Writing: Intentional Practice

“I once did hold it, as our statists do, / A baseness to write fair, and labored much / How to forget that learning; but, sir, now / It did me yeoman’s service.” –Hamlet (Act 5, scene 2), on being able to write under pressure.

You have said that you’re not confident in your writing ability so we’re going to fix that and if you’re the (very lone) exception to this statement then you’ll enjoy this ongoing writing exercise anyway.

The Work

1. Every weekday: write 2-3 sentences about things that made you feel good or changed your mood for the better. It can be one event with more detail, or multiple things with minimal detail — it only needs to be enough to jog your memory on the weekend.
   • Example: “Sunset with Brian and Sarah. The sky looked like it was painted in watercolor.” (Lifton & Knoppow, 2022, p. 65)
2. Every weekend: review the week’s list of events and write up a quick draft — tell a story, present a montage, or pick out a thematic analysis — of something that either pops back in your memory or coalesces from seeing all your week together. You will be writing against the clock to improve your efficiency with practice.
   • Choose a size of either 300 or 600 words (test suggests: half page or whole page); your weekly drafts should be targeting the same word count so you get used to how long That Many Words is until you can intuitively feel it while you’re writing. 📝
   • Time how long it takes you to write out a semi-coherent draft, starting from the first letter/keystroke. The benchmarks are: under 30 minutes for 300 words, under 60 minutes for 600 words. ⏳
   • 🛑 Stop when you’re out of time or out of words, whichever comes first. Don’t worry about being off on the first few exercises, I promise you’ll improve with practice.
3. Every other weekend: pick the better of your two weekend drafts for my review and feedback. You won’t need to make any revisions to the submitted drafts, but I do expect to see the feedback showing up in qualitative improvements to your future drafts. (This revision service is for paying clients only.💰 ) History, corroborated by Zinsser (2021) among others, suggests that feedback is likely to include specific instances of these very common themes:
   • “Here is your actual subject; move it to the first paragraph.”
   • “These words aren’t working hard enough, remove them.”
   • “This word (noun) is too vague, be more specific/evocative and add an emotional/sensory hook.”

“The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.” (Zinsser, 2021, p. 49)

The Objectives

🎯 Primary Objective: The goal of this exercise is to improve your writing skills from your earliest drafts by time-boxing the initial writing (for efficiency) and getting feedback on the known-imperfect draft (instead of a “final” product).

Secondary Objectives: This activity will help you better prepare for your college application essay(s) if the exercise draft you’re intentionally working to include the following in your practice:

• Connection to an academic interest (or something on your activities list)
• Mention of the people who were supporting you
• Action that demonstrates your self-efficacy
• Measure of positive effects and/or the people who benefited from your action

And the topical selection for weekly writing based on the notes of what made you feel good or changed your mood for the better will provide far more efficiently reliable material than “brainstorming” for Personal Statements when applying to universities.

Doing this work to proactively refine your experiences for future use will protect you from Zinsser’s tactless accusation that “When students say they have to write what the teacher wants, what they often mean is that they don’t have anything to say—so meager is their after-school existence, bounded largely by television and the mall, two artificial versions of reality” (2021, p. 134). You protect yourself by keeping briefs (notes) for your defense.

Optional: Combine this with your handwriting practice that is the foundation of our Thank You Note practice. (Drafts should ultimately be typed to confirm the word count, so maybe do the weekdays by hand and the weekends with typing?)

“Pressing delete soothed me… I sliced, burned, eviscerated… I tried to make sentences taut as garrotes… I murdered my darlings, then posted their heads on pikes at the gates of town as a warning to future interlopers.”
—Molly Crabapple, explaining how to hit a word count (2015, p. 314)

Supporting Discussion (Why & How)

1. The foundation of this work substantially overlaps with Gratitude Journaling, but I’m aiming to align more with Burton and King’s (2004) study that had 20-minute evocations of positive recollections for journaling 3 times per week and resulted in health benefits. So: this is a thing that you can do for you even if you don’t much care about writing a good college application essay and/or are not a paying client. Dr. Barr would likely advocate for the weekday recordings happening shortly before bedtime (2025, chapter 4) unlike morning writings advocated by (for example) Julia Cameron.
2. If you need a bit of role-modeling guidance: in chapter 2 of How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend, Dr. Barr (2025) recommends Ross Gay’s Book of Delights for how this sort of exercise might turn out if you take it much, much further than I’m suggesting here — but it could be worth reading on its own merits as well as showing how to expand your minor and transient moments of delight as I’m advising here.
3. The focus on habitual behavior is taken from Molly Crabapple who went from visual arts to written journalism to being an author by forcing herself to put words on paper every day even on the days when she had nothing to say and supported by Zinsser’s craft-oriented axioms (2021). When you have nothing to say, you can still produce structurally-effective subject-verb-object sentences. I expect you to have some difficulty getting started, it’s part of why I want you to have control over what you’re sending me for review but will also strongly advise sending me something to review. Molly learned with an editor; as a paying client, you can learn with me.
4. If you can readily predict that you’re going to be writing a 650-word personal statement for the Common App, then don’t prematurely limit yourself with the 300-word draft (which is better practice for the UC application) just because it seems easier. Present-You should be choosing to do this work in the way that best benefits Future-You.
5. Improving your quality and efficiency means you’re probably going to have thematic points getting repeated from week to week and this is a good thing. We’re not looking for an ever-gushing fountain of creativity, we’re looking to get you practicing and mastering a technique with a manageable goal and then growing your (in this case: writing) skills outward from there. (Achor, 2013; Wexler, 2019) If you need a guiding formula for writing an essay like this, try the START framework:
   • lead with the Situation and stakes,
   • identify the Target that you want(ed) to change,
   • take an Action,
   • look at the Result of that action versus the declared target and situation,
   • and then discuss your Takeaways from the experience.
6. The first advanced techniques you should apply to your essays when you’re comfortable are:
   • Conceptualization: write from a focused archetypal perspective (review our Archetype Talk worksheet) and
   • As time allows: replace every instance of a vague feeling — Happy, Sad, Bad, Surprised, Disgusted, Angry, Fearful — with a more specific feeling (use this feelings wheel)

Common Question

“What do you mean ‘things that made you feel good’? I’m not that kind of person!”

First of all, I totally get that. But, second, we’re not trying to make you feel ✨Good✨, we’re trying to find points in your life when you feel better than you usually do so we can focus on and differentiate those. The goal of this practice (cribbed from Narrative Therapy) is to spend time building up your capacity for an alternative to your dominant “I’m not that kind of person” narrative that you can slip into at least when you’re writing for social acceptance (including college admissions and scholarship applications) — but do seek out an actual therapist for more guidance if you discover that you want to change your dominant narrative.

Kohli (2024) — who is a therapist and likes Narrative Therapy — retrospectively explains her experience with teenage journaling by writing:

Writing allowed me to learn cognitive reappraisal, a form of emotion regulation in which one reframes their thoughts about an event to change its emotional impact. … in giving myself permission to give life to these alternate storylines, I started to disempower my dominant narrative. … I think the experience allowed me, for the first time, to consider a different future for myself. (p. 166, 169-70)

And here’s the part that’s going to be super-weird: even if you are that kind of person, you may not be that kind of person in the future. Kohli (2024) encounters her childhood journals and says:

I read this now and have no idea who that person is or where her fortitude to keep pressing on came from. … writing, in some way, became my version of letting my inner child come alive and a way for me to give her the things she needed but hadn’t yet received from others. (p. 159)

Similarly, here’s Broad (2018) talking about re-reading her teenage LiveJournal blog:

It’s a little embarrassing… because it’s just, so, adolescent. It’s someone I don’t really have memories of. It speaks to experiences I’ve forgotten and events that I can only imagine I made up—or at least embellished—for whoever the audience of friends was back then. … I wrote about boys as though I was actually having relationships with them. For every post, the ‘what I’m listening to’ status listed The Pixies. I never even liked The Pixies. These early social media imprints reflect a composite of someone I wanted to be. The image I wanted to be public. (Ch. 3)

So don’t pin yourself down to who you’ve tended to be until now: don’t let somebody who doesn’t even have a fully-formed prefrontal cortex prejudice you against yourself! As part of the transformational process of you becoming an adult (and forming that prefrontal cortex) we — me and Future-You — want you to spend more time paying intentional attention to what makes you feel better than you tend to feel in your day-to-day life.

And also improving your writing skills; you’ll need them. ✍️

References

Achor, S. (2013). The happiness advantage: How a positive brain fuels success in work and life (First paperback edition). Currency.

Barr, R. (2025). How to make your brain your best friend: A neuroscientist’s guide to a healthier, happier life (First American Edition). DK RED.

Broad, E. (2018). Made by Humans: The AI Condition (1st ed). Melbourne University Publishing.

Burton, C. M., & King, L. A. (2004). The health benefits of writing about intensely positive experiences. Journal of Research in Personality, 38(2), 150–163. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-6566(03)00058-8

Crabapple, M. (2015). Drawing Blood (1st ed). HarperCollins Publishers.

Kohli, S. K. (2024). But what will people say?: Navigating mental health, identity, love, and family between cultures. Penguin Life, Viking.

Lipton, K. & Knoppow, S. (2022). How to Write an Effective College Application Essay: The Inside Scoop for Students (Second Edition). Wow Writing Workshop, LLC.

Wexler, N. (2019). The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System–And How to Fix It. Penguin Publishing Group.

Zinsser, W. (2021). On writing well: The classical guide to writing nonfiction (Seventh edition, revised and updated, 30th anniversary edition). Collins.