Essay Masterclass / Module Two
Almost every dead personal essay I have read died here, in the first quarter hour of this module, and it died quietly. The student had a topic. They believed a topic was a story. It was not, and nobody told them for another month.
Vivian Gornick draws the line better than anyone has since:
The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.2
Take the boy on the trail. His situation is that he climbed a hard path with his father and found it easy while his father struggled. That is everything that happens. His story is that he had decided being a man meant never faltering, and his father, panting on a rock and talking about a newspaper column, showed him the idea was childish.
Take the boy with the vacuum. His situation is that his mother cleans a professor's house and he helps her. His story is that another family's leftovers taught him what to want, and he has never been comfortable about where his ambition came from.
Take the girl next door to the piano teacher. Her situation is a house and a neighbour. Her story is years of wanting to be known by her own name, and the discovery that she does not want to give the other name up either.
Read those situations again. Every one is boring. A hike, a cleaning job, a house next door. Yours will be boring too and it does not matter in the slightest, because nobody remembers the situation. They remember the change of mind.
Which is why the idea is called that. Not an event. A change of mind. He thought one thing, and then he did not. If you cannot find that shape in your material you do not yet have an essay, and finding out in the first exercise costs you fifteen minutes rather than three drafts.
Here is the sentence I get from about a third of students every year, in one costume or another.
My story is about the summer I volunteered at the animal shelter and learned the value of compassion.3
That is a situation with a moral bolted on, which is worse than a bare situation. The moral is a lid. Compassion was not a discovery, it was a word she agreed with before the summer began, so there is nothing left in the essay to find out. Every reader can feel a lid. It is the specific flatness of an essay that finished thinking before it finished starting.
The same material, opened:
I went to the shelter to be the kind of person who rescues things, and spent the summer discovering I was squeamish, bored, and mostly there for myself.
Nothing changed except honesty, and now the essay has somewhere to go.
Some of you have material that genuinely runs hardship, effort, improvement. An illness. A family that came apart. A year of failing before getting good. Every guide on the internet will tell you to find a clever angle on it, and that advice will make your essay worse, because a clever angle on a real difficulty reads as a person performing rather than remembering.
Write it straight. What protects a straight account is not structural trickery, it is refusing to arrive anywhere too tidy. Keep the improvement smaller than the effort. If your ending says you overcame it completely, no reader believes you. If your ending says you still flinch at a particular sound, every reader believes you.
The most common note I write on a first draft is that it is an anecdote and not a story. Students hate that note because they cannot see the difference, and they are right that nobody ever explains it. The difference is mechanical. In an anecdote, things happen. In a story, somebody wants something and cannot easily have it.4
The boy on the trail wants to prove he is a man. What blocks him is that his definition is wrong, which is a far better obstacle than a steep path because he cannot climb over it. It costs him the admission that he had been looking down on his own father.
The boy with the vacuum wants the life he can see inside that house. What blocks him is that he can only see it while his mother is on her knees cleaning it. It costs him a permanent unease about the source of his own ambition.
The girl next door wants her own name. What blocks her is that the whole neighbourhood already has a name for her. It costs her the fact that she loves the man who gave it to her.
Your stakes are going to feel embarrassingly small. They are supposed to. At this length nobody needs your life to have been in danger, and an essay about a genuine catastrophe written without a want is still flat. What a reader needs is something you actually wanted and could not simply take.
Watch for this one, because it is subtle and almost everybody writes it at least once. I wanted to be seen as a leader. That is not a want, it is a wish for a reputation, and readers detect it in about four words. Push a level down. What did you want that would still have been worth having if nobody had been watching? That answer is your want. The other one is your anxiety.
One more thing here, and it is what makes idea four possible. There are two people in your essay. The person who lived it, and the person sitting at the desk writing it. They do not know the same things. Everything you understand now that you did not understand then lives in the gap between them, and that gap is the only place reflection can come from.5
Which explains why essays about last month are so hard to write, and nobody warns you. If the two of you know exactly the same things there is no gap, so there is nothing to reflect with, and you end up asserting significance instead of finding it. Given a choice of material, take the older event.
There are many shapes. At this length, in one module, two of them do the work, and I have watched students lose a fortnight inventing a third that did not survive contact with a word count.
The first is a single narrative that turns. One continuous episode, and partway through it the writer's understanding flips. The boy on the trail is this. It is one hike, nothing else, no second scene anywhere in the essay, and the turn happens sitting on a rock while his father talks about a column in the newspaper. Choose this when your change of mind can be pinned to one occasion.
The second is a montage held on a thread. Several separated moments tied by one recurring thing. The boy with the vacuum is this, and he declares it in four sentences.
At age 6, I remember the light filled openness of the house. At 9, I remember how I used to lounge on the couch. At 12, I remember family photographs of the Spanish countryside. At 14, I remember vacuuming each foot of carpet.6
Four ages, four rooms, one house. The thread is the house, and inside it the vacuum keeps returning until it becomes the last image in the essay. Choose this when your understanding accumulated over years and no single day can carry it.
One question decides it. Can you name the day it changed? If you can, write the first shape. If you hear yourself saying it was more gradual than that, write the second and stop fighting your own material.
A thread has to be a physical thing. Perseverance is not a thread. A blue Hoover vacuum is a thread. An album, an obituary column, a poster on a bedroom wall, a pair of shoes. If you cannot point at your thread, what you have is a set of moments that share a topic, and a reader feels that as drift rather than design. This is the commonest structural failure at this length and it is entirely avoidable in exercise three.
Two others are worth knowing, partly so you recognise them and partly so you can decide against them on purpose rather than by accident.
The braid runs two or three strands in alternation, and the meaning comes from the collision rather than from either strand. A hospital ward in one, a chemistry syllabus in the other, and the reader assembles an argument the writer never states. It is genuinely powerful and genuinely hard, because a braid that does not converge reads as two unfinished essays stapled together. The applicant who told her aunt's cancer in four sections titled with Queen songs is doing a version of it, and it holds because both strands are physically present in the same room.7
The borrowed form takes a shape from somewhere else entirely and pours the essay into it. A recipe, field notes, a lab report, a table of contents. The boy who reads obituaries with his father does this. His essay is arranged as a book: Chapter one. Chapter two. Chapter three. Epilogue.8 It survives, and most attempts do not, because of two conditions. The borrowed form has to be something already inside the essay's world, and it has to make the essay easier to read rather than harder. Chapters belong to a boy whose father is a writer and whose subject is other people's life stories. A recipe structure on an essay about debate belongs to nobody, and a reader will read it as a costume.
If you are not certain, use one of the first two. A conventional shape executed cleanly beats an ambitious shape executed on a deadline, every time, and nobody has ever been rejected for writing a clear narrative.
While you are choosing, notice what the gaps do. A break between sections is not decoration and it is not a paragraph break. It is a jump in time or in mind, and it lets you cut everything that would otherwise have to carry the reader across. The Queen essay uses four of them and skips months inside each. Handled well, a section break is the cheapest compression you have. Handled badly it is where the reader falls out of the essay, and the test is whether the first sentence after the break tells them where they now are.
Now you write, and you write the middle. Not the opening. You do not have an opening yet and you should not want one, for reasons that will be obvious by idea six.
Personal essays run on two gears. Scene is what happened, in time, with physical detail, and the reader watches it. Reflection is you now, at the desk, thinking about it. Beginners write all of one. Too much scene and you have a diary entry that means nothing. Too much reflection and you have an opinion column by somebody who has offered no evidence.
Aim for roughly two-thirds scene and one-third reflection, and interleave them. Do not write four hundred words of story followed by two hundred words of what it meant. Nobody has ever survived that second block. It is where readers put an essay down.
Remember the gap from idea two. Here is what it is for. The boy on the trail is sitting on a rock feeling guilty, and the sentence reads: guilt that I had ever bought into facile standards of manhood. The boy on the trail did not have the words facile standards. The writer at the desk does. That distance is the reflection, and you can see both of them inside a single clause.
A scene done properly costs about a hundred and twenty words. At this length you can afford two, possibly three. Which means most of your beat sheet is never going to become a scene. It becomes a sentence.
Say that to yourself before you start, because the instinct is to give every beat its full moment and then discover in exercise seven that you are at eleven hundred words with no ending. Choose which two beats get the camera. Compress everything else without apology, and notice that compression is a skill rather than a loss. Three years can go into one clause. A whole friendship can go into a single detail about how somebody answered the phone.9
The essay about the hike contains almost no dialogue. It contains this, halfway up the trail:
“I think we need a water break,” I said, looking him over.
“I think so, too,” he replied.
Eight words and four words. Hold on to them, because they come back in idea five and they are the best thing in the essay. Look at what they carry. The son decides. The father agrees. Both maintain the fiction that the break is for the son, and neither says so. You could write two hundred words about their relationship and convey less.10
Long exchanges almost always cost more than they return. Dialogue is expensive per word and it does not compress, so spend it where a person reveals themselves in a way narration cannot manage, and nowhere else.
Your essay is going to contain somebody else's difficulty. A parent's illness, a sibling's struggle, a grandmother who had nothing. Two rules, and they are ethical before they are literary.
They get to be a person with their own wants, not a device that delivers your lesson. The father in that essay lost a job and fell into a depression, and the essay lets that be his rather than a plot point in his son's development.
And the essay stays about your change of mind rather than their hardship. This is harder than it sounds, because hardship is dramatic and a change of mind is quiet, so the gravity pulls the wrong way. A reader who finishes your essay full of admiration for your mother and knowing nothing about you has read a failure, however moved they were.11
The ending comes before the opening. That is not a preference, and idea six will explain it.
The best ending in the whole bank is thirteen words long and you have already read most of it. The boy and his father start the climb. Halfway up, the son says he thinks they need a water break. The essay ends:
“How about we get that water,” I said, reaching back into the pack.
That is a callback, and it is the most reliable ending available to you. Something planted early returns, changed. The first water break was a son managing his father. The last one is a son sitting down with him. Nothing is explained. The reader does the arithmetic and feels clever, which is exactly the feeling you want them holding as they close your file.
Now look at what he did not do, because this is where callbacks die. He did not repeat the line. The first version is I think we need a water break. The last is how about we get that water. Same object, different sentence, and the difference is the whole point. An exact repeat reads as a trick, and a reader who notices the trick stops trusting the writer. A changed repeat reads as time having passed.12
The essay about the sister's bedroom does this more precisely than anything else in the collection. It opens on a poster with neon-pink letters demanding that passers-by be yourself. It ends, on a stage, mid-performance:
“Never just be yourself,” I started. “Be yourselves.”13
One letter. The entire essay turns on one letter, and he trusts you to catch it without help. That is the level of restraint good endings have.
You are not required to arrive anywhere comfortable, and the strongest endings here do not.
I'm not just the piano teacher's daughter. But then again, I am.
It's her blue Hoover vacuums that hold up the framework of my life. Someday, I hope my diploma can hold up the framework of hers.14
The first holds two contradictory things and refuses to choose between them. The second brings back the vacuum from its own first sentence and turns it into a hope about a diploma, which is a wish rather than an achievement. Neither resolves. Both are better for it, because a seventeen-year-old who has finished thinking about their own family is not credible and a reader knows it.
Charles Baxter wrote an essay called Against Epiphanies, and it is worth knowing that professional writers treat the tidy revelation as a defect rather than as the goal.15
The lesson stated. I learned that family is what matters most. If your final paragraph could be replaced by a fortune cookie, it will be read as one.
The epiphany on schedule. The insight arrives in the last four lines, correctly sized, precisely when the word count required it. Readers have seen thousands and clock the timing before the content.
The pivot to the college. The essay swerves in its final lines into what you will study and how excited you are. Two of the admitted essays in this bank do exactly that and both are weaker for it. Save it for the supplements, where somebody actually asked.
The zoom out to humanity. You end on what we all should remember. A reader was interested in one specific person, and in your last sentence you replaced them with everybody.
Here is the hike essay with its real ending removed and the first of those put in its place.
Looking back on that hike, I realised that true manhood is not about strength but about vulnerability. It is a lesson I will carry with me for the rest of my life.16
Every word of that carries the same meaning as how about we get that water. It is simply announced instead of enacted, and announcing it robs the reader of the pleasure of having worked it out. Notice also that it takes thirty-one words to do the job of thirteen.
Here is why the opening waited. An opening is a promise, and until the ending existed you did not know what you were promising. Harry Bauld puts it plainly: a good lead is very often written last, because writers do not know what they are going to say until they have said it.17
Start with what you are up against. Twenty-four of the thirty-eight Common App essays in this bank open the same way. Somebody in the middle of a moment, one sensory detail in the first clause, usually a participle. Sitting in my makeshift darkroom, I shut off the water. Surveying from atop the steaming volcano, I peered down.18
All of them got in, so this is not an error and I am not going to tell you to stop. What I will tell you is that it is the most crowded sentence pattern in American admissions, that a reader has seen forty of them before lunch, and that it therefore buys you less attention per word than almost anything else you could put first.
Now the ones I can still quote years later. Count the words as you go.
I lived in the neighborhood music box.
Goodsway Mooring was an oasis in hell.
My parents are what you might call aggressive atheists.
When I was three, the horizon spewed red.
Chapter one. We begin our Monday mornings with the obituaries.19
Six words, seven, nine, eight, eleven. Not one describes a scene. Not one begins at the beginning of anything. Every one puts a claim on the table that the essay is then obliged to pay, and that debt is precisely what makes you read the second sentence.
Which is the mechanism underneath all of this, and the reason this idea has the name it has. A hook is a promise. Oasis in hell obliges the writer to produce the hell, and she does, in the next clause, and it turns out to be London. A music box obliges her to explain how a person lives inside one. The promise is the engine. An opening that promises nothing is just a sentence that happens to be first.
Look again at the music box. You do not know what it means. A music box is a small object with a lid and a ballerina, and nobody lives in one, so you keep reading to find out that she means a house full of other children's scales. She has withheld the noun that would explain her own sentence.
That is the most reliable move on the page and it costs nothing. Give the reader a sentence they can picture and cannot yet interpret. Do not give them a sentence they cannot picture, which is a different thing and merely confusing. The obituary essay does the same job with two words, because Chapter one opens a loop and a reader now expects chapter two and will stay to get it.
A loop cannot stay open long. After the first line a reader needs to know roughly who is speaking, where they are, and when. They should have all three by the end of the third sentence. If they do not, curiosity turns into irritation somewhere around sentence five.
The hike essay lands immediately: a father, a son, a named trail in the second sentence. The music box takes three sentences and gets away with it because the withheld thing is small. Nobody gets away with five.
Not every good opening is a firework, and the calm ones are rarer and often stronger for it. The essay about the sister's bedroom begins:
My favorite room is my sister's room.20
Seven flat words. No paradox, no shock, nothing withheld except everything, and it went to Harvard and Stanford. It works because the sentence is strange the moment you think about it, and because the calm is doing characterisation: this is a writer who is not going to shout at you. If your material is genuinely tender, do not put a firecracker in front of it. The mismatch is audible.
Read when I was three, the horizon spewed red aloud. Eight words, seven of them one syllable, and the two ugliest sounds sit at the end where the voice lands. That is not an accident of subject matter, it is a sentence built to be heard, and openings get heard more than any other line you write because the reader has not yet started skimming.
Short words at the start. Vary the length. Put your best or worst sound at the end. You will do this properly in Module 5, but do it roughly now, because an opening that sounds clumsy will be judged clumsy regardless of what it says.21
Bauld sorted openings by the kind of curiosity they create, which is more useful than sorting them by subject, and forty years later nobody has improved on the list.22 Four are worth your time, and each dies in its own particular way.
The paradox states a contradiction that turns out to be true. Oasis in hell. It dies when the contradiction is only verbal and nothing in the essay resolves it, at which point it reads as a slogan on a poster.
The confession admits something recognised but not usually said. It dies when you confess something free. Nobody would think less of you for it, so you earn no credit for the honesty, and a reader can feel the safety.
The shocker startles in one line. It dies when the shock is decoration. Bauld's phrase for the abused version is a tabloid headline, and the test is whether the startling thing is also the subject.
The curmudgeon takes a contrary position. My parents are what you might call aggressive atheists. Watch how that survives. What you might call puts the phrase in somebody else's mouth so he can use it and stand slightly apart from it at once, and then the next sentence doubles down. It dies when you are contrary about a position nobody actually holds, or when the ornery voice reads as a pose, which at seventeen it easily can.
The dictionary definition. The famous quotation. The flashback that opens in a vivid moment you then abandon and never return to.
The first two fail for the same reason, which is that you have spent your single best-read sentence on somebody else's words. A reader learns nothing about you from Webster or from Socrates, and both signal that you could not find your own way in. The third fails because it breaks the promise immediately. You opened a loop and walked away from it, and the reader spends the next paragraph waiting to be taken back to a room you have no intention of revisiting.
You will be told that admissions officers do not really notice first lines. Twice, a committee put the opposite in writing. One essay begins:
“Do you have body bags? The leak-proof kind, we need as many as you can spare!”
and the committee wrote that the applicant's interest in global health jumped out at us from the first sentence, and she carried this same theme through the entire essay. Another opens with two lines of a guessing game, and the committee wrote that the writer simulates electronic 20 questions to hook the reader's attention while effectively bridging his academic interests and future aspirations.23
Read the second half of each remark. Carried this same theme through the entire essay. While effectively bridging. Neither committee praised a hook. Both praised a hook that connected to something, and that is the pattern in every reader comment I have on the subject. An opening that only grabs gets no mention at all. Which is the entire argument for writing yours after your ending rather than before your middle.
Draft one is expected to be bad, and I need to say that in a way you will actually believe, because half of all students stall here trying to send something good. A late first draft costs you two revisions when deadlines are close, and that is when revisions are the only thing that matters.
What you are handing over is not a piece of writing. It is a diagnosis. Its entire job is to let somebody tell you which part of your actual prose is weakest, in your voice, on your material, rather than in theory. A polished four-hundred-word fragment cannot do that. A rough seven-hundred-word whole can, and the difference between those two is a fortnight.24
Module 3 is two more complete revisions, four days apart, on purpose. That is where the essay becomes good. Nothing you send is final, and the parts you are embarrassed by are the parts that will get the most useful attention.
So the permission is real and it is specific. You are permitted to send something with ugly joins, a weak third paragraph and an ending you are not sure about. You are not permitted to hold it back.
Done when the second half names a change of mind rather than a quality you already had.
Done when the cost line is not blank. If it is blank your material has nothing at risk, and you should go back to your inventory now. Exercise two is the cheapest possible place to discover that. Exercise five is the most expensive.
Done when the T is placed. If you cannot place it, the story sentence from exercise one is not yet a change of mind, and you should fix that before writing a word of prose.
Done when you have two real scenes, several compressed beats, and reflection sitting between them rather than piled at the end.
Done when your last paragraph contains no sentence that tells the reader what to think.
Done when you have one opening that makes a promise, and an ending that pays it.
Done when it is sent, not when it is good.
If you keep one sentence: write the middle, then the end, then the beginning, and make sure the beginning owes the reader exactly what the end pays back.
Every student essay quoted on this page is reproduced in full, with its source, in References.