The Films of Our Lives: Essay Advice and Some Epic Clips

How is this college admissions essay?

It's supposed to be evocative and lightly poetic in tone, but I can't seem to think of more to write. Any tips or feedbacks?

Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?

The cinema. As the lights slowly dim and the audiences slowly come to end their chatter, a calm silence ensues within me, a squirmy feeling that is a mix of excitement and benign ingenuity towards the vision of life that will soon stretch out in front of me. To overturn the state of serenity, the screen suddenly becomes infused with a complex ray of lights that originally belonged to a tiny envelope of film; what were thin scraps of plastic suddenly receive life, visible in form and matter that makes it hard to believe if it really is only a simple illusion. Perhaps it’s the thin line between the intangible nature of what’s presented before us and our own view that things are graspable. Whether we like or dislike what we have in front of us, it’s comforting to think that there’s a window we can look through other than our own, and that it expands the horizon of our experiences, triggers unfelt emotions, and puts us inside a reality that is graspable for the time being.

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I was asked to answer the question above on the website quora.com

Strange elongated sounds, an auditory slow motion whooshing.  “This is the end, my only friend.” The chopper blades blend, morph into the fan spinning above the man’s face, upside down, eyes staring, empty and scared, at us. Napalm beautifully unfurls, setting palm tree fronds spinning, slowly, into the smoke and sand filled air in his mind, in ours. The Doors’ song competes with the sounds  and images of the imagined, of the remembered, of the future apocalyptic fire… “Saigon,shit.”

A great essay, like a film, has a beginning, middle, and an end. An admission essay should have a narrative arc, but it can’t follow a feature film’s storyline. Why?

Choppers dot the beach, large, dark insects. Mortar rounds toss sand into split second castles that cascade down around the men. Everyone except Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore grabs their helmets, hunkers down as deep as they can into the sand.  M-16’s and AKs exchange debate. The waves curl high enough to make it worth surfing.

“This LZ’s still pretty hot sir. Maybe we should surf someplace else.”

“What do you know surfing Major, you’re from god damn New Jersey.”…

“I love the smell of Napalm in the morning….It smells like (pause) Victory.”

These two snippets attempt to capture a bit of the tone, verbal and visual, of the film Apocalypse Now. Each is only a few second’s worth of a long film. When I talk to students about writing admission essays, I often say that they often think of the task as similar to creating a major motion picture called: The Story of my Life. But thinking this way is misleading. A film has hundreds of minutes to unfold character, plot, setting, sound etc. The amount of time it takes to read a 650 word admission essay comes in at about 2 to 3 minutes. Instead of major motion picture, a student has the time to fill a short YouTube video. Should you attempt to get years of your life into such a small temporal space you may end up with a series of filmic long shots. To get a long shot you need a wide angle lens, and it means that there will be wide open spaces, a landscape, and maybe some people, hard to see, moving about on the horizon. In a feature length film the long shot works to set up everything to follow, but in 650 words you need to use, more often than not, close ups and you need to cut to the chase.

You’ve asked whether the words you’ve written have set the stage for the rest of the essay. The 177 words you have leave you, still, a fair amount of room to create an essay that makes the cinema a perfect place for you. Before I make any comments about your words let me share something I have found is pretty typical when people ask me to look over their essays.

Given my 30 years of reading admission essays, let me start by saying I have read untold thousands. Some have changed the way I think, read, view the writer and the world. Most don’t. It’s incredibly hard to write something that stands out. Most novels are not great. Most films are not either. Most anything is not great which is why great is hard and rare. 

More importantly, when students ask me to look over their essays I always ask what they are really looking for. By this I mean do they want me to put on my bad cop hat and beat up on the poor defenseless words in hopes of coercing a confession that gets at the real story underneath a web of abstractions and half truths? Or do they want me to don my Glinda the Good Witch costume and to the sound of a swirling musical score wave my wand and say “tap your heels together three times and think to yourself there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home” and all will be well? 

I should stop here. I have already exceeded the 650 words you will get to write your essay. And yet I have not even begun to address your words. Compared to a blank screen, 650 words may seem like more than enough to tell a good story or a bad story well.  On the other hand, to go into depth on any large topic, like a life, or how to write, it’s far too short to add much that is all that specific and helpful in the sense of both showing and telling. 

I often tell students who’ve already picked a topic to consider constructing a small pyramid instead of funnel. Many don’t know the tip of some pyramids was covered in gold and that is what you need to think about when constructing an essay. The tip is what sticks out and draws our eyes. In an admission essay (or most any essay), you have to grab our attention from a long way off. The eyes of admission readers glaze over quickly, they read and read and read, day after day, month after month. Coffee buzzed, sugar shakes, they crave a hit: “I DON'T WANT TO BE A PRODUCT OF MY ENVIRONMENT. I WANT MY ENVIRONMENT TO BE A PRODUCT OF ME." Frank Costello (Jack Nicolson) The Departed.

This first line of a film immediately challenges us, let’s us in the wide open door of the character’s house of being.  Journalists call an attention getting first line a hook. Whatever the term, it isn’t a wide angle lens approach, but something personal, specific, close: “Rosebud”. 

A pyramid essay begins with something specific. It paints or hums or runs. It’s something we can see or hear or feel. Pretend you are a director, cinematographer, editor, writer and you have a paragraph or two or three to create this film that will play in the screen inside a reader’s head. It’s what all the guidebooks talk about when they say show instead of tell. But that is not where the essay should end. It should also tell us about what this film we’ve just seen means. The telling part becomes the base of the pyramid. It’s what might have philosophical weight to hold up the gleaming tip. It’s at the end that abstractions, if needed at all, appear. Donald Justice, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, in a class I was in a long while ago, told us that we had to earn our abstractions. I agree. In admission essays, abstractions don’t do much unless there are concrete nouns and active verbs that have given them flesh and bone. 

Funnel essays approach topics the opposite way. They start out with a grand thesis, often far too wide, and pour it down the page trying to add some paragraphs of support and a few examples. Funnel essays often lose the readers attention by the end of the first paragraph, especially those who spend 10 or 12 hours a day reading applications. Funnel essays can work well, but they are not nearly as dramatic or as risky as pyramids. For those with writing talent pyramids often work. For those who want to write a clear essay a funnel can work but it won’t often be nominated for an essay Oscar. If you don’t believe me here are 10 first sentences of essays that helped students get into Stanford:

1. I change my name each time I place an order at Starbucks.

2. When I was in the eighth grade I couldn't read.

3. While traveling through the daily path of life, have you ever stumbled upon a hidden pocket of the universe?

4. I have old hands.

5. I was paralyzed from the waist down. I would try to move my leg or even shift an ankle but I never got a response. This was the first time thoughts of death ever cross my mind.

6. I almost didn't live through September 11th, 2001.

7. The spaghetti burbled and slushed around the pan, and as I stirred it, the noises it gave off began to sound increasingly like bodily functions.

8. I have been surfing Lake Michigan since I was 3 years old.

9. I stand on the riverbank surveying this rippled range like some riparian cowboy -instead of chaps, I wear vinyl, thigh-high waders and a lasso of measuring tape and twine is slung over my arm.

10. I had never seen anyone get so excited about mitochondria.

If this entry were a film then it would now be time for the climax. What about your words? I’ve been withholding my comments in part to be able to say some things that might apply to you but also to other readers too.  I am not quite going to transform into a bad cop or a Glinda but I do think I should make my own confession. I feel the need to quote Jack Nicolson again, this time a line from A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth.”

This is my somewhat feeble attempt to insert some humor in what has been a too serious set of words and references to apocalyptic or blockbuster films.

I think you your first line works well. The fragment puts us in the space you intend to discuss. What follows, however, is at least to me, a mix of genres that does not succeed in giving me a voice that I think is yours. You have said that you are trying to be poetic and I understand what you are attempting to do. On the other hand, some of the words you use do not work for me. For example, the word ingenuity seems forced and does not really define what I think you are trying to say. But rather than go word by word I think it might be helpful just to underscore that your voice in the essay seems poised between two different and in some ways contradictory registers. You attempt to describe the place but you do so in such abstract ways that it ceases to draw me in. 

If we could have a conversation about this I would ask you some questions. What are your favorite films? After you have named one or two I would ask you why. I would try to get you to draw out details and then I would ask you to write them down. No order, not yet.

I would ask you lots of questions about what films mean and how they mean. I would probably talk a bit about the role of the viewer and invoke Hitchcock’s Rear Window as an allegory for the way people watch films. I would also ask: Do you want to write about films or do you want to write about the space, the chairs, popcorn stand, the screen etc. that make the place? You sort of do this a bit and this too could make a great essay. But your opening sentence leads me to believe it is the magic world we enter into once all the lights, cell phones etc. are off. I think either approach could work but I would think that your invoking a few of the great images or words from films that have changed you might be more evocative and also reveal more about your aesthetic tastes. If you wanted to attempt a pyramid essay I would tell you to describe a scene or two at the beginning of your essay, then move out wider to reveal that the world you have just created comes from a film and then move further out into why these films and this place means so much to you. I would hope that by the end of the conversation I would know which films meant something significant to you, why you think films are important to you and to our culture and probably a lot more. I would hope this would take hours. I love films and I know I would learn from you. After that I would ask you to write down the things you have said, again in no particular order, and then, after that start to shape them into a scene that will unfold clearly and speak to us, maybe shock or surprise us, or maybe make us laugh or cry. We love stories. The story you have begun to tell has potential but potential won’t get you in. You have to film your words, firm your words, work your words, and then do it again. After that, I think you’d be ready for the red carpet premiere.

Best of luck