Unexpected Essay Secret Write Badly

Here’s what you’re doing wrong: You’re expecting it to come out right.

It might sound counter-intuitive, but expecting perfection from your draft is the best way to kill it. Actually, it’s the best way to ensure it never gets written at all.

The essay in your head is perfect. Once you start writing it down, it’s not perfect anymore. It’s normal to procrastinate with the idea that at some later point, your writing will come out perfectly—like you know it’s meant to, instead of badly like it is right now. It’s normal—just completely unhelpful.

Many students, when they come to me, don’t believe in second drafts. I think they believe they’re saving themselves time later if they do it right the first time. But that’s like picking unripe berries to save time in picking them in a few weeks … when they’re ripe. Sure, you can … but you’re not going to get the same results.

First drafts are supposed to be messy. Pretending otherwise is like trying to clean up your kitchen in formal wear. You can’t effectively wash pots and pans, let alone degrease the oven, and expect to still look Oscar-ready. Most likely, you’ll protect the clothes at the expense of doing a good job on the dishes. In your first drafts, you’re protecting your mental image of yourself as a “good writer” … at the expense of the breadth, depth and originality of your ideas. Let it go. Great writers write really poor rough drafts.

Put a piece of tape over your “Delete” key. You’re not going to be using it this round. Every time you stop to reread and delete, you’re derailing your train of thought and losing momentum. Even if you have a typo—especially if you have a typo! It’s just a typo!—don’t let that stop you. If you write something and immediately want to change it, just write NO and start writing what you meant to say instead. Otherwise, by the time you finish deleting the sentence you didn’t like, you’ll have forgotten the better sentence you were about to write.

The messier the writing, the more room you have to explore the ideas that you can’t quite figure out how to say. If you’re unsatisfied with how you’re expressing an idea, you’re going to be tempted to leave it out. Don’t do that. Just keep writing circles around it, repeating yourself slightly differently each time, “surrounding” your idea with not-quite-right versions until you find what you meant to say all along.

A writing coach, like a sports coach, can help you over both your mental roadblocks and your poor technique. To learn more about the process of working one-on-one to write your best college essay, schedule a 15-minute consultation today!

(Photo by Tran Mau Tri Tam on Unsplash)