Already and often I have referred to the work of writing a personal statement as an “art.” I use this word precisely. A sculptor needs start with a mass of stone. And even before this, he draws. Rodin, whose sketches I have pasted above, drew constantly. Vignettes of a mother and child, the curvature of skeleton ribs, fingers and fisted hands, the abbey portal of Saint-Pierre d’Auxerre, models, muses, and the cloud-shrouded moon. Each is an anecdote of a kind, a gesture toward some larger task. And, indeed, very few of Rodin’s thousands of sketches translated directly to a final sculpture. They sourced the flow of his creativity. So too the statement writer profitably begins.
I have read countless statements that commence with a vivid, detailed scene. The literary equivalent to Rodin’s sketches. They too are the product of deliberation and observation. And these initial tellings are valuable. They illuminate a theme, the thread upon which formative experience, skills and strengths will hang. And, naturally, the first-paragraph anecdote is particularly prized as it is the source for the idea driving the essay.
And yet that very prizing is the precise cue to cut! A personal statement truly begins after the sketch, no matter how lovingly produced. The sketches are not the sculpture. My first piece of advice is simple and adheres to the editorial wisdom of the late-Victorian literary critic, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch:
Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.“
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Writing, 1916
Try cutting your very first paragraph. Try cutting the first two. And see where your true sculpture, your statement, begins.
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