A fresh start. Doesn’t that sound nice?

We’re not talking about your life.

We’re talking about your essays.

Which, at this point on the calendar as we head into Round 1, may be (should be!!) one and the same!

We realize that some of you just rolled out of bed and looked at the calendar and rubbed the sleepboulders from your eyes to realize that, “Oh. Hey. Aren’t some applications due pretty soon?” And you haven’t really begun the heavy lifting of writing any essays yet. (If that’s you: You still have time to go through all the steps of the Complete Essay Package and come up with a strong pitch!)

But others have been writingwritingwriting and despite our many warnings about DON’T DO THAT!! you wrote a full draft for Harvard’s open-ended question, or about Stanford “What matters most?”, as your very first project.

And now you have a frankenstein monster that’s 2,000 words and has every single thought that you’ve thunk in the past three years referenced somewhere.

As much as it pains us to even suggest it: It might be better to start over.

We see signs when this might be the best (only) way out of an essay morass with things like this:

The introduction says stuff that’s never referenced again anywhere in the essay. Ever.
The same story appears in multiple places, but only in bits and bobs.
There’s timewarping out the gazoo.
The essay is 3x as long as it’s allowed to be by the school’s instructions.
The essay commits the #1 worst mistake in all of essays to bschool ever.

These are just some of the signs, and it’s certainly not an exhaustive list. But if even one of those is present in a draft, it is a good indication you may be headed for trouble.

It’s possible to do open-heart surgery on a draft that’s in trouble, but usually, it just makes a mess and gets guts on the floor and the patient ends up dying on the table anyway. And then the surgeon is exhausted and goes out to have a cigarette and doesn’t come back for two days.

That’s inefficient and non-productive (and dangerous: somebody’s gonna slip and fall in that mess of guts you left behind).

So yeah. We’re saying to put this beast out of its misery and start over.

But you know what?

If you do this, it may be painful at the beginning — just because that decision to drop what you’ve started and abandon all the words you wrote seems like a defeat.

But very, very soon, if you do this and ditch the too-long/overfraught/impossible spaghetti-mess of a document that you’ve constructed, and you do that horrible little step of “File->New” in Word, and stare at a pristine blank page that’s seemingly laughing back at you…

If you have the bravery to do that, then guess what?

It’s highly likely that the same good ideas you had before will still be there. Those good ideas will still make their way to this draft. And very soon, after going through some emotional angst in the difficult decision, you’ll start to see sunlight again, and you’ll get energized.

That is, provided you don’t repeat the same process that got you the Frankenstein before.

You need to start over and do the first step differently.

Don’t start over by writing a new draft.

If you do this, then you need to START OVER WITH OUTLINES.

Figure out EXACTLY what the answer to the question is first. This needs to be YOUR FIRST STEP.

Now that you’ve written a bunch on this topic, you will have a whole arsenal of ideas to pull from. The step that many people skip is ORGANIZING THOSE IDEAS. Selecting the best ones, and leaving the others aside for another essay on another day. Structuring your thoughts. Putting things in their proper place. Sticking with the skeleton form of an essay first. Not writing it.

If you just start writing, the draft will end up looking like the inside of your brain looks: a frenetic upchuck of random crazy thoughts and ideas that may be tangentially related but really don’t make all that much sense. (Isn’t that how your thoughts work in your head? Lots of pingponging? Associations and tangents? Snippets and memories and muddiness and distractions? We often see essays that are a direct representation of the thought patterns going on in the person’s brain. Revealing that to the adcom is not actually a good way to get into bschool. 😉 )

Here’s some actual honest-to-goodness real-life feedback we gave to a BSer after coming to the conclusion that this person’s Harvard draft was similarly unsalvagable:

formal outline to make sure you have the logic fully mapped out – is the way to go before proceeding. And, as counterproductive as it may seem, getting some other school’s essays done first (or at least, further along) before coming back to HBS is likely going to help. We know, there’s hardly any time, but if you’re diligent it can be done! A clean-slate approach on this is really going to be needed if you’ll have any hope of addressing these issues. Tinkering around the edges and trying to fix them in-line is like trying to change the tires on a moving car.

(Such feedback — and plenty more like it, that’s actionable and specific and very very detailed — is given through our Essay Decimator Essay Review service, in case you were wondering.)

Remember, writing essays is not a writing exercise.

It’s a THINKING exercise.

There are very, very few people who know what they want to say before they start writing — yet they start writing anyway. And then they have an essay that doesn’t know what it’s saying.

Don’t be that guy.

Sometimes the quickest way to where you want to get is to slow down, or even, sometimes, to start over.

You may also be interested in:

Is it better to build up or carve down?

If you’re feeling lost on your essays and you haven’t read our SnarkStrategies Guide for your school, then you’re making it harder than it has to be. Please stop by The Bookstore to see all titles currently available. They will help you!!