Practice your ability to stay open, and the writing will come In the face of daunting things, like a college essay, it's easy to close up and shut down. But it’s spring now: stay open. If you think writing a college essay is hard, I also help people who are having babies. Now that's a bit hard. And one of the hardest things to do is the necessary thing: to stay open, and open more. Babies require it to emerge. Your writing does too. It’s spring and this is just what creatures do. Rabbits make more rabbits. Branches make buds. Buds crank petals apart and drink up sunshine. The sky seems bigger for longer. Baby turtles linger on their warmed rocks. Teenagers linger on the warmed street. You’re a creature; you can act like one. Continue Reading …
Practice
Chill out writing strategies that work
I promise these are writing strategies that work... ...only if you do them. These strategies might feel uncomfortable and awkward at first, but so does being born. And that didn't stop us, did it? Both writing strategies involve a wall, which everyone has or can find. Any wall will do! Nothing special there. After you've learned the practice, you'll be able to IMAGINE a wall, but it helps at first to have a physical wall to use. Strategies that work: Being Seen Sit in front of the wall. Elevate your hips on a support or cushion if your knees are annoyed right away. Feel or imagine a tall spine and the dignity you were born with. Relax your shoulders (always). Imagine the wall is looking at you. It can see you. Its eyes are the warm accepting eyes of a grandparent, or any adult who cares for you immensely. If you don't have an adult like that in your life, invent one, or imagine your ancestor, or a really loving person in a movie. Your only job is to let yourself be seen. Keep relaxing. Don't try to hide anything from the wall-- it's just a wall! When you feel done, get up, but don't feel the need to snap out of it. What if the people in your world could really see you? What would they see? Strategies that work: Breathing Fully Start the same way: sit in front of your wall as comfortably as possible. Imagine the wall has a mural on it. Imagine the coolest, most vivid mural you can think of, or look one up, first, so you can have a bright image in mind. But just one problem: this mural has somehow become covered over in dust and funk! As you inhale, imagine and truly feel that you are slowly drawing a layer of dust off the mural, revealing a gorgeous, exciting piece of art. As you exhale, imagine that you are scattering the dust, revealing more of the art. Breathe in very slowly, so none of the dust goes up your nose: you are just clearing space. Breath out gently, so that the layer of dust is scattered lightly: you are Continue Reading …
Stubbing your toe, and getting past The Obvious
I broke my pinky toe this week. What I stubbed it on should have been obvious. I mean, a plastic tub of legos, taking up half the hallway? That my three year-old left there, during his righteous fit? What's more obvious? That's why I don't have a good story to tell you, which is annoying. Pay Attention--starting with the obvious! But my attention was elsewhere. It was past 9PM, and I was on my own righteous mission: to get my older kids to clean up after themselves in the kitchen while the baby meowed from the bedroom. (The three year old harumph-ed along beside me to chide his big brothers.) The minute I felt my toe make contact, I knew I had broken it. Your brain gains a momentary crater where it used to sense a comfortably in-tact body part. In my intero-ception, the damage was obvious. WHAT HAPPENED?, the three year old alarmist said, when he heard my expletives reserved for those choice toe moments. I BROKE MY TOE ON YOUR LEGOS! I half-yelled, because the obvious works better in ALL CAPS. The thing is, when you stub or break your toe, it's almost always on something that's right in front of your face, and could have been avoided. It's not like the walls switch around their location to mess with you and bait your appendages (except in Alice in Wonderland. Or when you're chronically exhausted). Look at the story you're telling yourself... From the site of injury, I started building a story-- sound familiar? "Tomorrow is going to suck...so is the next day...Why did I not put that away?" I also thought: dang, this would be a lot more acceptable if I had a good story to tell. Then I realized, a good story can start with the obvious, it just can't stop there. Moving beyond what's obvious What if I looked more closely at why we don't do what we know we should? Or examined the structure of the foot, the function of toes? What if I wrote about the evolution of emotion, studied my three-year old? The fits he has over things the Continue Reading …
Free-writing for your best essay ideas
Free-writing toward the Light For years I have relied on free-writing exercises to show my students their own light. Free-writing opens the writer to all the buzzing life they carry inside themselves in the form of memories, wishes, dreams, regrets, insights-- and stories, stories, stories. And for your college essay, you need stories. I start all my Essay Intensive students on their college essay process with free-writing. When students respond to prompts without any self-censorship or self-criticism, in their flow, they can let their minds be as wild, creative, and deep as they naturally are (yay, sweet relief!)! And what they generate is often surprising and, ace of aces, not boring! Any writer is capable of pulling up material from the abyss of the self, and the resources there cannot be exhausted. You inner world is full of riches that you can use for practical ends and to meet your writing goals. Much better than bitcoin, whatever that really is. Here's a piece I recently wrote for TeenLife Mag that tells you exactly how you can use free-writing to rock your college essay-- or any meaningful introspective task. It solves any number of problems. Any of this sound like you?: "Are you stuck on your college essay draft? Or don’t even know where to start? Are you sure that you have nothing of interest to say? Bogged down by wordiness and obfuscations? Or are you trying to write too many essays at once? Free-writing has the cure for what ails you. Here’s why and how to do it, and some prompts to get you started." Read more. Want to share your free-writing with nosy people? Oh, good! Your kindergarten teacher probably said "sharing is caring." And while that rhyme has the gag factor, it's also true. At Essay Intensive, we care a lot about what you find when you look inside yourself unfiltered. We're also nosy in the way a writer is obligated to be, and have a good eye for sentences and ideas that could lead you somewhere profound. For fast feedback Continue Reading …
What will you teach yourself?
Self-directed learning is one of the most satisfying kinds. If no one else told you what to study, what would you want to learn about? How often do we stop to ask that question? What are you going to teach yourself? My stepson is currently teaching himself to break the Guinness Book of World Records in claps-per-minute. He has always been a kid who needs a physical expression for his nervous energy-- think, clinking forks, think pinging sporks, think yelling "LLAMA LLAMA!", think ... right. But he's actually focused on this one. It means incessant grating clapping-- and it's driving us batshit, but he's also driven. And he's getting somewhere. His chest muscles are increasing in size from the practice. If we can separate the sound from its irritating quality, it's actually impressive the number of claps he can pull off in a short span. There is a technique to it. It's superfluous, yes, but also a talent. It's weird and absorbing, the effort to improve. He's also got a measurement method-- not just "Wow, I feel like I am getting better at this!" but two phones to objectively chart his progress-- one with a timer, one with a slo-mo video. He uses them to count the claps. He's clapping all the time around the house, and he measures at intervals. Soon, he'll draft his letter to the Guinness Board, whoever that is, and prepare his application materials. What You Teach Yourself, You'll LEARN What's the point? There is no point, really. I mean, it's fabulous to be the best at something esoteric-- I am telling you, no one can swipe the garlicky-oily-salty residue on a cooking skillet better than I can-- but it's also just something you can teach yourself just because. Learning should pull us in; learning should make us care to be better, driven to be better, sometimes even maniacal to be better. So often in school we're told, "Learn this; You MUST be good at Chemistry, or your head will be cut off!" But what if you just can't hang with the complexity Continue Reading …
A poem to inspire your best college essay
Stafford's Poem From time to time I find a poem that would be a perfect college essay, as is. Read it, and weep. William Stafford's "A Ritual to Read to Each Other," guts me word by word. I want to help my students make their college essays this pointed and distilled. So let's study this guy, a master of his form; he knows word economy. His poem unsettles. Good-- who wants to settle? That's for pre-Trump era folks. "If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star." Read the rest here. Stafford's poem helps us figure out how to be with one another as people (because generally speaking, we're pretty piss at winning peace prizes, folks). He is a badass** writer, somehow direct but also circumspect: "Lest our mutual life get lost in the dark." How is that for Twitter-able accuracy? As a side note, I would also feel really cool if one of my students wrote something this devastating and accurate. (Which, by the way, they sometimes do, just that most of them aren't famous for it yet.) These lines have haunted me for years. They could not be more relevant. Be Woke As a buzzkill and injunction to BE WOKE, I'll post Stafford's last lines. But you're best served by reading the whole poem aloud, again and again. Better if you can read it to somebody. Maybe somebody who, like the rest of us, needs to WAKE UP ALREADY. "For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe — should be clear: the darkness around us is deep." Again, you can visit the whole poem here. Light up your essay I often misremember the poem's last lines as "the answers we give should be clear..." But you could easily substitute, "the college essays we write...should be clear!" --because the Continue Reading …