After a brutal seven-hour writing session, I have completed the first draft of my Kellogg essays. I need to give my boyfriend a special thank you for his understanding. We were supposed to go to the movies and out to eat this weekend but I just haven't had the bandwith. I managed to make breakfast and lunch today but have not changed from my pajamas. I had to send him to the store to get things for dinner, and at 9 oclock we will have our Sunday snuggle time. :) Right now, I'm unwinding with a cheap glass of Sauvignon Blac.
Reminders to myself about essay writing:
Be yourself. I'm sure you've heard admissions officers and consultants advise applicants to be themselves and not try to paint a portrait of what they think the adcom wants them to be. Truer words have never been spoken. I had trouble articulating the motivation behind my long term goals on paper and I hesitated to go for broke in talking about my career plans because I was afraid the adcom wouldn't believe I had the juice to make a career switch. For weeks, my career goals essays were boring and seemed too force. They actually pained me to write. Today, I restructured my career goals essay and talked about the deal with my father that led me to this career goal. My words flowed so naturally and so much easier than they had before.
Brainstorm and outline. It is essential to have a plan before you start attacking an essay. You need to know what you want to highlight in your essay, what anecdotes you want to tell and why they're relevant before you set pen to paper. This outline is your essay's skeleton. This outline allows you to think through your essay and establish a structure. I am a big structure freak. Structure in writing fascinates me. James Joyce is painful to read but I had to respect dude's structure. In fact in undergrad, I contemplated doing a PhD in Literature studying narrative structure (yes I'm that much of a geek). Structure gives the reader sign posts. The reader needs these sign posts so that your points are not lost. It also gives you a frame work to operate in so that you don't get lost in the writing sauce yourself.
A rough draft is just that. Rough. I am an experienced writer and spent my college education writing papers upon papers, but even with that experience I had to remind myself that the first rough draft is to really get your ideas on paper. There's no way in Hades that you're going to sound like Maya Angelou or Nabokov as soon as you put your fingers on the keys. It's just not happening. If the outline gives you a skeleton, the rough draft puts the meat on that skeleton. Power through those moments where you get stumped. One of my tricks is if I get stuck on how to describe something or on a word to use I'll write a stand-in phrase and put brackets around it so I know to go back and clean it up when I do my first repass. Some people work best when they do this rough draft through stream of consciousness (a literary style that I've always hated due to my love of structure), and this may be you. So you have to let the words flow through you and write your thoughts out. Follow the map you created in your outline until you get to the end and don't worry about how crappy or how good the essay is when you've finished.
Do not be afraid to abort the mission. This is another tip I picked up writing papers. I have thrown away pages of a paper and entire essays because after I got them on paper they sparked an idea for a paper that was much better than what I had. In the past few weeks, I wrote maybe two entire essays that I abandoned. I lifted maybe one or two sentences or ideas and used them to spark the essays that I have labeled my first draft. You have to give yourself ample time to write garbage. Nabokov's first iteration of Lolita was probably rubbish, so keep in mind that the greats got that way because they practiced, practiced, practiced. We're not writing novels here, but expect to go through some iterations before you get your polished jewel ready to submit to the adcom.
It is almost time for True Blood and Breaking Bad. My first draft has been sent off to my MBA application coach and I look forward to seeing what she has to say. I should include another self-reminder -- humble yourself. You need someone to keep it real with you and tell you where and why your essay sucks. I'm expecting lots of constructive criticism. I'd be kidding if I told you that I will squeal with glee when I see all of the comments about what I need to change and what sucked, but I need and want to hear this.
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