WRITING 4
CHILLING OUT
(or, Everything I Say You Canât Do, You Can Do)
Consider the following opening of an essay, a blast from the past that might seem datedâbut its value as an example is immortal. It seems at first to be a typical âHelloâ autobiography.
There is authority and humor here, and awareness. He realizes that his opening is ordinary, and he plays on it surprisingly in the second line by showing that he knows itâs banal; at the same time he begins to see some meaning in something as simple as his birthdate. We realize, in fact, that he was setting us up with that first line. Weâre having fun, suddenly. Itâs as if we are hiking through a wilderness with an expert outdoorsman; none of us is quite sure where the next step will be, but we have confidence the journey will be worthwhile. The sound is fresh. The turns of thought are surprising. We are hearing a voice. The joke at the end brings more than a smileâit steers a reader to the point of the essay: why being born in 1960 was such a big deal. Letâs listen to the answer.
NO BAD TOPICS
But, you say, that essay falls right into the forbidden modesâit could be either the Autobiography or the Big Issue. Relax. Contradiction Number One: Everything I say you canât do, you can do. There are no good or bad topics for college essays, only good or bad essays. John Updike said, âThere is a great deal to be said about almost anything. Everything can be as interesting as every other thing.â Sometimes good writing is just the result of reinvigorating what has become a clichĂ©. In your essay, you donât have to say something startling and new, or strain to be âdifferent.â The writer above doesnât make any contributions to the store of human knowledge. He just says what he knows in a fresh way that allows us to see for ourselves who he is.
This doesnât diminish the danger in all the deadly essays in chapter three, but now that you know the traps of the Terrible Ten, you are ready to understand that most of themâBig Issue, Trip, Autobiography, even Pet Deathâcan be lively and revealing. Even the old second-grade standby, My Summer Vacation, can lead to excellent writing (see chapter twelve, âSummer Beyond Wishâ).
You can make a college essay out of anything; the materials are everywhere. You just have to pay attention and teach yourself to care.
GETTING READY TO WRITE
Approach is everything. Here are some ideas to keep in mind as you begin.
1. If you ask what âtheyâ are looking for, you are already on the wrong track. What do you have to say? Thatâs what they want to hear. The Common App topics are all reducible to âanything you want.â Take them at their word. If the thing that intrigues you most lately is that your seven-year-old sister is the one person in the house who can text with one hand without looking, write about that, not World Peace; you have the beginnings of a good Big Issue essay.
2. Find a reader, or readers. Friends, brothers or sisters, pen pals, maybe a teacher you know and trust; someone who will respond to your writing in the right spirit. I canât emphasize this enough. You are writing for readers now, and you need to train yourself to say something worth reading. They should simply be people who like good writing and can read your work without preconceived notions about what it should say. They have to be honest, and they have to care about you. It is often mutually inspiring to have your reader(s) also applying to college. You can swap ideas and frustrations. One warning about parents, though. They may want you to âsell yourself,â an approach that is dead wrong.
Parents have their uses, but reading your college essay isnât usually one of them. They care too much, and often donât know quite enough, or they have suspect sources of information and want to âfixâ everything.
3. Write something only you could write. It should have a sound as distinctive as your speaking voice. The problem with most essays is that they could have been written by anyone. In one sense, your writing âvoiceâ is simply a polished version of your speech; but remember how that speech changes when youâre talking to different audiences, like teachers or friends. Itâs the same you, but your word choice, tone, sentence rhythms, and even the sound of your voice change. Just as you speak in a different âvoiceâ to parents and friends, so you must find the one thatâs right for this purpose. The voice you should be aiming at is one youâd use toward an acquaintance you wanted to be better friends with. (Remember, admissions officers already know you when they read your essay.) Though itâs not the voice youâd use with your best friend, itâs not formal, either. Donât write to impress an adult, in what you imagine is an âeducatedâ voice. You have two or three different voices of your own, and you should explore and use them. A good essay is like an interesting letter from someone you once met.
4. Know what you write about. This is a slight twist on the common writing advice, âWrite about what you know.â The professional writers in chapter twelve know a lotâeverything from history and foreign languages to the design of playing cards. Thatâs part of the reason their writing is good. But be comforted. Writing is discoveryâwriters often donât realize what they know about something until they try to discuss it in print. If you find you donât know anything well enough to write about it thoughtfully or entertainingly, youâve learned something disturbing but not irreversible. And youâre wrongâyou know more than enough. Think of yourself as a reporter working on a story, the subject of which happens to be your own life and interests. Your memory is your file drawer, and in that file are your research materials. Youâre looking for significant details. These appear in the humblest and most ordinary things you do every day, usually in a more interesting way than they do in the Big Moments (being elected student body president, or scoring the winning water polo goal), events in which so many college essayists try unsuccessfully to Find Meaning. Instead, how about paying attention to that pigeon on your windowsill and what you eat for lunchâand why. If the unexamined life is not worth living, itâs certainly not worth writing about.
5. A college essay is an informal, or familiar, piece. All the questions, even the Big Issues, are really asking for some kind of personal statement. Donât even think of it as school-related writing. It is not a history or English paper. Loosen up. You are after the most natural tone and style possibleâa kind of inspired conversation, scrubbed clean of all its hesitations, repetitions, and vagueness. It is as personal as a phone call.
6. Entertain. I donât mean you have to do stand-up where laughs must arrive every fifteen seconds. But all writing entertains at some level. âEntertainmentâ has gotten a bad name over the years, a reputation as a lightweight; people say, âIt isnât a very thought-provoking movie; itâs pure entertainment.â As if only things that turn your mind into fruit punch are entertaining! To truly entertain doesnât mean to open with a few lame jokes or to sink everything to the level of TV sitcom; it means to sustain a voice worth listening to. You can be as serious or as frivolous as you like, whatever suits you. But when you write, write to give pleasure to your audience. Youâll write a mo...