Please read this: http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html
The best advice I give is that you should produce a relentless amount of content. Try to produce one essay every day starting today
Eg every day write a brand new common app essay from a blank document. In the beginning It should either be a different topic or should be a new telling of a previous essay without looking back at what you wrote, like pull from memory
You should start to exhaust every possible idea for a college essay that you have, and exhaust every possible biographical memoir concept you have, until you get to the point where you feel you are writing absurd content
Then you will start to unlock creativity. Don’t worry if your first essays are boring as hell. Just keep writing. Produce a massive corpus of content
Other good rules of thumb: almost never let an adult edit your essay, especially near the beginning. They will ruin your essay and more importantly your creativity. If there’s an adult mentor you really look up to who is more worldly in their thinking, then you can have them look at the halfway point or later.
As for friends to read/edit, they should come closer to the end, mostly to check your grammar and spelling and coherence. If the friend is also applying to college, their advice on content will be counterproductive, since they don’t have experience, and will make your essay sound more indistinguishable from everyone else’s
You can break these rule whenever you want. In the best case someone giving you feedback should be able to mark whether certain paragraphs or chunks are boring or not boring, and you should be responsible for making your essay not boring. If your essay feels boring to yourself, then it is guaranteed to be boring. Write a new draft.
You’ll know when youre getting close to a winning essay when not a single sentence feels painful to write. Don’t lie to yourself about this either. You’ll know when you almost have a winning essay when youre having absolutely the time of your life writing the essay, laughing your ass off, it will feel mischievous, like pulling a prank. You’ll be surprised by this feeling because so many previous attempts at writing the essay will have felt like pulling teeth
* that last point is not to say your essay has to be funny. A deliberate attempt to be funny will likely fail unless one is already a comedian. It’s more like the joy of writing something that is actually enjoyable to both write and read. And the feeling is more so the realization that you have achieved originality, voice, and self awareness
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