Graduates, Headmaster Jones-Wilkins, trustees, faculty and staff of the Community School, and friends and family of graduates:

It is an honor to be here, and an honor to be asked to get a last few licks in on behalf of the faculty.

Thirty-five years ago, when I agreed to teach eighth, ninth, and tenth grade English and eighth grade science at the newborn Ketchum-Sun Valley Community School, I did not know I would spend my life as a teacher, nor did I realize I would see my life-work as a source of joy. So I wish to thank The Community School for setting me on a path that I continue to love.

Today we are here to graduate some wonderful people. I’m going speak to them, but the rest of you can listen in.

I can say with confidence that you’re wonderful people, because I’ve met you and I’ve seen the way you treat each other and I’ve talked to a few of your teachers. Without much prompting, your teachers have described you as a hard-working group, deeply interested in learning new things, considerate of others, and humble in the face of your accomplishments.

That is extraordinary praise, and it reminded me of what an admissions director at Harvard told me when I was the college counselor for The Community School. He was dishing some gossip about another school in the neighborhood.

“Down at M.I.T.,” he said, “They could fill every class with applicants who have perfect SAT scores. They tried that, and got brilliant students who quit math and physics and engineering and were unemployed dropouts by the time they were twenty-four. Now they’re looking for applicants who will peak out at fifty-five.”

M.I.T. learned to stop depending on standardized test scores to pick their applicants. They began to look for people who were deeply interested in learning new things, who were considerate of others, and who were humble in the face of their accomplishments.

M.I.T. started searching for people who were going to become smarter and better educated and more involved throughout their lives. They learned to look for people like you.

The only thing that worries me is that you’ll peak out at fifty-five, and not sixty-five or seventy-five. Fifty-five seems a little young to me these days.

Here’s how the great science fiction author Alice Sheldon described her ambition to write better and with more intensity until the day she died: “I want to burn right down to the waterline.”

That’s an unfortunate metaphor in a world that contains both oil platforms and the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s the privilege of writers to use unfortunate metaphors.

It’s not the privilege of anyone, writer or not, to peak out or burn out or drop out before he or she has given what they can to this world. So I’ll say right now that you will not fulfill your life until you find out what it is you have to give to the people around you, and have given it, and they’ve accepted it in some way.

It may take years to find out what you have to give, and more years to turn it into something acceptable, but if you’re making the lives of the people around you better and happier, you’re going in the right direction. If you’re making their lives worse and more miserable, stop and turn around.

For the past year I’ve been writing a book for people who want to become writers. At the end of every chapter I’ve listed rules for making good stories into great ones. I began to like writing down rules so much that I’ve come up with some for you.

A list of rules is probably not what you want to hear right now, but these are rules designed to improve the life stories of the people you will be when you’re fifty-five or sixty-five or seventy-five. You owe those old people a good life, and you can imagine them sitting on the edge of their rocking chairs, thinking about how uncertain life has been, and hoping you’ll get some good, solid rules to follow today. They like the idea that you might be able to change unhappy endings to happy ones, boring dialogue to exciting conversation, and scenes where nothing happens into action-packed triumphs of excellence over mediocrity.