Writing Stories

Lisa Wang
Student Voices
Published in
5 min readAug 16, 2018

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This is how I imagine the creation of English verb tenses went down:

Man 1: Let’s keep it simple and just indicate tense with context rather than the verbs themselves.

Man 2: No, dude, if we add lots of complicated rules and even more exceptions then we and our progeny will have a leg up in life.

Man 1: Oh that’s a much better idea, let’s go with that. #MakeWhereverEnglishOriginatedGreatAgain

Seriously though — I challenge you to explain the past perfect continuous tense to someone learning English. This can be like the ice bucket challenge except not fun for anyone.

I’ve been reading a lot of personal statements from high school students for whom English is a second language, which is why I’ve been thinking about this. If you are currently writing a personal statement for college, this is the easy checklist of things you should do:

  • Stick your essay into Grammarly. Grammar is hard, cheating is easy. JUST KIDDING, but actually this is a pretty useful tool.
  • Double check verb tenses — I know they suck, but you should at the very least not move between past, present, future unless you need to.
  • Do not, I repeat, do not start consecutive sentences with multiple transition words that indicate you’re changing perspectives, i.e. “But,” “However,” “Yet.” Ex. “I love ice cream. But I also love pizza. However, ice cream really is very good.” You’re going to give your reader whiplash.
  • If you use a thesaurus, I swear to God, you better be 100000% sure you are using the word correctly. “I want to be crystalline about how this went down” is not a real sentence anyone has ever said in their life. Also, don’t use a thesaurus — sounding like yourself is a good thing.

So that’s the easy stuff. The hard part is telling a good story. I realized that I was never really taught how to tell a good story in school (can you say 5 paragraph essay?). Which is crazy considering the number of jobs that require this skill. My favorite example is a friend of mine who is working on his PhD and describes telling a good story as “cultivating potential.” For him, he works on really complicated cellular research, so he has to craft that into a good story to tell potential donors, and cultivate their potential to give him money.

Even for those it comes easiest to, there’s structure involved. Check out Dan Harmon’s Story Circle which describes his process for creating each episode of a TV series. Or Emma Coats’s 22 Rules of Storytelling, which outline the process Pixar goes through to create a great movie story. So why don’t we learn this stuff in school (or maybe you did, in which case kudos to your teacher)?

Well, regardless, here are some tips to writing your personal statements — take them with a grain of salt because my only credentials are the things in my bio, and the fact that I consume a lot of media.

  • In the same vein as the Story Circle, but less involved because you have <1000 words vs. 30 minutes of scheduled programming, your story should be circular. This is to say, you should somehow take your reader back to where you started, but with a different perspective. The most common type of essay I read is an “experience” essay — you know, like you lost an important game/match and then learned about the value of failure or something. For these essays, I suggest this pattern — revisit the challenge or a new challenge with your learning and make us care. Make it clear why this was important in your life overall.
  • Spend at least as much time detailing your personal learning/change as you do on the failure/challenge itself. I’ve read too many essays now where most of the essay is about the failure and then the last paragraph is like “And then I learned that this was bad and I stopped doing the bad thing.” That’s like if The Lion King ended with Simba going to live in the jungle and then we learn that he went back, fought Scar, and took his rightful place as King in the post-credits scene.
  • Write about something only you can write about. Let me tell you, reading a gazillion personal statements that are all the same is not fun. Reading an essay about a 16-year old girl randomly starting to bald and how she handles that is like getting a cold drink on a stifling, hot day. If you do write about something more common, like your family immigrated to the U.S. and it was hard but then you made friends, then you HAVE to include some specific stories that only you can tell. Otherwise, why are you different?
  • When you’re writing, imagine you are an experienced scuba diver leading your reader out of the Thai caves — the world you’re taking them through is dark and mysterious. Hand-hold the reader through your thoughts, don’t jump around. And use descriptive language to light up the scene.

The icing on top of all this is surprising and delighting your reader. This is probably the hardest one — and also, interestingly enough, what companies try to do every day with their products. You can do this in a couple of ways:

Tonal shift — this is my favorite example:

Drops hurtled from the sky, splattering the window with futile attacks as I gazed out at the dusk. I looked up at the clouds, trying to gauge how long and how hard the rain would fall, wondering whether the thunder and lightning would rumble on or settle in. Satisfied that they would linger, I stepped out into the evening, my feet resting upon the cold steps of my soaked stairway. As raindrops pelted my head and saturated my shirt, I watched a torn and trembling sky. It was a nice view.

A stormy night is set up with tons of descriptive language and then the paragraph ends with the simple “It was a nice view,” which is not something usually used to describe a storm and also a short, concise sentence that contrasts with the rest of the paragraph.

Symbolism — bring back a piece of symbolism that you used early on in a story later. The reader might have forgotten about it, and bringing it back is like finding an old friend, familiar and kind of delightful. My favorite example is using “ginger, anti-baldness shampoo” to represent facing going bald head-on, but also facing challenges in life directly. In the essay I’m referencing, the author discusses an entirely unrelated challenge at the end, and then references the “acrid smell of ginger shampoo” as a reminder to face her problems.

That’s all from me. If you don’t have a parent/teacher/other adult in your life who is a native English speaker, I’ll read your essay if you want. Throw it in a Google Doc and link it to me in a private comment.

Oh, and go watch Crazy Rich Asians and support this incredibly delayed moment in Hollywood. Cheers!

Thanks to John Finnegan for letting me use a snippet of his essay above.

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