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.
A draft means a messier version of the Real Thing. It 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.
There seems to be 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 deep 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.
More often than not, the order your reader will need or prefer the information in is not the order you thought of or remembered it in. 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 other information you know about the story, and every time you reread it, it will sound more “right” in the 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.
Or, you can think about getting a coach. 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.)
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