What a First Draft Is … and Is Not
First things first—and when it comes to writing your college essay, the first thing is NOT a first draft.
The problem isn’t with the word “first,” it’s with the word “draft.” The connotations that “draft” carries are going to lead you to poor choices in your writing that will hurt your ideas, organization and style—which will be more difficult to remedy in later drafts with this weak foundation.
Ideas
The first and most central problem with writing a “first draft” is that it’s not an exercise in capturing your thoughts, it’s the first attempt to put your thoughts together. To write your best essay, you need to be open to the inclusion of any idea that crosses your mind. I’m not saying you need to keep every idea that occurs to you—you only have 650 words, after all. But you need to be open to it. The word “draft,” which suggests “a messier version of the Real Thing,” makes you reluctant to truly make a mess. You want it as close as possible to the final version. If you’re being truthful, you expect to clean up some punctuation and maybe a typo or two, and be good to go.
What that does to the quality of your ideas is absolutely disastrous. By avoiding “making mistakes,” you stick to “safe” ideas that are boring and impersonal—the two worst qualities possible for a college essay. Knowing that you only have 650 words, you will tend to summarize your stories instead of really bringing the reader with you into your memories. And you might not even know how to summarize the growth you experienced. Depending on the story you’re telling, you might well have to write to develop your thinking about the experience and what it meant to you.
Organization
“Draft” suggests a deliberate organization, which means before you begin, you battle a crippling round of “Where do I start?” If you win that battle and start somewhere, you end up with a piece that is likely still disorganized, but you’re less likely to notice.
When it comes to personal essays, I find a persistent belief among students and non-writers that the way your first draft comes out is somehow the way you are meant to write it. It has some kind of insight into who you are because of the things you thought to mention and the order in which they occurred to you. If something came out first, the logic goes, it must be the most important to you, and therefore that’s where it belongs.
Actually, it’s just how your brain coughed up the information.
Because you normally organize school writing the same way every time (in the serviceable but boring five-paragraph essay), you likely don’t really know the most logical way to organize your thoughts. More often than not, the order your reader will need or prefer the information in is not the order you will think of or remember it. Sometimes you’ll write down a memory in a logical chronology that turns out to be dull for a reader. Other times you’ll write your way into discovering what was really your point all along. The interesting thing is, when you read your work, it will be intuitively scaffolded by all of the information you know about the story, and every time you reread it, it will sound more “right” in the random order you originally wrote it. You have to really focus on the reader’s perspective to ask whether they’re getting the right information in the right order.
Written Fluency and Style
Finally, if you’re writing a draft that you think should be a step away from done, you are going to spend way too much time thinking about how it sounds. You should be writing in such quantity that you will be forced to cut at least half of this draft. If that’s the case, is it really wise to fall in love with every turn of phrase? Is it a good use of time to agonize about how each sentence sounds? Of course not. Worse, sometimes you write something poetic and realize that if you try to translate it to boring prose … it doesn’t really say anything. (Even poets and songwriters have to mean something with their beautiful words. I once sat in on a songwriting class by bluegrass musician Claire Lynch in which she taught just this lesson, in a story about a particular line she fell in love with. She told how she edited around it to try to make it work, but eventually had to be honest with herself that it wasn’t adding meaning and she had to cut it—and the finished song, which she had performed in concert that day, was better for it.)
So when you’re ready to start writing, start at the true beginning. Sit down and “prewrite” or “freewrite.” Don’t hold particular expectations for what you are going to put down. Just get the ideas on paper or onscreen.
Or if you’re determined to skip the “messy part” of the process, consider getting a coach. A coach won’t save you from an authentic writing process, any more than having a soccer coach would save you from warming up before the game. But a coach will help you avoid the mistakes that would require a full trash-and-rewrite, like picking a completely wrong topic, or focusing on the sound of your sentences and ignoring the underlying ideas.
Any outside perspective can help by pointing out what’s not immediately clear to a reader. A friend, sibling or parent could potentially offer that type of feedback, and if they remember the event you’re writing about, might even point out things you didn’t remember. But a writing coach can do more than that. A professional editor or writing coach recognizes how a strong piece of writing should be built—how it should flow from one piece to the next, and even where the holes are in your essay—not just details missing from your story, but a paragraph that gives the background on X or a piece that notes your connection to Y.
If you’ve written what you believe is a rough draft, but you’re unhappy with your results, or you’re struggling to make various snippets that you do like come together into one piece, let’s have a 15-minute consultation and see how I could help.
(Photo by Dillon Shook on Unsplash.)
