Off-beat Essays

Like I said before, this book "might" help you out and/or put you in the mood to produce or one-up.  Not all essays are actually that good and I think that's a good thing.

I'd like to focus on "off beat" essays, and I found a sample from the book at the following link:

Off-Beat Essays

You can click on Alexis Spero's essay further down in the introduction.  I'd like you guys to write an "off beat" essay for next class (the next class we workshop).

A good college essay - Heeku Kang

  “You betrayed me on that snowy mountainside! Your reasoning was that my blind belief in destiny was evil! I see your point now, actually! But you know what, Irithdelle ElFalan? By betraying me and letting yourself slay innocent humans of the north, by seizing the HawkEye with force and using it for your personal enjoyment, you turned evil yourself! Evil! Evil!”

I cough as he finally lets me go—my main character, Jeicale Riverstone. My already husky voice is now croaky from shouting too much. Jeicale is furious at Irithdelle. So am I. I lie back on my chair, rub my bloodshot eyes, push my laptop away, and gratefully play Maksim Mrvica’s “Exodus,” a piece I often listen to after writing tense scenes. It feels even more special this time because this scene is the climax of my first full-length, 600-page English novel, The Lost Heroine.

Seven years ago, as a complete sponge inspired by excellently-read English audio books, I began to write without planning a childishly-structured story titled The Magical Mansion, in which a desperate young kid unsatisfied with reality breaks away into a magical mansion awash with fantastic adventure. Though full of embarrassingly cliché characters and shameless homage to Harry Potter spells, The Magical Mansion still has meaning, which can be found in the clumsy opening sentences of the story: “I will write a story about a magical mansion from now on. You have to listen carefully. The main character is me.”

On and on I wrote short stories in English, persistently, totaling sixteen in the end. Yet none but the first has the actual me as its protagonist. Being my first story, written by an English novice who could barely write, The Magical Mansion has multiple errors and drawbacks and is easily the plainest of all. Yet in reading over the story and seeing that the protagonist found comfort in a fantasy world and not in reality, I saw that the story was actually about my desire to escape from the villains of reality.

Back then I used to have a black and white view of the world, one in which there were either heroes or there were villains. My alcoholic father, the man who used to tie me to a swing to prevent me from looking into ant holes, was the major villain. My mother, the woman who always rescued me from my father and cuddled me in her arms, was the ultimate hero.

Naturally, my earliest stories are strictly designed so that the bad guys get thoroughly beaten up by the good guys. Omnipotent, I achieved in my stories what was impossible in the real world. Creating my own worlds was one way for me to cope with reality, by being in a place where my father the bad, bad villain could not interfere. Both worlds, the one inside and the one outside, were black and white.

Slowly, though, they grayed. My later short stories and novels no longer have flat, “hero-or-villain” characters. Irithdelle, for one, is neither a hero nor a villain. Or, she could still be both. In the book she betrays Jeicale and his gang Lunarelle because she thinks his blind adherence to destiny is wrong and evil. However, she lets herself become evil as well, abusing her magical powers to make humans obey and fall to her cause. Not unlike her, many of my relatively recent characters are flexible, versatile, and multifaceted.

This change—no, metamorphosis—took place because the originally dichotomous worldview I had been sticking onto made sense no more. I had begun to see the gray in people as well. Yes; the graying sensation was not limited to my imaginary world. The real world was a feast of colors. My once black father, too, turned gray and then blossomed into a parade of rich, vibrant colors. Actually, it had been the black shades on my eyes, not an inherent blackness of my father, that had forced me to see him in black. And when I took off the shades, our relationship spurted from adversity to a more normalized father-son status. Then it bettered, with smiles, jokes, and, above all, mutual understanding. The place I had dubbed hell was all of a sudden home again.

I entered high school filled with these new spirits, and found myself capable of conversing with a wider group of people in a school brimming with students with unparalleled individuality. The Lost Heroine began there. Naturally, the plot was richer, longer, and smarter, for I put together the tale by drawing elements out of real life—people, happenings, contexts. The world was a bigger and more colorful place for me now. It wasn’t only my characters that had turned gray.

I put my laptop on my lap again and erase the last three sentences I just wrote. Jeicale doesn’t have to tell the readers Irithdelle is evil; her being multifaceted has already been established. I will convey something else through him. I start yelling again, and so does Jeicale: “Friendship, Irithdelle, is more valuable than anything else in this world, and you defied it!” No. It is too plain. I erase. It goes on.

Superhero - By Seewan Kim

I finally got it.

                  I finally figured out why female superheroes tend to be not as romantic. Spiderman has Mary Janes, and Superman has Lois Lane. But what about Wonderwoman? Batgirl?

                  When people think of the word “hero”, it usually elicits an image of burly man with masks and capes or with yellow jumpers and fire hose. Or sometimes, it recalls an image of ancient historical figures whose works and feats seem too far away from the lives of ordinary people. However, to me, that word elicits an image of Jain Kim, a petite girl with a large smile.

                  I like to say that I’ve always been full of passion and confidence, but in fact, that hasn’t always been the case. I wasn’t shy, but rather insecure, preferring an one-way debate with curly letters in books to clashing with my peers. A boyfriend? That was a fairy tale. I was too baby-faced, too content, and perhaps even complacent to think of such matter. The stuffed dolphin that kept its place on my bed for more than ten years was enough for me. Maybe in my dreams after all the lights are off, but not in this real side of the world.

                  Naturally, I had no intention of “competing” when I first took up climbing. It was in the urge of my mother who worried about my seemingly feeble stature and lack of exercise that I went to the nearby climbing center. (I broke my glasses twice as I tried to play in a basketball game.) When the trainer pointed to the wall that I’d eventually be climbing, I turned to mom and rasped,

                  “Mom, you’re serious? With my height?”

                  The wall was 15 meters high, but certainly comparable to Mt. Everest. It was not even perpendicular, slanting at an awkward angle that reminded me of those action movies with secret agents. And all I had to prevent me from falling into the doom was a rope thinner than my own thumb and a safety harness with Velcro that did not seem too sturdy. Me? Climb that? No way.

                  But only a couple of feet away, there Jain was, climbing up and down the wall as if she was bitten by a radioactive spider. And she was a good two inches shorter! On my way home, I grumbled to my mother, accusing her of trying to kill her own daughter, but deep inside, my thoughts were filled with that tiny Spiderwoman.

                  I was inevitably drawn back to the facility, day after day, staring at her feats with awe while my own climbing made tangible improvements. It wasn’t until I asked the manager her whereabouts that I learned that she was ranked first in the world and that she had gone to Italy to compete.

                  The first in the world. It was like finding out that my next door neighbor was a Nobel Prize Laureate or an Oscar Winning actress. Suddenly, the walls of my world started to shake apart. I’ve had numerous people who shaped my life: my brother brought me to the world of science, my mother to self-reliance. But it was this tiny girl with beautiful smile that let me see how tiny my world was. Now was time for me to take up my own share of medals in domestic competitions. Dreams were no longer limited to beds. They started to invade the areas of reality.

                  One day, I finally gathered up enough courage to go up and ask Jain a question that I had kept in my mind for long.

                  “Why are you so passionate about climbing?”

                After all, there’s not much fame or money involved in this fringe sport; I’d never be able to play baseball with Alex Rodriguez, will I?

                “Because it’s there.” She replied.

                Someone needs to reach the top. Someone needs to travel to Mars, and someone needs to cure the cancer. So, why not me? Why don’t I go for it?

                “Er…. Do you have a boyfriend?”

                She broke into a hearty laughter and shook her head.

                “I don’t have time for that.”

                See? I figured it out.

Common App Prompts

Within the next two weeks, the deadline being the first day of midterms,  I would like you to hand in a printed version of your essay, double-spaced, as close to the 650 word limit as you can get it.

You may write ANY of the common app prompts, but, eventually, I'd like you to try them all. 

Hopefully, the discussions we've had and the essays we've read will have helped you "load your gun" to the point where you are ready to shoot and hit your target.  The exercises we've done so far, along with workshopping, are designed to show you the dynamics of tone, structure, voice, and theme. 

Please avoid cliche' topics (or at least make them interesting), and always think about "what do I want my admissions officer to think about" when they compare your essay to the rest of your application.  Will they want to meet you? 

CLICK HERE FOR COMMON APP ESSAY TOPICS

A "unique" college essay...

Thread-like wound.

 My grandfather collects furniture.  He restores it.  He knows everything about it, and loves the story of wood.  One day, he sent me an envelope and asked me to correct his writing:

When valuing the quality of wooden furniture on the practical level, the flexibility and the hardness of the material are most important. The aesthetic quality, which becomes more important as the furniture becomes expensive, focuses on the beauty of the grain of the wood and the clean surface of the wood. A crack in the furniture is unexpected, but deadly and could ruin the furniture.

“Let’s go to the sauna, HanMin.”

My father interrupted me for our Sunday morning ritual.  We would go to the local sauna. We would scrub each other’s backs, get refreshed, and return home after eating popsicles together.

“The water isn’t very hot this time, HanMin.”

                  As we have always done, my father first scrubbed my back and I turned to scrub his. Then I noticed the difference in the father who I remembered, and the man he actually was. He had lost more weight, his back had become stooped, and his fingers twisted from long hours of work.

                  My father had a crack.

“Dad, start exercising. You have to take care of yourself.”

“Okay I will, HanMin. Don’t worry.”

                  The cause of my father’s crack was me. At least I thought so. I was suffering from the competiveness and a busy life of boarding school.  I wondered if I pushed my agony and sorrow onto people near me. I sometimes blamed my parents for my troubles. I spent my time vaguely, between work and play.  I knew I was being selfish, but I thought my vanity lay in love. I also had crack in myself.

“HanMin, take a cab to go home. I have to go to work.”

                  After coming home, thinking more about my father, I felt the crack grow inside me. Who was I? My vanity seemed to go against the grain of those around me. I was too resistant of accepting myself for who I was truly being.  Maybe not who I truly am.  Who could I be if I was more realistic and honest with myself? How could I fix the crack in my father’s health? If I could fix my own, I could fix his.

When wooden furniture became cracked, our ancestors covered the furniture and stored it. From the cold, arid atmosphere of winter, the wood would dry and from the hot humid weather of summer, the wood would reform and reshape itself.

                  Admitting my naivety was harder than I thought. Though I could say that I was young, understanding and admitting my faults from the heart, it seemed unreal. My father was once young like me.  He also had a father.  Did they go to the sauna as well? I recalled all those times during the summer and winter breaks. We would go to the sauna every week and have long conversations. The topics sometimes offended me or him, but we both knew that those were necessary. The heat and humidity of the sauna tempered and raised me.

                   If the furniture survives its trials, then the wood finds its original figure, and the crack is left as a thread-like wound - a glorious mark of its growth. Then, though it has the same quality as other well-made furniture, it is considered as exceptional furniture.

                  My life had been a continuing sequence of avoiding and hiding from myself and the reality. I was afraid. However, after realizing who I am, how my father loves me, I have tried to change myself. I now know that there are friends, teachers, and my father behind me  - who will always give help and support even when I face the ugliest and hardest truths. I now know that I have to carry myself, and though I should not follow the errors of my life, I have to keep them, be responsible for them, and love them.

                  The crack in me has been found, and is turning into a scar. My father has quit smoking and started exercising. My family seems tighter. I am becoming more self-aware.

Then, though it has the same quality as other well-made furniture, it is considered as exceptional furniture.  The artistry is a wonderful accident, that gives the wood the quality of art.

My grandfather’s words are also my father’s words.  I hear them in him.  I hear them in myself.  There is nothing I can change on paper to make them better.  I can only learn to listen to them more. 

                 

Tone Essay vs Story Essay

As said before, I would like you guys to recognize how an essay "without a plot" can be just as effective as one where a protagonist rescues a child from a burning house. Here is one of the "favorite" essays from the 13th wave. This version is FAR too long, but we can see how the style and diction that the writer brings is engaging.  It meanders and transitions very effectively.  Have a looks and leave a comment on how you feel about it.

 Eighteen 

Eighteen. What a special number! In Chinese, the word “Eighteen” can be pronounced in a way that means “prosperity,” and in the same way building floors with the number four are considered unlucky, eighteenth floors are more expensive because they are considered lucky. In Northern China, however, floor number 18 is avoided because apparently Chinese hell has eighteen levels, far more cost efficient than Dante’s Italian hell of thirty three floors (one would assume then that all eighteen floors ought to be avoided). You’d think it’s a contradiction that one number could mean both prosperity and hell in Chinese. In Korea, pronounced slurred, “Eighteen” is the equivalent of the Korean f word.

Eighteen. Although tempting, I won’t go into the mathematical significance of the number since every number seems to have at least five mathematical labels apart from its actual name – to name a few, composite number, semi-perfect number, heptagonal number, abundant number, Harshad number (eighteen qualifies all six labels apart from the lesser know “eighteen”). You try looking for significance in a number, and you’ll find one too many.

On the 6^th of May, I turned Eighteen. It was a dark, foggy night when my cell phone exhibited four consecutive zeros. Just a few seconds ago I was seventeen and celebrating Children’s Day. Now I was suddenly a very marriageable age. My roommates brought out a cake they had bought for me and sang “Happy Birthday” while I looked down at a candle-less chocolate cake. After they finished, I awkwardly murmured my thanks and hugged them. Then we sat around waiting for each other to take a bite of the sumptuous cake, only all of us were too full and too aware of our weights. (Someone should have told us that the 6^th of May is also International No Diet Day.) The cake was stowed away for another day.

Ironically I usually have more fun on other people’s birthdays than on mine, especially if the “other person” happens to be a deity or semi-god. On Buddha’s birthday, for instance, is school-less. I don’t think anyone could ever give me such a wonderful present as a No School Card unless my friend happened to be a dictator (who could make my birthday a national holiday), or a Korean Dalai Lama (who would announce that recently discovered, unforged, ancient scriptures revealed that Buddha was actually born on the 6^th). I also have more fun on Jesus’s birthday because not only do we get several school-less days, but Jesus also bestows us with seasonal films on TV that aren’t copyright-elapsed C-list movies, a benevolent fictional white bearded man who doles out free stuff, and 50% Christmas leftover sales on Boxing Day. In fact, my birthday is the national holiday in Bulgaria because the 6^th of May is also the Bulgarian St. George’s Day and Army Day. No doubt George deserves a whole day to himself as well as a figurine on monastic shelves because he speared to death some reptile that was probably just an obese, mutant iguana. If not, dragons have become extinct, and today he would probably have been arrested by PETA.

It is comforting to know that I share my birthday with Sigmund Freud, Tony Blair, Orson Welles, and King Sejong, the creator of Hangeul. It is not comforting to know, however, that since Hangeul Day has already been abolished from the status of public holiday to one of 350 or so days that aren’t distinguished, there is little chance of success in a petition to the government proposing Sejong be honored along with Buddha and Jesus.

However, by some stroke of luck, I didn’t have school on my birthday. By some stroke of negating bad luck, it was because I had the AP Literature exam on my birthday, during which I read a poem called, “To Sir John, On His Coming of Age.” Thus I spent my first marriageable morning comparing poems about coming-of-age and analyzing Charlotte Bronte’s rite-of-passage novel Jane Eyre. What a wasted morning! Were I in one of the countries in the world that isn’t one of ten that has a drinking age higher than eighteen (and Korea happens to be one of those miserable ten), the morning could have been spent experimenting with drinks that aren’t orange juice or milk for a change. Were I in England, I would be at the polling station, voting for whichever party that would give the hottest prime minister to outflank James-Bond-candidate Putin – From Russia with Love? – and topless Obama in red boxers at the next G8 meeting. Were I in one of those countries where eighteen is also the age of consent – ah, never mind.

Eighteen. I can legally get a driver’s permit. Next year, I suppose I’ll be writing about how I’m legally allowed to purchase films rated 19 and access adult rated websites and videos blocked by search engines for under 19 – not that I would, but it’s the thought that I’ve been newly enfranchised with another right that counts, even if it is not of much use. However, now that I’ve turned Eighteen, which seems more than just one year of a step from seventeen, but a giant leap from angst-ridden middle teenage-hood to mature late teenage-hood-nearing-adult-hood, I don’t look forward to more birthdays to come and instead look back at all the birthdays that have passed, and with them, all the years that have passed. “Lines have formed on my face and hands,” not suddenly on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, but for quite some time in a gradual process, yet it seems that you only stop to notice age overtaking you when the occasion arises to look in the mirror, not to straighten your hairclip or apply lotion but to actually look for an aged face. This occasion was my eighteenth birthday, and how old I felt! I felt as if the last time I had looked into the mirror properly was when I was ten-years-old and was experimenting with mom’s wrinkle cream.

I was stepping into an entirely new world of adults, a new contender in the competitive business of match-making, a new potential candidate for every bachelor who has already been slighted by every eligible female in the pool, a new customer for alcohol companies targeting 18-year-olds by showing celebrities getting drunk on TV ads, a new constituent whose vote could have (along with many other 18-year-olds disenfranchised because they moved to Korea) overturned the hung parliament in the 2010 British general elections which took place on, yes, the 6^th of May. Here I was, a novice in many ways, but still, I felt old. With every birthday, I feel old.

The treat of my birthday was an email I received from a friend from England, with whom I last celebrated my birthday four years ago. She told me about school, and how they would be going to uni in the fall. She told me about my friends who seemed to be living a much more glamorous, exciting life in London than my breathtaking life in Sosa living next door to corn fields and a stinking milk factory. How good it was to hear from someone of my past! “I haven't forgotten your birthday (yay!) and nor have many people in school either. Over the last few days certainly a few people have told me that it's your birthday coming up,” she wrote. It was nice to know that I was remembered half way across the globe, especially since I was not remembered within a few feet radius.

And that was it. That was all I wanted. Not for people to remember my birthday because it’s St. George’s Day or International No Diet Day. Not for people to commemorate Sigmund Freud or Orson Welles. Not for Tony Blair to joke about going to the polls to vote out the party that kicked him out of office. What I wanted was to be remembered for my birth. Isn’t that what birthdays are for after all? Plus, Eighteenth birthdays are meant to be spent having a cosy celebration with close friends at the pub with a few friends or an early stag night. They are not meant to be spent taking exams in the morning and spending two hours in the afternoon writing essays about the significance.

I get the feeling that this time, next year I’ll be writing another reflection about how it feels like to be Nineteen. I’ll feel older, more mature, more grown up, just as I do today, but reading through this essay again, I realize that there is still much in me that is a child. If I myself, upon just reading through the essay once more, is able to realize that, there is little chance anyone else who reads this will not realize that underneath all the excitement is disappointment, all the flexing of muscles is fear of the future, all the seemingly careless sarcasm is a sensitive, childish heart. Yet even this insecurity, this innocent pretentiousness, this sensitivity, I will treasure, because I want to take a step at a time, and today, at Eighteen, I am still only Eighteen.

Happy Birthday, _______.

A perfect essay?

I tip my hat to Mr. Menard for suggesting this one.  You may know of Amy Tan. She's almost as impressive as E.B. White, and her essay, Fish Cheeks, is probably more useful to you.  It's 503 words, and it says a lot.  It's fun, it's fast, it's simple, and yet really dynamic. And when I googled it I found a version of it with some good questions/exercises below.

So do read it, and do think about it.

Fish Cheeks

By Amy Tan

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