You review the prompts for your upcoming college essays, and feel the creative juices begin to flow. You sit down at your laptop, open up a blank document, put your fingers over the keys and then…nothing. No flash of inspiration, no grand and sweeping opening, just the blank page and your cursor blinking at you.
Writer’s block is a problem which vexes thousands of students every year as they try to write their college essays, and one we encounter a lot while working with students. It can feel like an insurmountable problem, but there are some easy strategies you can use that will help you deal with it successfully. We’re going to explore these in this article, and show you how you can vanquish your writer’s block, and write the perfect college essay.
Skip the Introduction
Beginning an essay is hard. Writing a catchy hook, formulating a coherent thesis, even figuring out a plan for the rest of the essay. It feels like a big first step, and a daunting one for many students to tackle, leaving you like the student above, stuck looking at an empty page.
Our advice here is encapsulated by a quote by Harlan Ellison, taken from his short story “Repent Harlequin!” Said the TickTickMan: “Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself.”
This quote is on the nature of the story he is telling itself, but we have found that this works quite well as writing advice as well. Don’t worry about the introduction, don’t find the perfect hook or craft a compelling thesis, simply begin in the middle of whatever story you’re telling, where the action is. Once you have this down, and have the whole story on the page, you can go back and find the thread that starts it. Building a hook is easier when you know the point of the essay, and crafting a thesis that models it simpler when you can see the twists of the narrative.
This advice works best for students struggling to start the writing process entirely, and those whose biggest hurdle is beginning an essay. This is a common issue we deal with, but have found significant success with this approach.
Write Something Else
Writing is a skill, like any other. How do NFL quarterbacks hone their throwing skills to the elite level? By throwing footballs a lot. How do writers do it? By writing.
This advice is for students who find they get stuck partway through a narrative, or who can begin an essay, but not continue it, not seeing how their story should proceed, and being blocked because of it. We see this often as well, where an essay might have a strong start, but when the student does not know what step to take next, they get stuck. Our mentors can give advice in these situations, but how do you overcome it yourself?
Practicing writing, especially narrative writing, helps you better understand the flow of stories, and makes you more comfortable with your own voice. It teaches you how stories progress naturally, and how to move around or rework issues in the narrative you are telling.
This approach does have limits, the primary one being that practicing things takes time; nobody becomes an expert overnight. This is the best tool overall for overcoming writer’s block, but may not be useful for all students due to the time commitment.
Rubber Ducking
There is a debugging method among computer scientists called rubber ducking. When the programmer has an issue with locating a bug in a particular piece of code, and can’t seem to isolate it, they verbally explain the problem to an inanimate object, traditionally a rubber duck.
Your verbal reasoning centers in your brain use different pathways, and force you to think about the same issue in a different way. By articulating your issue to a neutral party, even (or perhaps especially), one which cannot respond, you force your brain to approach the familiar problem in a new way.
This can work for writer’s block as well, when you are stuck for what to add next, what to write about, or how your story should end. Step away from the page, find a duck, and explain your essay verbally. How it starts, where it stands now, and where you want it to go. Often, the more natural tone you take while speaking can translate well to the page as well, making your essays sound more like it was written by a person, containing the kind of authenticity that admissions officers love to see.
Building Outlines and Re-Brainstorming
Sometimes you get partway through writing an essay, and then get stuck. No matter how you approach the narrative you’re telling, there’s no proper way to convey your intended meaning. This happens on occasion; not all ideas pan out in the writing process. In these cases, it can help to go back to your initial outline, or even back to brainstorming.
It can be hard to realize that an idea just isn’t coming to fruition, but not all great ideas lead invariably to great essays. Sometimes a story doesn’t hit the right beats, or it doesn’t show the aspects of yourself that you thought it would. Writer’s block can and does occur when you simply aren’t working with the best possible story. In these cases, going back to your initial brainstorming with your newfound knowledge can show you concepts you previously overlooked which would serve much better.
Read Other Essays
A final tip to get your creative juices flowing is to read what other students have written for their college application essays, either their personal statements or the supplemental essays various colleges ask for. The goal is not to copy them directly, either in subject or style, but to get a better sense of how these essays flow, and how they can be constructed.
It is easy to take inspiration from essays that worked, or see how a particular essay structure could be well suited to telling your own story to colleges. We do want to warn again about copying essays too closely; these students got in because the essays they wrote shared something authentic about them. Your own essay will work well if it shows something authentic about you.
For some examples of what these look like, check out our essay archive, or see our essay guides for top universities.
What Not to Do: Using AI
AI tools are becoming increasingly popular with students to assist in their essay writing, and college applications are no exception. The appeal of these tools is obvious; with some simple instructions and a few clicks what would have taken you hours is accomplished in minutes instead. There are, however, some significant issues with using AI in this way.
The first, and most repeated, is that using AI to do your work for you is cheating. Colleges are quick to note this themselves, as can be seen in Caltech’s well-developed guidelines for how applicants should (and more often should not) make use of AI tools in the writing process. Note that they specifically caution against using AI in the drafting process.
If your essays are found to be written using AI, your application will be rejected out of hand. Admissions officers want to admit students who are capable of doing the work required by an advanced college, and turning in an essay not written by you gives them no proof you are capable of what they ask for.
In addition, the other point of admissions essays is to learn about who you are as a person, so they can ascertain how you will fit into the community they are trying to create. An essay drafted by AI can’t tell them this; only you really know who you are, no matter how careful your prompt instructions are to ChatGPT.
Finally, we need to point out that AI is actually really bad at writing college essays. We’ve discussed this before, but it simply isn’t capable of the same kind of prose and artistry achievable by a human. It can create something which is legible, but it lacks the style and flow that top colleges want to see in admissions essays. Even if it does seem like a silver bullet to cure your writer’s block, it will leave you worse off than before you tried to use it.
Final Thoughts
Writer’s block is a persistent plague on those who put pen to page, and students struggling to write their college essays oft suffer its ravages. We hope that this article has given you workable strategies that you can implement to deal with writer’s block, and shown how you can get your own college essays back on track.
Of course, as with everything else in the admissions process, writing the essays is easier with help. Our mentors are well versed in how to guide you from brainstorming, to choosing the perfect idea, to drafting your essay, to polishing it to perfection. Essay writing may not be easy, but it doesn’t have to be a painful process either. To learn more about how we can help you, schedule a free consultation today. We’re always happy to hear from you.
