The first year out of school is by its nature a recharge-the-batteries year.
Kind of on-the-nose there, don’t you think?” The writers’ workshop in my head kept saying: “The protagonist has to slay the figurative dragon. The challenge? Was to recreate a book page about dragons. I’m not a designer: I’d learned everything I knew about the program in under a week. There was an epic parking struggle, a sprint over snowy sidewalks and lawns in my stocking feet, thoroughly wind-mussed hair, an interview itself strange enough to be an SNL skit, and then a skills test for the program InDesign. I had a hilarious job interview a few months ago that went exactly like the opening of a working-girl rom-com. Sometimes, life itself is OTN every once in a while it plays out like a bad movie, everything fitting too perfectly, everything according to formula. When people talk about bad writing, they’re usually talking about OTN writing, especially OTN dialogue.
It means you were too obvious, it means you lacked subtlety, it means you hit that nail at least one too many times. It is one of my least favorite crits to get. One common writing criticism is on-the-nose: you might get back papers with “OTN” scribbled all over the margins. In part this is a good thing: it develops your self-editing. Though if it was, it’d be pretty on-the-nose.Īnd when I say on-the-nose, I don’t mean the more common use of the phrase to mean “exactly right,” “nailed it.”Īfter you spend a few years in writing workshops, you start hearing those critiquing voices in your own head. This is not a metaphor for post-grad malaise. This picture is what happens when you realize the only currently-working digital camera you have is the thing you want to include a picture of.