with a firm grasp of how to calculate her annual escrow bill, Emily Jane Golden is a student in creative writing. Finally.
