It's Perfect, now Help! Last week, a former Essay Intensive student, T, needed help last minute help with her transfer essays, which she thought were close to perfect. It was the usual problem: I've written it, now how do I cut it down to size? T was-- and still is-- Perfectionism's Poster Girl. She will fight you, and did me, on every turn of phrase in her essay, every single preposition-- why it should stay, why the wording is already perfect. AND YET SHE NEEDS AND WANTS MY HELP. She's classy and has poise, but her affect is whisper-yelling, I LOVE IT LIKE THIS GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY SENTENCE. People who don't want to revise are in trouble as writers. T is incredibly articulate, intelligent, and accomplished-- but aiming to make your writing perfect isn't usually the way to make it perfect. In Love with the Darlings? Is she "in love with her darlings"? Yup. She's thought so hard about every semantic and syntactic choice in the essay that eliminating something feels like a liability. Familiarity can actually lessen our critical eye. Her essays sound "just right" to her-- and yours to you?-- EXACTLY as they are. And so it's nearly impossible to objectively evaluate what to cut. What's considered perfect is too precious to improve. Remember your audience, however. My advice to students who cling to their work is, "Save this version for your memoirs, I can't wait to read them!" Do your job Because we have to give readers what they want. In these essays the admissions team is not, actually, evaluating whether you've turned a phrase perfectly. They want to know that you can answer the question, and that you see your story-- expectation, disappointment, reassessment, plot turn-- clearly. And you, like everyone else who lives and breathes and hopes to apply to school, has to come in under word count-- 650. It's the great equalizer and no admissions team- or text box, for that matter-- will make an exception for you for even the most brilliant Continue Reading …
Solutions
Is your heart smarter than your head?
I heart not Stressing Most of us are stressed, and it gets old; our heart sags. (Waiting for your college letters much? That can wreck you-- so don't be wreck-bait.) But somehow you still get cool points for being the most stressed. Even though, somewhere deep inside, you know it ain't right. If you really want to stress yourself out, don’t let me stop you. You're still on the Cortisol Cruise. Go do something more stressful, like trying to keep my toddler from licking all the magnets he fished out from under the fridge. But if you're not so sure you want to feel stressed out all the time, and maybe the hamster wheel is giving you vertigo, read on. The key might be connecting with your own intelligent heart. Heart "Facts" I recently heard (in a long scientific-esque lecture on Le Youtube) that the heart shares a majority of its neurotransmitters with the brain--something like 60%. I don't believe everything I hear. And like most things biological, the picture is probably more complex than that fact alone signals. However, I like this one. In this age of loose facts, when the president decides not only who can vote and who can't, but also whether truth has any business in the executive branch-- I'll cherry-pick my facts. I'll critical think later. I invite you to do the same, just for the duration of this blog post. Because your heart, or so this doctor says... ...perceives 5 seconds faster than da' Brain. (Perceives what? Perceives how? Not sure, but I like where this is heading.). It knows some things first. I've felt this happen. Have you? So why not get in synch with your smarter organ? A heart coherence meditation Here’s a meditation geared for teens, for those moments when you are stressed and just want to come back home. My students love it. (Your parents can and should do it too-- here's a meditation for them.) The meditations take just a few minutes. Call a family meeting to try it out. Or do it by yourself in Continue Reading …
Your topic? Your Triscuit!
"Can't Find a Topic" Blues Many young writers panic because you can't "find an essay topic" before the obnoxious January college essay deadlines. I can feel the fireworks in your belly and your rational brain turned to champagne. But the writer has allies in all kinds of places. The humble greasy Triscuit will be your guide in the story I share below. It starts with reading...someone else's topic First, reading good writing almost always shakes me out of the topic draught. It will do the same for you, wherever you get your fix. Triscuits don't come running when your mind is tight. A good topic often only comes when you aren't groping madly for something to say. At 5AM this morning, trying not to drop my phone on my sleeping baby in the dark, I read a former Essay Intensive student's engrossing personal essay draft, saturated with childhood memories. If you like knowing pedigree-- She went first to Columbia University, then to Pomona, and now left school again to flex her writing muscles in the free world. Reading her talented, bad-ass work always makes me have that itch to write. She wrote certain flash scenes from her childhood with deft attention to image-- a blanket on her mother's shoulders, a tune they always played in the car, a certain food they shared after arguments passed. And her images gave my mind a shove hard into my own. What childhood images had stuck for me? Which might have messages for me, decades later? And suddenly the dark Triscuit stood there, insulted it had taken me that long. Triscuit Triggers Before I was afraid of cheese, I loved Triscuit crackers with melted cheddar. The cheddar was sharp. The Triscuit was oily and crunchy, the household cabinet equivalent of movie popcorn. They looked hardy, whole-grain-ish-- to a fool. Triscuit crackers arrived in their glowing yellow box on the snack scene before the Gluten Villain scared all orthorexic people from the grocery store's cracker aisle. And my mom, who was Continue Reading …
What is “authentic” voice?
Your authentic voice? answer with an anecdote! The student in my college essay revising workshop tipped dangerously far back in his chair. Even the chair was nervous. "Can you look at my essay?" He called. No matter that I was in the middle of a sent-- He handed me an essay draft with tight lips. It was all about how he went from careless to caring about his school work over a few challenging years. "I don't like it." He said. "It's boring." He wasn't fishing for praise. He didn't like it. "Well, if you are bored by it, it's probably boring," I agreed. I skimmed it. Yup. Continue Reading …
How to take care of yourself right now
25 ways to take care of yourself this fall It's fall. It's frenetic. It's college application season for you or your kids or your students. It's hard to do it all. To take care of yourself feels like a luxury item that gets tossed with last year's papers. But still, you've got to take care of yourself or game over. Any of the suggestions on our list will be a perk, a plus. Pick and choose: aim to keep your body, mind and heart healthier-- and hopefully less bat-shit crazy-- as you move through coming months. Continue Reading …
Ditch cliches for a strong college essay
The worst thing you can do for your personal story is deaden it with cliches. Cliches make your reader's mind go numb. Use them too much (playing it safe?) and Admissions officers have forgotten you before they are even done reading your college essay. Even the most intense, riveting tale can lose all of its power if you tell it just like everyone has told it before you. "I couldn't believe my eyes. As she took her last breath I begged her not to go." This sort of thing. How tragic would that be? You have a powerful story to tell-- but it's so predictable that no one cares. Now, look: in human life, death is predictable. Suffering is predictable. Some mishap, some humor, transitions-- all are predictable. But that doesn't have anything to do with cliche, or how you choose to tell your reader about what happened. It's all about what details you include, where you put the focus, and what fresh images or stark descriptions you weave in. Continue Reading …