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Gabrielle Glancy Featured on Dr. Larry Show “Life Can Change in A Moment”

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Gabrielle Glancy is wonderful!  We had a successful and fulfilling experience working with her on the whole college process from start to finish.  Our son just got in to Columbia early.  We couldn\’t be happier!  Gabrielle Glancy has our highest recommendation.  She\’s awesome!

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When Dr. Larry invited me on his show, I was thrilled.  He wanted me to speak about how my life changed in a moment.  He asked me wonderful, pointed questions and really got me talking!

The exciting part of it was that the more I talked about it, the more I realized that my life-changing moment was one in which I realized I wanted to pursue my dream of helping others pursue their dreams.  And that\’s just what I did.  I like to say that I am in the business of helping students applying to college manifest their dreams.

I\’ve been at this over twenty-five years and my life has only gotten richer, better and more interesting.

To date, I have helped hundreds, if not thousands, of students locate and get into their top-choice schools.

I\’ve got some more dreams brewing!  Stay tuned for more on this.

In the meantime, I\’m accepting students now for the 2020 academic year.

It\’s true that \”life can change in a moment.\”  Mine did.  Begin the journey of a lifetime and get into the college(s) of your dreams now.  Click here to book an appointment with College Admissions Guru Gabrielle Glancy.

Oh and here\’s the link to the Podcast!

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Gabrielle Glancy Interviewed by Native Influence

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Wherever my daughter is, Gabby has a technique or approach to support her and help her move forward. My daughter started the process skeptical, with concern and some anxiety since she missed school etc., not sure she had anything to say, but she is really enjoying working with Gabby and has found her confidence and power.

I was recently interviewed by The Native Influence on what has inspired me, how I got to be where I am today, and what my goals are for the future.

Click here to read the interview.

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College Essay Tip #2: Happy Little Accidents

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Gabrielle Glancy is an awesome college counselor!  She is one of those rare individuals who has a gift for listening and bringing kids out.  We went with her for both our son and our daughter. She knows how to help kids find their path — which schools to apply to and what they might want to study — and most importantly, she is really an expert at helping them write college essays that get them in!

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The mind naturally moves from one idea to the next, from branch to branch, like a nimble chimpanzee. As soon as you start trying to figure out a structure, worry about the order of ideas, allow the critic to take over — the blood supply to your associations will be cut off.

Have a read of my recent article, Happy Little Accidents, published in Elephant Journal in which I help apply the principles of the famous PBS painting pro, Bob Ross, to the writing process.

The Gift of Stuckness

Gabrielle Glancy Featured Again in Elephant Journal!

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I contacted Gabrielle Glancy (as well as some other consultants) and found that Gabby’s style and approach matched our needs.  From the outset she respected my daughter’s experience and was all about listening to her and helping her discover her story and communicate it in a compelling way. I feel like Gabby is not trying to make my daughter into someone else just to look good in an application. 

On the subject of writing college essays and getting UNSTUCK, Elephant Journal has once again featured me in their newest issue.

Here\’s a teaser:

You can never really escape your own story. It’s there, in you, waiting to be uncovered. And it will emerge, or you can get at it, a million different ways.  An infinite number of ways, actually.

 

To read more, click here! 

New Vision Learning Writer's Block

College Essay Writing Tip #1: Write First, Think Later

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Gabrielle Glancy takes the common complaint, “I’m Stuck! I have nothing to say!” and turns it into an opportunity for total creative generation. Because Glancy is as pragmatic, funny, and as experienced as coaches come, she reminds us that “our” best ideas are born from a rich matrix of unknowable origins and that you’re guaranteed to get a “better” college essay out of this, and more than you could have ever asked for. She’ll convince you, and you’ll show yourself, that the best already lies within you. 
–Sara Nolan, Essay Writing Intensive
 

Many people will tell you that you need to start with a topic, and start with an introduction.

I cannot think of a more sure way to gum up your brain than this!

You may have an idea of what you want to write about.  You may have read the prompt for a particular school and have had thoughts about where you might take this essay.  That’s good.  Nothing to worry about or cancel out.

But what do you do after you’ve brainstormed a topic?

Unstuck by Gabrielle Glancy

In my work with students who are stuck, I don’t say: Come on. What’s wrong with you? Can’t you just start writing?

Rather, I turn writing into a game.

It’s worth noting here the difficulty in deconstructing a process with the thinking mind that does not involve the thinking mind.

That’s like hearing the sound of one hand clapping. It’s a built-in conundrum.

In my experience, play is the best way to create opportunities for a chance or accidental moment of inspiration to occur.

Once the words start flowing, I keep quiet until the stream runs dry. At that point, when the student has written as much as they can (for the moment), I say something like: How do you feel in your body? What does it feel like to write this way?

This approach is completely counter to what most people will do.  Even the most enlightened writing coaches will tell you that you need to have a topic to begin.  They will have you brainstorm topics — your favorite object, what you want to be when you grow up — and then they will say something to the effect of:  “Great topic!  Now write your essay!”

But how do you do this?

The problem is that once you engage the “critical” part of the mind — the part that is concerned not with the journey but with the destination — you are creating an environmental inhospitable to creativity/innovation/newness.

From there, it is very difficult to generate ideas, let alone craft an essay from first word to last (starting with the introduction!)

So what do I do instead?

I have them write first in the worry-free zone.  Almost anything can generate writing.

Recently I gave a talk in an auditorium in which there was a white board that had three words on it:  “Grass.  Bunny.  Hamster.”

I have no idea why these three words were there, but I used them to my advantage.

I asked the students before me to vote on one of these words.  They chose “hamster.”

I then directed them to free write on the word hamster.  “Write anything that comes to mind when you think of a hamster.  Don’t worry about grammar or punctuation, just write.”

There were sixty students at this workshop.  They all produced unique writing on the subject.  And believe it or not, many of them wrote about topics they could potentially develop into narrative personal statements — the time my hamster got his head caught in the treadmill, the week we lost our goldfish, our hamster and our dog . . .

Then I bring to the students’ attention the feelings they have just experienced— flow, inspiration, being in the zone, whatever you want to call it — so they become conscious of what they felt in their bodies and can come to call upon the memory of this experience as needed.

This is not unlike the moment Gallwey describes of reproducing a peak experience in his book The Inner Game of Tennis:

One day when I was practicing this form of concentration while serving, I began hitting the ball unusually well. I could hear a sharp crack instead of the usual sound at the moment of impact… I resisted the temptation to figure out why, and simply asked my body to do whatever was necessary to reproduce that “crack.” I held the sound in my memory, and to my amazement my body reproduced it time and again.

The idea is to happen upon the flow through play, and then make conscious your experience of being in the flow, until the day comes when you can reliably, through “body memory,” tap into the trance-like state pretty much on cue. 

When you’re in the zone, you almost feel like a channel, like the writing is coming through you.

Writes Gallwey regarding tennis: “Commonly students use language like ‘I wasn’t there,’ ‘Something else took over,’ ‘My racket did this, or did that,’ as if it had a will of its own. But the racket wasn’t missing, and the great shot was not an accident . . .”

What I am describing here is very important. 

It is the idea that you must put the thinking mind aside to write well.  How do you do this? 

You write first — on just about anything — and then you read what you’ve written to figure out what you’re trying to say.

This is described in my book UNSTUCK and is a great way to . . . well . . . get UNSTUCK!

I’d love to show you how I teach this and how you can learn this. Click here to book an appointment.  This way of doing things is a heck of a lot easier than trying to figure it all out before you get anything down on paper!

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Get UNSTUCK!

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For parents of teens who are flummoxed by the complexity and competitiveness of SAT prep and the college application process, I have a recommendation: Gabrielle Glancy of New Vision Learning.

My new book UNSTUCK:  How to Break Through Writer\’s Block, Find Your Voice and Get Into the School of Your Dreams is about to come out September 15th.

It has already been reviewed on BroadwayWorld.com and I have interviews in Authority Magazine, Thrive Global and VoyageLA.  Most recently, Elephant Journal published my article The Inner Game of Writing.

I just want to give you a few tips (and teasers 😉 that could be extremely helpful as you embark on the writing process:

  1. Write first, think later.  While it is important to brainstorm ideas, you should not hold yourself to those ideas.  They are merely the \”triggering subjects\” that got you writing.  
  2. Let Thing Two and Thing One out of the box.  Allow the creative part of yourself to make a mess. Don\’t let the critic overtake the creator.  You can always clean up later.
  3. Let the wand find the wizard.  Allow your topic to emerge, organically, from the writing you do.  Often, you will see a pattern or find a way to put together the pieces once you have them  . . .because
  4. It\’s a lot easier to generate than to cut.
  5. I always suggest students \”Roll out the dough before you cut the cookies.\”  Don\’t write to the word limit.  Write much more than you need.  You can always go back and trim the fat.
  6. If you\’re stuck, you have a lot of options.  You can pick a book up off your shelf, find a random sentence and free write from that sentence.  You can read some great college admissions essays to get some ideas.  You can read my book 😉 . And you can get up and shoot some hoops, take a shower or make a sandwich.
  7. Once you have free written much much more than you\’ll ever need, go back and \”read what you\’ve written to figure out what you\’re trying to say.\”

This will get you started.  I\’d love to help you write the essay of your life.  Click here to meet me and book an INITIAL CONSULTATION!

Elephant Journal publishes Gabrielle Glancy

The Inner Game of Writing College Essays

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I contacted Gabrielle Glancy (as well as some other consultants) and found that Gabby’s style and approach matched our needs.  From the outset she respected my daughter’s experience and was all about listening to her and helping her discover her story and communicate it in a compelling way. I feel like Gabby is not trying to make my daughter into someone else just to look good in an application. 

My new book UNSTUCK focuses on the inner aspects of writing college essays.

Here is a recent article I wrote for Elephant Journal that explains how I approach the task of helping students overcome the anxiety of the blank page.

 

 

Elephant Journal publishes Gabrielle Glancy
Why Comic Vector Cartoon Illustration Explosions. Comics Boom

Supplemental College Essays: Focus on The WHY’s

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Working with Gabrielle Glancy, even the hard questions weren\’t that hard.  She has a way to help you get started and write your essays that really works.  I can\’t believe it, but I kind of had a lot of fun writing my essays.  And all my hard work paid off.  I got into Stanford.  J.Cameron, Stanford \’20

College Essay season is upon us.  It\’s really only a matter of weeks before the applications are due for your Early Action schools.

Most students start with or have already started on their Common App essay.  Some students will already have finished that essay and are ready to move on to the supplements.

Remember almost all your schools will receive your Common App essay.  The supplemental essays for each school are unique.  This is where the school gets to ask you anything it wants.  The Ad Com spends a lot of time inventing these questions and they\’re eager to hear your answer to them.

Almost all schools have a \”WHY\” question.  And even though the word limits on these are often fairly low (with the exception of the University of Pennsylvania), the WHY\’s are very important.

Having been in admissions, I can tell you that the Ad Com often reads the WHY questions first.  Why? 😉

Because that is where they can get a feel for how genuine and deep your interest in their college goes.

If, in your Why essay for Tulane, for example, you end the essay by saying,  \”And for that reason, The University of Oregon is my top-choice school,\” they will surely know that you are using the same essay for all your schools.  They will also know you\’re careless.  And it goes without saying, you\’re not going to get in.

If, on the other hand, your WHY is filled with writing that shows you 1) know about their school 2) honestly want to go to their school and 3) are a good fit for their school — you\’ve just upped your chances of getting in!

We get it, we get it.  The \”Why\’s\” are important.

I would be lying to you if I didn\’t add that the WHY questions are also the most difficult questions to answer.

I usually advise my students to wait until they\’ve written everything else before they attempt to write the WHY\’s.

So why I am bringing this up now, so early in the college application season?

There\’s a method to my madness.

Although I don\’t have students start writing the WHY\’s until after they\’ve finished the Common App essay, and potentially even the other supplements, I do offer some suggestions to get them thinking, and even writing, preliminarily.

In a certain way, I prepare a marinade for them so that when the time comes to sit down and write that essay, it has already germinated inside them.  In some cases, the writing they do in preparation for writing the essay, is good enough to use.

 

Find Your Why Text. Vector Illustration. Motivational Inspirario

Your reasons for choosing a particular college or university are unique.  They belong to no one but you. 

You can\’t just tell Columbia University what they already know about themselves.  You can\’t just tell them how pretty their buildings are or how bustling the city is outside the campus.  You must show them you really know who they are by showing them why you\’re the perfect candidate for that particular school.

You must Find Your Why!

And one way to do it is to follow the guidelines below.

So here is my recipe for the marinade:

  1. Go visit the school if you can
  2. Speak to students who are going there or have gone there
  3. Research the school thoroughly.  Go to their website.  Look at mission, vision, values.  Read what\’s in big print — that\’s what they want you to know and think about them.  And read between the lines — get a feel for what the school is really like.
  4. Once you\’ve done the above, pick 5 adjectives that best describe the school and see if you can find an example for each one of them.
  5. You could also pick 5 adjectives to describe yourself and match these with aspects of the school that appeal to you.
  6. Find a metaphor for the feeling you get about this particular school. Is the school a boat drifting at sea?  (Hope not.) Or is it the freedom of a bird in flight searching for food for its mate?  May sound corny, but it helps you locate your sense of the place.
  7. Think about how you first heard about the school
  8. See if you can remember what people you know have said about it
  9. Look at courses and majors and see what interests you, what you might take if you went there
  10. Pick a specific spot at the school — the library of the business school, the quad, the dining hall — and imagine yourself there.  What is it like?

Don\’t write an essay.  Just see if you can answer these questions.

Then, when you have finished your Common App essay, and other supplements, pull out your answers to the questions above, and see if you can put them together as an answer to the question WHY?

I would love to guide you in this process.  I\’ve been doing it a long time and am something of an expert at it! 

It\’s not an accident that about 94% of the students I work with get into their top-choice schools.  I helped them find their WHY.  I can help you too!

 

College Essays, The Worry-Free Way

College Essays, The Worry-Free Way

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Gabrielle Glancy is focused, brilliant and knows her stuff.  She is \”on\” every millisecond of the session.  She makes you feel like you don\’t have to traverse this mountain alone.  Idris Lepla, Yale University

 

Free Writing, emphasis on FREE, is the golden key to writing your college essays, and getting into college, THE WORRY FREE WAY.

Applying to college is stressful.  Writing college essays is perhaps the most stressful part of the process.

Why is that?

Because writing is hard.  Because writing winning essays is critical to your success in getting into college.  And because you are required to write in a form you have never been taught — the Narrative Personal Statement.

In the process of taking students through the steps to writing a stand-out college essay, I often speak about the Free Write.  In fact, the Free Write is the mainstay of my method.

Free writing is the act of getting everything out of your head and down on \”paper\” before worrying about what you\’re going to do with it.

 

Writing takes time.  And writing is difficult.  Anyone who writes for a living (like myself) will tell you this. And you probably know it already.

Of course there are those moments when you bang out an essay in 10 minutes flat — and it\’s the most brilliant thing you\’ve ever written.

I call this a \”dangerous piece of luck.\”  It happens, but you can\’t count on it.

Because of the fact that writing is difficult and writing takes time, it\’s a good idea to start your college essays early.  That\’s an understatement.  It\’s imperative you start now!  

Summer is a great time to begin your college essays. 

Free from the pressure of the daily-grind-with-homework-on-top, you have the ability in summer to \”loaf and invite your soul.\”  And I would advise you to do just that.  Get ready to relax.

You must be thinking I\’m talking circles around you.  Writing is difficult, but get ready to relax?  What on earth could this writing guru mean? 😉

I do not advise you procrastinate on starting your college essays — and personally I would start with the Common App — but I do advise that you put off the pain of writing as long as possible!

There is always a moment of truth whenever you write in which you must break a sweat.

The idea is to do everything you can to delay that moment as long as possible.

Enter the FREE WRITE!

Once you have brainstormed ideas — and that\’s easy — it can be as simple as reading the prompts for the Common App essay or for the Personal Insight Questions and jotting down what comes to mind.

You could also, as I often do with students, list 5 significant moments in your life in which you went into an experience one person and came out slightly, or more than slightly, changed.

In reality, anything can serve as a prompt if it prompts you to write.

The idea is to FREE yourself enough to write what comes to mind about a moment, an object, a person, an experience that is or has been important to you.

You could write about a teacher you had.

You could write about a droid you tried to build.

You could write about the corner of your backyard you always believed was haunted!

It doesn\’t really matter.  Anything you write about in great depth, from your heart, in the spirit of freedom, will reveal a lot about you.

Witness this essay on a student\’s obsession with calligraphy:

The Illuminati changed my life. Three years ago, I found my first ambigram in one of my favorite novels, Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. I turned the page, and there it was: the word “Illuminati” printed into the exact center of the book. It was styled like a newspaper masthead, exquisite and complex, yet oddly symmetric. Curious, I rotated the book upside-down. Impossibly, the inverted word was still “Illuminati”. Gazing closer, I realized that the letters, I-L-L-U-M, actually shaped a flipped I-N-A-T-I. Suddenly, I was reading it inboth directions. My eyes waltzed along the broad curves and sharp twists of the calligraphy, striking poses in a glamorous font against a sheet of creamy whiteness, sliding between the dense vertical strokes, peering at the edge of the defined serif as it angled away, then bent boldly toward me. Every line was deliberate, every flourish smiling with purpose, and the whole word balanced on the delicate cord that joined two letters into one. It was unforgettable. Ambigrams are words that can be read from different directions. Actually, “ambigram” is an umbrella term that encompasses dozens of distinct types of visual wordplay. The most popular ones are rotational, mirror image, and – my personal favorites – symbiotic ambigrams, which can spell two different things when viewed normally and upside-down. Compelled by the striking art, I could not help but try my own hand at designing ambigrams, and slowly I felt the pitiful stick-figure artist inside me shrink away as my inner energetic graphic designer sprang up. Before early volleyball tournaments, I woke myself up by filling up pages and pages of experimental letter combinations, gleefully satisfied at the way that a rounded lowercase “a” was a perfect upside-down lowercase “e”. In my AP Literature class, I drew “She’s a witch!” which revealed, when flipped,“Communist” to reflect Arthur Miller’s contemporary motives for writing The Crucible. On a challenge from a friend, I even drew an ambigram of “Jay-Z” and “Beyoncé” on a bumpy bus ride back from a Leadership retreat. In the last few months, I have also practiced drawing ambigrams as fast as I can. I dream about the day when I can effortlessly write out a message saying “Hi, how are you today?” normally and “The password is cherry268” upside-down, without pausing or rotating the paper. I imagine a world in which everyone had this ability, and could literally write two things at once. How would that change communication? Encryption? Trust? My legs swing comfortably from this innovative edge, excited to take a stab at the Answers. The best part about the ambigram is that it refuses to define itself as just onething. It is a linguistic passion, a cryptographic endeavor, an artistic design, and an ironic illusion. I relish the fact that ambigrams force both the artist and the audience to reject first glances and embrace secret identities. This may just be a nerdy obsession, but ambigrams have taught me more than how to sketch fancy words. Their multidimensional truth implies that my hobbies of both writing Italian sonnets and solving logic riddles are not opposing functions of my left and right brains, but rather, a perfect conglomeration of my passion for creating and solving puzzles. The beauty of the most surprising combinations reminds me to take bold risks in both my life and my designs. Above all else, ambigrams have taught me that I can create the impossible. I can make true and false the same word depending on something as simple as a 180-degree head turn. Victory can be defeat. Open can be closed. An amateur piano player with an obsession with cryptology can learn to program iPhone apps and get the game-winning kill at the varsity volleyball championship. A girl with divorced parents can make time for both families, and an inspired teenager from California can write her name into world history – both normally and upside-down.

While it is true that some prompts require more specific answers such as for the \”WHY\’s\” and the Personal Insight Questions, there will still be a need for freedom in writing in order to get something down on the page.

And in order to have that freedom, you have to get into the \”zone.\”

The \”zone\” is worry free.

It is a place where you can be yourself and check your inner critic at the door.

 

 

 

The Worry Free Zone

Sometimes to help a student get into the zone, I do an exercise in which we write a crazy short story in turns.  I write a sentence; you write a sentence; I write a sentence; you write a sentence.

Since you never know what I\’m going to write, you are free to let yourself be in the moment and respond when the time comes.

Another favorite exercise to get students into the \”zone\” is to have them pick random phrases from a book — it could be any book, but I particularly like books about quantum physics — and then write using the phrase as a \”prompt.\”

Let me demonstrate:

I pull off my shelf a small book by Rebecca Solnit called Hope in the Dark.

The first phrase I see when I open the book:

Imagine what else could have sprung from that morning eight years ago.

Now it\’s my turn to write something that could follow this line.  And here is what I wrote:

To jump ahead eight years from eight years ago lands me right here writing to you.  But let me count back.  Where was I living?  What was I doing?  Perhaps that was the year I witnessed a double homicide in Oakland, California. . .

(Sorry, dear reader, to be so grim.  It\’s a true story, but I will save it for my next book . . 😉

A random phrase from someone else\’s book can prompt you to write an amazing essay!

Anything can, if you are open.  And realize you can just write write write.  And if you get yourself into the zone.

I often like to say you need to \”get lost in order to get found.\”

What do you do once you\’ve free written your little heart out?

You read what you\’ve written to figure out what you\’re trying to say!

But first, you must free write.  Stream-of-consciousness, no regard for grammar, punctuation and spelling — but in FULL sentences.

Don\’t be tempted to use bullet points, except to jot down the ideas you came up with when you were brainstorming.

Allow yourself to go sentence by sentence into the unknown — and then you\’ll see that the book I pulled off the shelf randomly, maybe wasn\’t so random after all, as free writing will give you Hope in the Dark!

If you want to take a journey to the worry-free zone, I would love to be your guide.  Click here to get started.

Hope in the Dark
Don't Get Nervous. Get to Work!

The Common App Essay: Start now, Worry Later

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My daughter absolutely LOVED working with Gabrielle Glancy.  Gabby was a huge help, support and inspiration, and taught her how to think about writing in a whole different way.

Believe it or not, the time to start writing your Common App essay is now.  

The clock is ticking.  There are two weeks left of summer before school starts. 

A recent article in Forbes hits the nail on the head:

The end of summer feels imminent. . . With the school year approaching, college applications are weighing heavily on rising seniors’ minds . . . Many students can expect to have at least one application due by early November. Yes, this is over three months away, but the fall can be hectic with classes, sports and activities.

Just reading this will make you nervous.  Of course, Brennan Barnard, the author of this article, is right.  But do you have to rub it in? 😉

So, you know you have to get started, but you\’re not sure how to do that.

First off, I would relax.  I know that seems paradoxical, even impossible, when you\’re faced with such a high stakes game like getting into college.

What you need most to write a great essay is a great state of mind.

Most people in my position focus on the externals of writing — picking a topic, structuring your essay, making the language come alive.

I\’d like to focus on the internal aspects of writing — what I like to call the Inner Game of Writing — which is the main subject of my new book UNSTUCK:  How to Break Through Writer\’s Block, Find Your Voice and Get Into the College of Your Dreams.

Had I not suffered from writer\’s block myself, I wouldn\’t have earned my stripes.

I had a bad case of it!  In fact, writer\’s block is the reason I almost became a doctor instead of a writer.  I just could not overcome my anxiety.  It was paralyzing.  \”Hamlet, the main character of Shakespeare\’s play Hamlet . . .\”  EEK!  I can\’t write that! 

One day, I learned to let the river take me.  I realized that I had to put my thinking mind to sleep and write from another place, what I have come to call \”the trance-like state.\”

But how do you get into the \”trance-like\” state.

 

Common App Essay Topics

 

In a way, you have to trick yourself into relaxing.

One of the best ways to do this is to adopt an attitude of \”play.\”

Many people — including trained professionals — will tell you that you need to find a topic before you can start writing.

I think you should start writing to find a topic!  \”The wand must find the wizard.\”

But what do you write, what do you start with?

Anything!

And then you free write until there is nothing more to say, not worrying about order of ideas, grammar, punctuation, spelling — just write write write.

Let me demonstrate.

From where I am sitting now, I see an old-fashioned upright bicycle leaning against the wall in the courtyard across from my office.

I will begin to free write on this bicycle with no particular topic in mind. 

Note:  The mind is a wild animal.  If you truly follow its meanderings, you\’ll see that, like a chimpanzee going from branch to branch, your thoughts will jump around.

That bike reminds me of the green Raleigh I got for Christmas, it must have been 1975.  I had a Raleigh later that I loved.  I biked all around London with it.  The courtyard is terra cotta, with late afternoon sun cutting across the middle in a small town in the South of France.  My father motorcycled to the South of France every year, to the Arts Festival there . . . That year I got 4 bikes stolen.  I bought a Motobecane, silver, from a street vendor on St. Mark\’s.  That one must have been stolen too.  Once all that was left was a skeleton of a bike still attached to a parking meter and the chain I locked it up with.  I used to carry it down the three stairs to my favorite cafe, Cafe Mogador . . .

And so on and so on.

This free write is actually rich with possibility, even though I had NO IDEA what I was going to write and it didn\’t seem at the time I wrote it as if I could use it for anything.

But my train of thought took me to many interesting places all over the world.  And the stolen bike theme is a metaphor, as is the skeleton of a bike attached to the parking meter — of the lives we live and leave behind?  I would have to write more to find out.

But that was the easiest 150 words I ever wrote.  I just let myself leap from thought to thought without a care in the world.

That\’s the idea of the free write.

You can start anywhere.  Pick an object (such as the bicycle), a person, a meal, a place, a memory, a dream, a scene in a movie . . . and just start free associating from there. (Remember:  Write in full sentences!)

What will this have to do with your essay?  You have to write enough so that a pattern or theme will emerge. 

Then you have to read what you\’ve written to figure out what you\’re trying to say.

This is the complete opposite of what everyone else will tell you.  Trust me.  

The beauty of this way of doing it is you take the anxiety out of the equation.

I outline this method in my new book UNSTUCK, available from Amazon on September 1.

You can read a review of it here.

I would be happy to guide you on the amazing journey of writing from the inside out with an attitude of play and freedom, rather than nerves and anxiety.

Feel free to give me a call to ask me how I would do this or Book a session now.

 

 

 

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