My essay about the indignities of plane travel started in my garden.
While I pulled up weeds, my mind wandered, and suddenly I remembered that I hadn’t booked my flight for my cousin’s wedding. I felt a pang of dread because I knew the flight was going to be expensive. I also realized it had been a while since I’d been on an airplane, because a global pandemic had happened since the last time I’d flown anywhere.
Carlos shares his inspiration for this post.
And that’s when a thought hit me: What if I wrote a tongue-in-cheek guide for people like me, who haven’t been on a plane in a while and might’ve forgotten how annoying air travel can be? That has some comedic potential.
As a comedy writer, I’ve learned to expect ideas when I least expect them; the strongest ones come while I’m out for a walk, doing dishes, or (as mentioned) while working in my garden. But I also know that’s not the whole story. The material for my ideas, the moments that make my writing actually funny … I’ve been collecting those for years: the TSA agent brusquely pulling me aside because I forgot to empty my water bottle, the guy who pushes past me as I’m standing by the gate because he has priority boarding and I don’t, or the person sitting next to me on the plane who insists on talking to me the entire flight even though I clearly have my headphones on.
In the same way that humor can bring people closer, sharing the specific details of your story can help bring the reader of your college essay closer to you. These don’t have to be “big” moments that upended your entire life; they just have to be real ones.
These fleeting interactions happen to millions of people every single day, and most think nothing of them. But to a comedian who has learned to pay attention to such moments, this is gold. So I safeguard these little nuggets for later use.
Gathering memories is a key part of my writing process. And it’s essentially the same process we ask writers to undertake in The Uncommon Essay Course in our Ten Sentences Exercise. We start by asking you to mine your own collection of memories, combing through personal experiences that have stuck with you, and then to write one sentence to describe each moment. These don’t have to be “big” moments that upended your entire life; they just have to be real ones. In fact, you might not know whether they are going to add up to anything yet. You just know that they stuck with you for a reason — because they made you feel something.
The Ten Sentences exercise is how I, as your coach, get to know you and what makes you tick. But it’s also how you get to know your own experiences. It’s something you can let your mind drift toward while doing a routine activity. Any rote, physical task (that doesn’t involve staring at a screen) usually does the trick. Pick one, and your mind will wander where it needs to go.
Spend enough time gathering these moments (when you’re not trying to), and you’ll wind up with a good collection of past experiences that are meaningful to you. And from there, through our conversations together, we can begin to tease out why those moments stuck in your mind. Were they moments that changed your perception in some way or did they affirm something you already believed?
Either way, it’s the details that make the experience real to the reader. In my case, those details were precisely what made my garden-generated-air-travel essay both funny and relatable. Yes, I really did write it, and I used all of those collected experiences — the TSA agent, the impatient pushy traveler, the chatty seatmate. It was published in The New Yorker in August 2021.
Even if a reader has never cried on an airplane while watching the movie Coco like I (regrettably) have, the specificity of that experience helps them picture it in their mind. If they’ve had a similarly embarrassing moment, then they have a good sense for how I felt. And without ever speaking with one another, we can laugh about our shared travails. In the same way that humor can bring people closer, sharing the specific details of your story can help bring the reader of your college essay closer to you — to help them understand what makes you, you.
As a rising high-school senior, you already have an interesting college-essay’s-worth of lived experiences inside your brain. Give yourself the time and space to roam through those memories, and you’ll likely find the seeds of an idea starting to grow.
Carlos is a Hillside coach.
