#i may be more sensical about my thoughts later too filled with emotions to do so now

[alifeincoffeespoons]

a moony has spawned in the server, chapter three

check out the first two parts of this fic here!

hey sirius,

this is my first common app draft. please, please be harsh with it. tear it apart. also, i’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone else about my topic/etc—it’s pretty personal to me. - remus

will do! - sirius

common app draft #1: through sickness and health

The waiting room’s fluorescent lights are harsh and unforgiving. The faces of my mother and father are as unreadable as stone, my mother staring straight ahead, digging her fingernails into her palm. I swing my legs back and forth impatiently—we’ve spent the past weeks in and out of Inova Fairfax, and I’ve been poked and prodded at, had vials of blood drawn by smiling nurses with colorful Band-Aids, had cells taken from my bones and sent to laboratories, and all I want to do is go home.

I know I’m not well. I’ve spent the past few months losing weight even as I fill up my plate with food at dinnertime, and at night, I keep my parents up with my coughing. But I’ve always gotten sick easily—one of my earliest memories is of my mother at my bedside, pressing a cold compress onto my forehead as I burn up with a fever—so I see no reason to be worried. I see no reason for my father’s mouth to be set in a grim line, for my mother to close her eyelids tight and mutter the refuah shlema under her breath.

your writing is good, but i think these two paragraphs take up too much space. you only have 650 words, and you’re using almost a third of them to basically say that you’re in a hospital and are sick with an unknown disease.

“Mr. and Mrs. Lupin?” A nurse emerges from the door leading to the waiting room, holding a clipboard. “May I speak to you?”

dialogue is always tricky in essays. i’m not sure if you should take this out or keep it in—so far, your essay is basically a narrative, so it might work, but at the same time, it always feels awkward to me when a conversation is shoved into the middle of an essay. also, i really doubt that you remember any of this as vividly as you’re describing it.

My parents follow her into the next room over, and I’m left by myself in the waiting room. I flip through an old issue of Highlights, musing over the faded puzzles. These are the last few minutes before my life is irrevocably altered. In twenty minutes, my parents will leave the side room with their faces drawn and pale. In twenty minutes, I’ll learn the meaning of the words “acute lymphocytic leukemia.” In twenty minutes, I’ll be told that I’ll be returning to the hospital often to undergo chemotherapy.

good parallelism here—could you make this more of the focal piece of your narrative? also, i’m unsure if the current third iteration of “in twenty minutes” is the strongest one—can you reword it?

The next few years of my life were spent in and out of hospital beds, having various drugs injected into me. I was pulled out of the local middle school and enrolled in a virtual high school, my father believing that it would afford me more stability in my learning—never mind that I lost most of my friends in the process. While my former friends joined the track team and learned to play the flute, I learned about genetically inherited diseases and cell mutations. There were few constants during those three years.

obviously, this is a negative part in the story, but it might be too negative—you don’t want to come off in a bad light to the admissions officers.

Perhaps the only constants were boredom and anger. Boredom as I found myself with almost no entertainment bar the children’s cartoons playing constantly on the old televisions of the hospital, anger as I found myself overcome with helplessness. I couldn’t do anything to stop the sadness and fear on the faces of my parents. I couldn’t do anything to make my cells stop eating me from the inside out. I couldn’t do anything to make the treatments work. All I could do was wait and hope.

maybe take out the boredom part + emphasize the helplessness. also, maybe don’t use the word anger.

It was my mother, who had always loved words, that finally came up with the solution. “What if you could write those thoughts down?” She gave me a notebook bound with ribbon, and in it, I wrote my first poems—words running into each other as I grasped for a way to describe the changes in my life, for a way to describe the emotions that I could never voice out loud. Predictably, they weren’t very good poems, even for an eleven-year-old—but they were poems. There were verses and stanzas and half-sensical metaphors, and I spent those lonely days and nights in my hospital bed scribbling out my thoughts and dreams and everything that came to me under the moonlight. And I kept writing, even after the treatments finally came to an end. I wrote about my grandmother’s childhood in East Germany; I wrote about my father’s beloved dog named Snuffles, who he cried over when he had to be put down; I wrote about injustice and justice and fear and love. And even now, I keep writing—because I know that the written word is the way to the elusive pursuit of realization.

this probably sounds bad, but this is honestly the only paragraph that i can feel true emotion in. finally, it doesn’t sound like you’re writing something you want the admissions officers to like—this is something you care about. what if you reworked the essay to focus more on this? do half-and-half, maybe—half getting sick, half writing + realizing that you loved to write. currently, it feels rushed (which is also probably because you’re over the word count, but we can fix that later), and i think it’s because the balance is off. thoughts on this and my other notes?

moony (Today at 2:02 PM) so basically my essay is trash lmao

padfoot (Today 2:04 PM) it’s not trash! we just have to rework some parts of it that’s all

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