Your Essay is a Story: Get Creative!

This is a guest blog post by TeachStreet writer and tutor Leah Kaminsky.

Hey guys! Quick pop quiz. Should your college essay:
a) Be a checklist of accomplishments
b) Repeatedly state why you are a good applicant for any college
c) Discuss activities that you think look good, but you’re not so excited about
d) Be structured ONLY like a traditional essay, with the “thesis” being choice b

Hooooo, trick question alert! The answer is none of the above. Yeah, I could have added a letter e for that option, but then I wouldn’t have gotten to say “hooooo.”

Almost every student comes to me thinking that: “college essay” means “academic essay,” which means:

• Thesis (check!)
• Evidence to support thesis (check!)
• Intro, three body paragraphs, and conclusion (check!)
• Audience bored to death at rates higher than the Great Plague (check!)

These are telling techniques, and we’re all sick of them. Even you. Fess up! Fact is, the best college essays are a lot closer to fiction in construction than to an analytical essay, except that, of course, you’re telling the truth.

Imagine, for a moment, the biography of the boy below:

Our protagonist was born to parents with an alternative lifestyle. However, they died when he was very young and he was sent to live with his aunt, uncle, and cousin, who thought he was very strange and treated him poorly. One day, a stranger stopped by, told him that he was a very gifted boy, and asked him to move to a different land where people were more like him. He did, and things were better, if not great. He had a lot of battles with other people but eventually came out victorious and with lots of friends.

Did you guess that this mystery protagonist is Harry Potter? Well, what if this is how it actually was written, with every detail told to us in a matter of fact kind of way? Would J.K. Rowling be a quadrillionaire right now? I don’t think so! As every fiction writer knows, you can’t tell any new stories, but you can tell them differently. Harry Potter is a mash up of well-worn themes, myths, fairy tales, and fantasies, but it’s awesome to read because of the way the author writes the story.

This is my promise to you: make your essay a story, first and foremost, and the rest will come. We can tell that Harry Potter is loyal, hard working (if not to Hermione levels), inventive, and a fun guy to hang out with because of the specific, unique details provided about his character, his behavior, and the things he says.

You writerly types out there are probably getting a sense of what I’m going for here.

SDT.

Or: Show, Don’t Tell. Yep, don’t mix those letters around.

Think about it. If some guy randomly came up to you in the hallway and said, “Hi, I’m John. I may look like everyone else here, but I’m pretty different. I’m a hard worker, and I enjoy achievement,” would you believe him more or less than if he just did all of those things? Show us who you are.

Start at the genre level. What kind of essay is this going to be? Are you going to focus on one small moment or formative event, and draw life lessons from it? Are you going to take us through a history of your passion for an activity, hobby, cause, or sport? Are you going to reflect on a particular character trait, and provide anecdotes about times when it really shined through? Get a book of essays like Fiske’s Real College Essays That Work and familiarize yourself with the wide range of approaches people take.

Then, do as fiction writers do! Use unique details, similes, and metaphors to better capture your experiences. Take advantage of dialogue to show how two characters relate. Give us a thriller-styled action moment to draw us into the problem. Determine how and why these things matter so greatly to you, and connect these things to concrete details.

Use one or all of these techniques, dependent on how comfortable you are with a more creative kind of writing. If, for instance, your subject really does require the structure of a more straightforward, analytical essay, consider opening with an action moment or anecdote to capture our attention, and then go back to something more traditional. If you’re not so sure what approach you’d like to take or what exactly you’d like to focus on, use a more traditional structure to get your thoughts rolling.

As always, each of these things techniques deserves its own post. Keep checking back to this site for in depth instruction, be sure to follow Seattle Learning Specialists on Facebook, and check out our website here.

So, go forth, ye! Get creative on us!

Leah Kaminsky is a writer and a writing specialist at Seattle Learning Specialists.  She wrote a pretty boring college essay herself, and has patrolled these fair United States ever since, trying to right that wrong.  Make her proud; write an interesting essay!