<p>Read a lot and develop a good vocabulary. The better your vocabulary, the more educated you sound.</p>
<p>Read to develop a better flow in your writing. Master the long-lost art of the semicolon, and definitely use a thesaurus to find the perfect word. Learn to edit for structural inconsistencies, as well as for grammar and spelling.</p>
<p>I consider myself a very good creative writer. It is one of the few things I consider myself extremely good at, and I do believe that it was my essays (among other things, sure) that got me into Stanford University for the class of 2017.</p>
<p>That being said, I do feel that creative writing is a lot like singing: you can get better at it, but only if you understand why you aren’t good at it in the first place. And similar to singing, there are parts of it that is subjective, and it is hard to tell who is a “better” author when you put two distinguished authors next to each other. It is, however, easy to tell apart excellent writing from poor writing; in the same way, it is easy to recognize if someone has a beautiful singing voice over a poor singing voice.</p>
<p>The only way I can see someone getting better at creative writing is by them writing a little bit and then having someone show them where they can improve. When I read a story, I like to think about what I like and dislike about the story. For example, as a self-proclaimed psychology nerd, I often have trouble with dialog because books very rarely allow dialog to flow freely in the way that real-life conversations do. I often feel that dialog is either rushed or contains lots of pointless information (I once read a book where the characters were like, “You stop!” “No, you stop!” “I told you first!” “No, me!” and it went on and on. I made note of how much it bothered me because I realized that you should always include what needs to be said, nothing more and nothing less). Furthermore, I have trouble with how quickly teenage characters fall madly in love in young adult novels. Little things like this stay in the back of my mind when I am writing stories, and the same can ultimately be said when you are writing your college essays.</p>
<p>Overall, I think the most helpful advice I can offer about creative writing is that you should always look at writing as a way to articulate a message in the most realistic way possible. Writing something beautiful is not nearly as hard as writing something realistic and philosophically sound. I think that you should begin by writing exactly what it is you want to say, and then go back and cut out all the useless information, shorten sentences, etc. And then you can go back again and make your sentences sound beautiful. This is the tactic I used to write a lot of my college essays, and it is also a tactic I use to write sonnets (I once wrote an entire essay in Shakespearean using this tactic. It wasn’t hard — I just wrote a normal essay and then changed the sentences into old english using an Elizabethan translator. It was only a one-page essay, so it took like an hour and a half).</p>
<p>PM me further if you want help. I love to read and offer constructive criticism, though I am by no means an expert. In fact, I hope I didn’t make myself sound like I am smarter than I really am. I am just a seventeen year old girl lounging on the sofa, killing time on the Internet.</p>