Could your kid benefit from working with a professional writer on her/his college essay?
I’m available.
I hadn’t planned on this. But a close friend wrote me at the start of her son’s senior year in high school. His grades were terrific. His test scores were excellent. He had a list of activities as long as your arm. But he was stuck on his essay. And because he was applying for early admission to an elite college, he and his parents knew the essay would be read closely.
I read what was his 5th or 6th draft about an after-school activity that was completely foreign to him in 7th grade. He had, over the years, come to love it. The essay was a chronicle of personal growth. But he didn’t say that. He’d focused on the externals. Carefully. Accurately. Grammatically. But not vividly. There was no conviction. And no a-ha moment at the end.
I started working with my friend’s son. “Forget the activity,” I told him. “Tell me what changed in you. How you felt then. How you feel now.”
He dug in. Peeled off a few layers of skin. Two drafts later, we were both satisfied. A few months later, he got early admission to a college in U.S. News Report’s top 20.
Then I heard from the parents of a son who was anxious about his essay. For him, the problem was psychological. He was a perfectionist, wired so tight he was writing draft after draft and hating all of them. After reading two drafts, I sent him a four-word email: “Just puke it out.” He had a light bulb moment, ripped off a new draft. We tightened it. He got in.
That’s when I decided to turn pro.
True, my experience with college essays is modest. My experience teaching writing to kids, however, is considerable. I taught screenwriting to undergraduates at NYU from 1978 to 1987, and I helped some kids learn to write better and I was smart enough not to help kids who were magic on their first day of class — instead, I steered Vince Gilligan (“Breaking Bad”) and Chris Columbus (“Home Alone,” “Harry Potter,” “Mrs. Doubtfire”) to agents when they were 19. Through a PEN program, I taught one writing class a week to ninth graders in an East Harlem High School.
Still, to get up to speed, I read a few guides to successful college essays. And found this: “Combine like ideas into more sophisticated sentence structures. The vast majority of the sentences in your essay should be compound, complex, or a combination of both (compound-complex sentences). Save simple sentences for instances when you need to create impact.” That is bullshit. The trick in good writing is to sound like your unique self. As Geoffrey Rush, playing the speech coach to the stuttering King George VI in “The King’s Speech,” tells the King thirty seconds before his first radio address: “Just say it to me. Say it to me… as a friend.” That is not bullshit. In my work with kids — and in 8 books, gazillions of magazine articles, dozens of ghostwritten speeches and op-eds, and 1,800 Head Butler reviews — it is the Holy Grail.
I’m publishing this now because if your kid is about to be a high school senior, the summer is the ideal time to attack the essay. Once school starts, madness descends. And tension. If we start now, we can still proceed like humans.
How much do I cost? That depends on your kid and your situation. Write me at [email protected], and we’ll figure it out together. [Can I help adults with book proposals, grant proposals, manuscripts, and you-name-it? Yes, at Head Butler Creative Services.]
You may ask: Are you working with your daughter on her essay? If you’re a smart parent, you know: you don’t teach your kid to swim, read or drive. And maybe you also don’t ride shotgun on the college message. In this case — a writer and his daughter who writes well but is, naturally, allergic to writing — you don’t assert yourself too soon on her essay. The good news: she’s going into the 11th grade, so we can postpone this conversation until next summer.
But I have written her a “How To Write” memo, and for those who don’t want to hire me, here’s pretty much everything I know…
1. If you can think it, you can say it. If you can say it, you can write it. That means the most important thing isn’t the writing — it’s the idea. It needs to be yours, not anybody else’s. To confirm that it sounds like you, say it out loud, ideally to someone else, but mostly so you can hear it. Are you less than excited? Then think again.
2. Writing is energy. Do it when you have some. Take your energy, slap it on the page, and the reader will sit up and pay attention.
3. Subject verb object. Subject verb object. Subject verb object.
4. Active verbs are best. They have energy. “She is running” is dull. “She runs” or “She sprints” keeps the reader moving forward.
5. Use adjectives that are specific: color, size, etc. If you’re using adjectives to convey emotion, look again at the verb. Maybe you need a stronger one.
6. Avoid adverbs. If you think you need an adverb, look again at the verb. Maybe you need a stronger one. Stephen King: “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
7. Write topic sentences at the start of each paragraph. Then support them.
Okay, there’s a little more…
When I was teaching at NYU, I noticed my students weren’t killing the opening of their scripts. I told them: “The people who will be reading your work see a lot of scripts. If they like one and they champion it and the movie gets made and is a commercial failure, they can lose their jobs. It’s safer to turn scripts down. If yours starts slowly, they can safely turn it down without finishing it. So… you have 10 pages.”
My students protested. “The people reading our scripts used to go to film school. They love movies. They’ll keep reading.”
I asked my friend and rabbi David Brown to come to class. He once ran Fox. He also produced “Jaws,” “The Sting,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” and many more hits.
“You have 5 pages,” David Brown said.
Translate that to the college essay: Your first sentence must grab the reader. In his terrific book, On Writing, Stephen King says he tends to revise the first paragraph of a book as many as 70 times. And he’s Stephen King! BUT… you may not have a killer opening sentence right away. That’s no reason to freeze or procrastinate. When it doubt… puke it out. You’ll find your dream opening sentence later… maybe even buried in your piece.
Finally, a word from my film agent. I have been known to get excited about a new idea and pitch it to him. He always says the same thing: “It’s all in the execution.” And so it is in a college essay. Your kid starts with an idea that’s all her/his own. Then she/he works at it until it gleams like a gold medal. And then it’s off to college, where more writing awaits….
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Previously published on The Head Butler.
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