College essays

We all know that we'll have to face them someday. The best thing you can do is to start early and know what you're doing as you're writing. It's kind of like what Sun Tzu said in The Art of War. "Know your enemy and know yourself, and you shall win a hundred times in a hundred battles." What does the college want? Someone with promise, who's memorable, intelligent, and not someone who'll drop out of school or shoot his/her professors in a rage. And who are you?

Ah, that is the question - to be, or not to be, yourself.

I say be who you are. Even if you aren't quite sure how to, yet. Just be honest and it'll be okay. Be true, be true.

Okay, I really didn't mean for all these allusions to crop up in my blurb. AP Lang is taking over my mind! No!!!

Well, here, anyways. M

y second draft of my golden essay; it will need to be cut drastically, and the ending is crap, but the content is all there. (I'm already halfway there, suckers! Hah!) (Seriously, though, this was a real pain to write a lot of the times, and it took hours. And hours. Please don't procrastinate on your college essays.)

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When I was twelve, I created an imaginary friend. I did not play with him in the conventional manner, though - I never spoke to him, held hands with him, or interacted with him at all.

Instead, I packed in his little straw basket a twisted past and a magic rabbit and sent him off on a grand adventure. By the end of his travels, he would have met a hundred strange people, seen a thousand strange sights, ended a war between magic and science, and saved the world eight times over.

After writing 35 chapters and 64,920 words of his story, when the magic was just starting to gain momentum, I stopped. I had just turned fifteen.

See, I know a lot of people who write for fun. Convoluted plotlines, cliche characters, and abandoned stories are all commonplace. I was one of them; I would scribble out fake fancies, romances, and dramas, searching for a means of escape from my own life, because school and parents and the myriad rules of the real world were all so monotonous and needlessly complicated in comparison to the fantastical. And I was lonely; I attended a different high school than all of my middle school friends, and for months I had no idea how to open up to strangers. Friends were hard to come by for me, and so I made my own, and I loved to lose myself in their otherworldly adventures. I wrote by myself, for myself.

But inevitably, I started to meet people. I learned how to hold an extended conversation with a stranger until he or she was a stranger no more; I practiced how to harvest truth and real people’s characters through Journalism class. Talking still was not second nature to me; but with enough practice, it became my third. By my Sophomore year of high school, I was confident in myself enough to take my own initiative and join clubs like Literary Chronicles, participate in rallies, and speak up in class. And as I hung out with an ever-expanding social circle, I realized that my previous reasons for writing no longer applied. Life was interesting, though I couldn’t quite call it exhilarating. And now that I had real friends, there was no need for fake ones.

But following this logic alone, I still would have continued the story of the little boy and his rabbit - it was fun to write, and my mind is so constantly creating scenes and character interactions that I’d feel bereft without some kind of plotline to channel the creativity into.

What led to my moving away from this story was actually the revelation that I could make some kind of impact in my community. Before, I never attempted to instigate change. It reflected in my writing - I never placed people I knew into a story, instead creating characters out of fragments of my own personality and thoughts, or modeling them after pre-existing archetypes. My “inner world” and the “real world” were separate and incompatible, and however brazen and idealistic I could be with a pencil, I was quiet, dull, and forgettable most of the time. I wrote for selfish reasons only, and if nobody ever gave my story a second glance, I would be fine with it.

By the time I turned fifteen, though, I had learned that words could touch people in miraculous, mysterious ways. I read books by such authors as Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, Neil Gaiman and John Green, and each time I was left with both a profound sense of satisfaction and a fresh outlook on life. They all wrote fiction; but they wrote about truth, as well, in a less direct but more moving way than journalism. They inspired in me shockingly strong feelings. And for the first time, I seriously sought to inspire that feeling in others with my own work. I came to see writing less as a tool for escapism and more as a means to reach out to people.

I wrote a short story and posted it online, and the feedback I received from friends and strangers was one of the most exciting experiences I have ever had - to think that I could make something enjoyable, could color somebody’s perception, even just a little bit! But I was fully aware that I could not compare with the authors I admired. I began to read with a more critical eye, trying to discover how to close the humbling gap in ability. My child’s fantasy, I now saw, paled in comparison to good literature - my characters spoke in cliched falsetto, and the events played out like a bad soap opera. I stopped writing that particular story.

But I did not stop writing. Far from it. I merely turned my focus in a new direction, telling stories about various kinds of people, for everyone to read. Currently I am working on another novel, still an adventure, still grounded in fantasy, but also a serious contemplation on the passions and motives of human beings as a whole.

On my fifteenth birthday I decided that I would be a professional novelist when I grew up, and this ambition has only solidified as I have matured. I now try to create settings readers would be able to relate to and infuse my characters with traits I have observed in the people around me. I will continue to write, and I hope that someday I will be able to make a difference in the world through my stories.