Perfect isn't believable Even Olympic Champions have their weaknesses: your college essay may be only as believable as yours. Take a step back and look at your intentions for your admissions essay: are you trying to be, to sound, perfect? So that the admissions committee will have not a shred of doubt about bringing you to their school? Actually, your humanity is far more believable and appealing if you admit (so to speak) to knowing your weaknesses. Lately, I've been getting great lessons in this from reading about gymnast Simone Biles. She's so inarguably tremendous, yet flawed just like the rest of us. Include your flaws because you're a character now Simone Biles is considered "the best gymnast in the world"; but she's also a teenager. As perfect as her gymnastics is, her humanity is evident. We can point to so-called imperfect traits (I culled these from recent journalism). She's afraid of bees. She won't quite call the guy she's seeing her "boyfriend." But she can land dazzling, nearly impossible jumps that would have the rest of us in the emergency room, or worse. My point should be your point: Take a good look at not only what makes you a super star (each of us can get a gold in something), but also what weakness makes you believable as a character. I'll tell you if you tell me...or, let's both tell everybody! We know it can feel like dicey terrain to admit to weaknesses when stakes are high. At Essay Intensive, we practice what we preach, so here goes: I get really territorial around vegetables. I need a lot of them in my fridge at any one time to be safe and comfortable. I need at least half my plate to be taken up by vegetables. I'm lucky to have access to them. I get all squirmy when a meal is served without enough of them. Oh, and will I lose cred in your eyes if I tell you I often get long division incorrect? Or come up with two different answers to the same problem? Or that I went bald from thinking too hard trying to do Continue Reading …
Wisdom
Use your imagination to give up
Tony Morrison's "Give Up!" I have a crush on where your imagination can get you. I also have a crush on Toni Morrison, largely for her refined art of the simple sentences that slap you. This kind of writing startles you into productive awareness (ahem: aim for that in your college essay!). Take this quote: "Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down." (Song of Solomon) Oh, right. Continue Reading …
Be Bold in Your College Essay
A bold kid on a mission to write When I was in fourth grade, I was obsessed with opera. And I had a bold teacher, Mr. F, who was lanky and fierce in creativity and temper. He always smelled like coffee. Luckily, he also was obsessed with opera-- some of the same ones. And, like me, he liked to write. Mr. F, however, was a musician who had actually written and produced an opera. About the revolutionary war. For fourth graders to perform. In a public elementary school. I was 9. I told Mr. F I wanted to write an opera. And what did he say? Go for it; I'll help you. This encouragement is what each of us needs to be equally bold. Someone saying, Got dreams? Got something to say? Go for it; I'll help you. What did I know then about ambition? I wore paisley print stretch pants, velour shirts, and Velcro sneakers, to give you an idea. I was still eating pita-and-peanut-butter-and-honey for lunch every day, and throwing my invariably mealy apple in the over-sized cafeteria trash can (and why was it over-sized? Guess!). But even with no feel yet for literary structure, never having written lyrics, I still thought I could write an opera. And I started right away on my dad's long yellow legal pads. What I wrote strangely resembled my favorite opera in character, in plot and....I had no idea how one would compose song. Do you get it? I could do none of the things required to actually write an opera, but I still THOUGHT I COULD DO IT. As soon as I was supported, I got started. I was bold. Self-doubt was not even in my vocabulary. I think the opera is somewhere in my parent's basement now. I don't need to see it because I'm embarrassingly confident how bad it is. But I'm so proud of that kid. In your college essay, be like a ballsy fourth grader.. Here's the deal: your work is only as bold as you're willing to be. And sometimes we need a hand at our back, a voice in our ear saying, Go For It. Sometimes we need to switch our seat at the Continue Reading …
Powerful People Pause
The "fail" pause and the perfect pause I start almost every essay support session asking students to read-aloud their college essay drafts, and for most it's like asking them to read the omens in my baby's dirty diapers. I can't count the number of times my students lower their eyes and barrel through the read-aloud, with nary a pause. Well, that's not true: they take one pause at the beginning, the "fail" pause, and the last and only time they'll inhale for the duration of their read. A puree of words, no connection to the audience (me), no pacing to measure impact or resonance. I can hardly hear them, and they can hardly hear themselves. They zoom through the read, like the Dalai Lama will condemn them to Samsara, or Obama exile them from the US, if they take too long or stumble on a sentence. (That's why DL and BO are sitting up there in the photo looking so compassionate, right guys?). Lose me or hold me? By contrast, my Whole Heart Connection teacher, Thea Elijah, can hold a whole room with her pause. Nobody snickers, squirms, or gets nervous. No one checks their phone or doubts her credibility. The silence is not awkward. It is very very very full. Everyone just waits for her to begin speaking again. How come? Two kinds of pauses Thea describes it this way: there are two kinds of pauses. There is the pause where the speaker disconnects from the room (the audience), goes inside, and gets lost in their own stuff. They have "lost touch with the field" (i.e. the rest of us. Hellooooooooo, come back!). But then there is the very different kind of pause where the speaker stays connected to the room (the audience) but stops speaking long enough to check-in inside. Like an energetic, mighty octopus, the speaker is still completely aware and part of "the needs and the nature of field" (i.e. the rest of us). The first kind of pause is the lost cause. You can make a come-back from it, but basically you've given your audience a Continue Reading …
Crappy Moods, Comedians, and the Writer’s Cure
Crappy moods: they happen. (Reader, are you straight-jacket-ed by a particularly crappy mood currently? Cut right to this Louis CK cure. Road-test the comedians' corrective. And come back to read the rest of this later.) Crappy moods are like reverse rainbows, showing up when weather conditions are darkly unfavorable in inner or outer environment or both. At their best, crappy moods facilitate discharge of the nastier emotions. and move on. You know the drill: kick your drawer shut, and break your own toe in the process. Slam household items around. Be snappy at those you love. Mope and mull. It's not usually a pretty picture. But Crappy Moods sometimes settle in like shower mildew, and can put a serious cramp in your creativity. Comedians: they help. Your Crappy Mood is an orchard ripe for picking for comedians, who can find the humor in anything-- the less seemingly funny it is, the better. Your irrational or irritable behavior is already slightly ridiculous to anyone who's not you. A comedian laughs not just with you, but at you. And you'll want them to. Because then you'll have to laugh at yourself, and this is the healthiest way to return to creativity, sanity, and general equilibrium. Let Joan Rivers explain Joan Rivers told Larry King, "I purposely go into areas that people are still very sensitive about and smarting about, because if you can laugh at it, you can deal with it. That's how I've lived my whole life. I swear to you - and I'm Jewish - that if I were in Auschwitz, I would have been doing jokes just to make it OK for us." But to deal with it, you have to know that it's there in the first place. Crap Under the Radar Crappy moods happen more frequently and more fiercely when something is bugging us just under the radar of our awareness. Some unaddressed stressor, or maybe a small mountain of them. Some factor out of our control, like whether or not-- emphasis on not-- our writing is universally loved. Or, more to the point Continue Reading …
Stay Inspired
How do YOU stay inspired, Toni Morrison? I was already nursing a huge crush on Toni Morrison as she spoke about her fictional characters' natural limitations-- how, like you and I, they only know what they know. Her confiding tone, her flirtatious but never-bullshitty manner, made me (and every other "me" there to see her, I suspect) feel as if it were just us two on a porch together, at some place and time that compelled honesty to a fault. Ms. Morrison's interviewer, Professor Claudia Brodsky, drew an audience question from the stack of submitted index cards. She smiled at the author, a close friend and subject of her academic studies: "How do you stay inspired?" The Brooklyn temple, packed to the gills, hushed entirely to hear what Ms. Morrison would say, with her twinkling eyes and easy hands, with her direct simplicity and charm. Because, hell, this was like the elixir of creative life about to come from the Mouth of Literary Giant Morrison. This could fix all of our problems. She said WHAT? But Instead of haranguing the muse's poor attendance record, instead of telling us a recipe, a trick, her answer was both jubilant and matter-of-fact: "Because I can't not!" Right. She can't not stay inspired. Anyone else have that problem? "Because I have to be creative," she continued. "I have to be! It's me!" She said that the way a doctor might tell you your blood had to circulate. Let that sink in: queen of the novel, now well into her wisdom-years, in a wheelchair for unknown reasons, with her nest of braided hair resting in the curve of her neck like a crown worn backwards, continues to be creatively inspired not because she owes it to anyone, not because of any contract, not because of anything. Because that's who she is. She can't help you stay inspired-- but you can! All the desperate writers in the room, all the hungry writers, the people slightly disenchanted with their lot or lives or creative practice, all those Continue Reading …