Yesterday, during my high school poetry class, the lead teacher opened the session with 10 minutes of free-writing from this prompt: "Today I am. . . . " I am often not inspired by prompts; in fact, I often actively despise them. But in class I always try to make myself go with the flow, so I sat down and opened my notebook and started writing. This is what came out.

Today I am having a hard time not running out to my garden every 5 minutes to see what's growing. I am so excited to be planting again. Already my peas are up and yesterday we had baby lettuce at dinner, and now my tulips are in bloom, and there is a cardinal nesting in a neighbor's lilac bush, and I am so relieved to have my hands in the dirt again--and yet when I walk back into my house and pick up a book or a pencil, even that interior world feels richer now, as if the dirt under my fingernails is a kind of magical powder and the words dance and the thoughts cohere and suddenly being a writer makes sense--I don't feel like I have to explain, "Oh, I used to be a poet, but then the poems disappeared"--no, here they are again--gifts like sunshine and spring and a cat blinking his eyes in a warm wind and the scent of hyacinths and the sound of that cardinal singing his joy.

Now, this all sounds very nice and hopeful, but it is not entirely true. I have no evidence that the cardinal is nesting in a lilac bush, though certainly he and his mate are nesting somewhere in the neighborhood. And that coy declaration about becoming a writer again, and feeling all happy about dancing words and such: that is . . . well, not entirely bosh, given that I did construct a decent poem draft this week, but I am in no way living the ethereal writer-life that my prompt response claims.

Why did this semi-specious paean burst from my pen? Why do such fabrications force themselves into the air? I can't say that my response was a lie--I am happy to be gardening; I am writing more productively than I was; a cardinal does sing in my back yard--but there is considerable embroidery.

If I were trying to revise this passage in an essay, I would take stock of my exaggerations and think about how to mold them into a response that would be more complex and less directly sentimental. At the same time, of course, I would be creating/re-creating a persona, which, in essays as in fiction, means that I would be deliberately highlighting and eliding and otherwise manipulating your gaze. So in that sense, this first draft is simply a rough outline of the kind of control a non-journalistic writer exerts over explorations of memory and reaction.

Still, there's a raw falseness that I find unnerving, and I meet it in nearly every first draft I produce. I wonder if you, too, have some version of this experience.