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The halls of every high school are tense right now. After all, it’s March: the season of waiting for envelopes or emails from colleges. Some students who applied early may be lucky enough to know whether they were accepted, and where. But a good number of others will be anxious until April, since many universities don’t send out their final acceptances until then.

I feel for all the young people who will spend the next month or two consumed by a process that is entirely out of their hands. If that describes you, please take this to heart: You’ve done everything you can. Try to enjoy these last few months of high school. But I know the futility of such advice. I know many students will be agonizing until May 1, confirmation day at many schools around the country, when they will announce to the world the place they’ll call “Home” for the next four (or more) years.

So seniors and parents of seniors, hang in there just a few more weeks. Juniors, it’s your turn. As you’re gearing up to write those all-important application essays, the ones that will demonstrate to college admissions committees that you’re a good fit, I can offer a few tips.

Start early, but not too early. If you’re a high school junior, and if your parents are anything like most at my kids’ high-powered high school, you’re probably being pressured to start your essays yesterdayor, barring that, over spring break. 

I have a reputation for being a careful planner, but this seems a bit early even to me. I think it’s better to spend second semester of junior year delving into the courses that might help you decide what you’d like to study in college. And it’s certainly better to spend spring break frolicking with friends at the beach, hiking, or playing frisbee with your dog. (If you MUST break out the AP or SAT test prep guides at some point, so be it. But please, no more than 2 hours a day, okay? Apply some sunscreen and go play.)

Summer—that’s your starting point for application essays. You won’t have the pressure of papers, pop quizzes, or AP tests distracting you from the task. You’ll have had time to let the last year of learning settle, and you’ll be able to step back and take stock. Maybe you’ll even be a little more certain about why you want to study a particular subject, or at a particular school.

Don’t be freaked out by the questions. A lot of college application essay questions are purposely general. Some students see that level of generality and freak out because they think they have to chronicle everything they’ve ever done that will make them a good fit for college. When they try, their essays become a choppy, centerless mess—which is what no admissions officer wants. 

In fact, college admissions committees don’t want you to tell them everything. Your résumé is already doing that for you. What they really want is to learn who you are and how you think. They want to hear your voice and get a sense of the person and student their campus would get if they sent you an acceptance. They want to know what qualities you’d bring to their community. And, believe it or not, when they ask what you want to study, they don’t expect you to know now that you want to get your PhD in aerospace engineering so you can work with NASA to make Mars habitable for humans. If you know you want to do that, great—but most people your age don’t. 

What are you curious about? What problems engage you? What would you like to learn so you can help address those problems? What lessons have you learned that will help you succeed in an undergraduate program? For most college admissions teams, showing the sort of student you will be is more important than showing you’ve got your entire career planned out.

Trust the power of stories.Sometimes the best way to answer an essay question is with a story. Questions that begin “Tell about a time when….”? Yeah, those are pretty obviously asking for stories. To answer those questions well, you need to ask yourself “What do admissions officers hope to learn from this story?” Well, they want to learn the sort of qualities you possess, so they can tell what you’ll bring to their school. Grit, intellectual curiosity, problem solving—these are just a few of the traits that might make an admissions committee think, “Yes, we want this student.” 

If you’re having trouble thinking of stories from your life, you might jog your memory by making a list of the qualities an admissions committee is likely to appreciate in applicants; then consider each quality in turn, and ask, “Is there a story in my life that shows I have this quality?” By the time you’ve made it through the list, you’ll probably have one or more stories you could share in a personal statement.

Pay close attention to deadlines. I recommend setting up a Google Sheet for yourself that lists the colleges you are applying to and all their important deadlines: early application deadline, regular deadline, financial aid deadline, honors program deadlines, FAFSA deadline. Also include the type of application each school accepts (common app, universal app, universal app, school-specific apps, etc.) and a list of any additional essay questions each school wants you to answer. As you’re scouring websites for that information, be thorough, especially if you want to be considered for scholarships. 

Some schools streamline their scholarship application process so your application to college makes you eligible for scholarship consideration. But simply applying may not make you eligible for ALL the scholarship opportunities a school offers. I knew a smart young student once who, because his grades were middling, decided not to apply for the honors college in his chosen major. He arrived at orientation to find that the only people who had received merit scholarships from the department were those who had applied to the honors college; it turned out that applying to it was the prerequisite for being considered—a fact he would have known if he had spent more time scouring the department website. The moral of the story: Make sure you know what you have to do to be considered for scholarships from your university AND from your intended major, just in case those requirements are different.

That’s probably enough to get you started.

I don’t tend to spend a lot on decorations for holidays–my sister got the decorator genes in our generation–but this past January as I was wandering the local grocery story during its get-rid-of-everything-Christmas sale, I saw this: 

I had never seen an advent calendar so rustic and simple.  Smitten, I bought it and promptly put it away for next year. Then last week, “next year” arrived! So I happily pulled it out of storage,  hung it up on the wall in my dining area, and… stared at it. 

See, here’s the thing: My family doesn’t have much use for a traditional advent calendar. My kids are teenagers (one’s away at college, even), so there are no tots here to delight in pulling little chocolates out of the buckets. And chocolates are out of the question anyway, since our dog would tear the calendar apart to get to them, and we’re not looking to get his stomach pumped any time soon.

So I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this adorable thing, whose numbered buckets indicate pretty clearly that we’re meant to do something with them daily. Then yesterday it hit me: I’ll fill it with words.

I suppose there are a lot of ways to do this well. Some people might fill each bucket with a biblical verse; others might fill them with prompts for games of Holiday Charades. For me, the best choice is to turn it into a Gratitude Calendar.

I’m one of those people who thinks Gratitude Journals are a wonderful idea–I can’t say how often I’ve started them. But I seem constitutionally unable to stick with them. This is something I’d like to change about myself, because I know it’s true that people who are grateful for the good things in their lives tend to be happier overall. And who can’t use a little more happiness? The Gratitude Calendar looks like it will be a wonderful baby step toward this goal, because it only goes on for a finite amount of time: just between now and Christmas. Surely I can stick with that!

So today I cut slips of paper from pages in an old notebook and put them in a bowl on my kitchen table, with a pen within easy reach. I thought about what had happened on each of the past 7 days (since the beginning of December), grabbed some slips of paper, and started writing down all the things I’m grateful for, big and small. Here are some of the things I wrote:

• UT and Son#1 get to go to the Cotton Bowl.
• Son#2 helps/takes over in the kitchen.
• We have extended family, and we look forward to spending time with them.
• Health insurance

Then I considered which days those bits of gratitude belonged to and tucked them in the proper calendar buckets, like this:

My plan is to encourage each member of my family to put words in the buckets whenever suits them, and then on Christmas Eve, we’ll pull them out and remind ourselves how much we have to be thankful for.

At least, I hope that’s how it will go. Wish me luck! And may your holidays be merry, bright, and brimming with words that matter.

I’m not a big fan of outlines as a drafting tool. I wrote them in high school and again in my first-year advanced writing course in college, both times under duress.

When I say “outlines,” I’m not thinking of the short jottings students write in the margins of a bluebook to organize their thoughts before an essay test. Those serve the valuable purpose of keeping the brain on track in a time-sensitive situation. No, the kind I hate are sentence outlines, the paramour of many English teachers in the 1980s, who required student writers to plan in excruciating detail the topic sentence for each paragraph of their essay.

I believe the teachers who assigned those outlines did so in good faith. I bet they thought that if my classmates and I knewthe topic sentence of each paragraph in advance, we’d have an easier time writing the rest of the paper. But I found those sentence outlines stultifying. They turned the act of writing into drudgery where I dutifully wrote a little bit more about what I’d said my main ideas were. The process was made more excruciating by teachers who refused to let us change our outlines while we were writing.  No pursuit of new ideas = no delight.

My rejection of outlines comes chiefly from this miserable adolescent experience with them but also from composition scholarship that says the act of writing is itself generative. When we write, we don’t simply flesh out ideas that were wholly formed in advance: The act of writing creates new ideas and can take us far away from where we thought our thoughts would take us.  When we write, we learn what we think. 

So, yeah, I loathe sentence outlines. But there’s another sort of outline I do appreciate: the reverse outline. It’s based on the premise that an outline is easier to write, and more useful, after your draft is complete. 

How does it work? Imagine you’ve completed a vomit draft, a first draft where you just spit all of your ideas onto the page, not caring whether the sentences are complete or the punctuation is correct, not thinking at all about style. You’ve got loads of ideas here, but you’re a little woozy from dropping all that stuff on the page really quickly, and you’re not sure how the ideas fit together and whether they’re ordered in a way that makes any real sense. 

This is a great time for a reverse outline. Go through the essay, summarizing the main idea of each paragraph in the margin. If a paragraph seems to have more than one main idea, write both down. (You’ll come back to this.) When you get to the end of the paper, go back to the beginning and read your paragraph summaries.

This is where you’ll be able to tell how your ideas are progressing. If you feel a bit of a leap between paragraphs, so will your reader. Maybe you’ll just need more of a transition there, or maybe those paragraphs are too unrelated to be so close to each other. Having summaries of all your paragraphs allows you to see those gaps and misalignments, so you can move paragraphs around to create a more logical progression. And those paragraphs where you have more than one idea? Those are an opportunity. Break them up and develop your thinking about each topic more fully. 

My other favorite time to apply the reverse outline technique is when I’m so deep into revising that I’ve lost track of which point I’m trying to develop. For me, this usually goes something like this: I’m writing along, developing one point, and then suddenly it becomes apparent that the point isn’t really clear unless I explain something else for a while, and that leads me to a really cool rethinking of something I said earlier, which now I need to comment on, and wow, doesn’t the framing I gave this paragraph make it seem like I should be developing another idea too…Sound familiar? This is one example of what scholars mean when they say writing is generative, and if you’re having this experience, you may want to get to the end of this section and start to reverse outline.

So it happened: I missed a week of writing, and then it stretched into almost two. And my internal critic is not happy. She’s having a hissy fit about how unreliable I am, how I blathered on about the virtues of writing even just 15 minutes a day, and then I failed to follow through.

Never mind that I’ve been coughing up my lungs for 2 weeks: The internal critic is a No Excuses type, sort of like the nun who terrorized my entire 5^thgrade class by rattling more than one of our heads against the hooks in the cloak room. (For the record, I’ve known some nuns who were simply wonderful; she was not one of them.)

The critic likes to lay it on thick. See, you’re not REALLY a writer, she crows. That’s what I’ve said all along. I’m right; you’re WRONG. What a fraud you are! Look, if you can’t even keep a simple promise to put in 15 minutes a day, you should probably quit your job helping other people write. 

She can go on in this vein for quite some time. When I was younger, her tactics could knock me flat for days. I spent a lot of time at the therapist’s office asking if the path I had chosen was the right one for me. But as I grew used to her tricks, I learned to look for the holes in her logic.

And this time the hole is an oldie but a goodie: The False Dilemma. According to the inner critic, there are only two ways of being: If I write every single day, I am a writer; if I fail to write every day (for whatever reason), I am a fraud. 

Like many charlatans who set out two options as your only choices, she oversimplifies the situation grossly. What if an emergency happens? Or I’m too sick to think straight? Should I really believe a voice that thinks I should be writing under those circumstances?

The critic’s draconian words are designed to make me feel like I should give up. And that’s how I know she’s the fraud, because you should never trust an voice–internal or external–that tells you to stop creating.

You’re not imagining it: you’re hella busy.

Chances are, if you’ve hit a certain age (not very advanced one), every day brings new rounds of busy-ness. I’m willing to bet you juggled at least 4 of the following today: work, school, homework or work that you do at home at night for your job (teachers, I see you!), chauffeuring, extracurriculars, paying bills, grocery shopping, cooking meals (or trekking to meals), dishes, packing lunches, fixing stuff around the house, cleaning, folding laundry, mowing the lawn, or applying for things you want  or need (like college acceptance or a home improvement loan). 

On top of all that, you’re probably also doing what you can to be a good person, to be kind and considerate to others, to be a supportive friend or family member or colleague, to pull your weight in whatever circumstances you find yourself in. 

So if you look over your days and think, “When can I possibly write?”, know this: The struggle is real. No matter who you are, your life is brimming with responsibilities and expectations, and while many of them are welcome, they all take time.  And so does writing.

When I take stock of all the things I’m juggling, I can get a little panicky about when I will ever be able to write again, so I remind myself of a few things:

My busy-ness is a result of my choices. Sure, things crop up that are out of my control, but for the most part, the things that make me busy are things I’ve chosen. I chose to do the kind of work I do, to be a presence in my kids’ school lives, to cook meals from scratch rather than ordering pizza every night (as tempting as that sounds). A lot of my choices are non-negotiable (yes, I do need to show up for work and actually be a functional human being there). But sometimes I can gain a little peace by being a little less of a perfectionist. (Papa Murphy’s, save me.)

Feeling less busy is a matter of perspective.I used to think people who felt this way simply had too much time on their hands. I’ve since discovered that, even if the entire day is going sideways, the thing that makes the difference between Frazzled Alice and Serene Alice is my outlook. If I’m in victim mode and my brain is screaming “Why me? Why do I have to be responsible?!”, serenity is going to pack her bags and head for sunnier climes. So I have to settle myself down to do a bit of work, because:

Gaining perspective takes a bit of effort. In a culture that worships busy-ness, slowing down and finding the big picture is a counter-cultural act. Fortunately, the counter-culture has been pushing its way into the mainstream for a long time and bringing with it really effective tools for slowing down. 

For me, yoga is one of these tools. My schedule doesn’t fit with the local YMCA’s class schedule, so I improvise. Every morning when my alarm goes off, I slip into another room (to keep from waking my husband and dog), unroll a mat, and drop into child’s pose. 

The beauty of doing yoga alone is that no one tells me to LEAVE child’s pose. I can stay there as long as I want. And if I don’t want to do sun salutations or chaturangas? Well, then I don’t. The freedom is amazing. When I move, it’s because I want to move. I wait until a little bell in my head says, “Now,” and then I move.

I emerge from yoga feeling clear-eyed, relaxed, and ready to face what the world has in store for me. And get this: Getting to this happy place takes me no more than fifteen minutes. Why? Because:

Time isn’t what we thought it was.

Lots of us have gone through life believing that in order to do something well, we have to put in hours and hours of time. We have to become slaves to the process for days or weeks or years, sacrificing all the things normal mortals enjoy. We cling to the Olympic athlete metaphor for pursuing your dreams. And it’s soul-sucking.

Does writing well take time and dedication? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean the chunks of time have to be long. For years I pummeled myself for not setting several hours per day aside to write. Then a friend, who was finishing her second academic book at the time, talked about how different writing was for her now that she was a working professional with a family. She used to spend hours obsessing and losing herself in a writing project, but now she had to be a lot more disciplined. “It’s like I pop into a chapter and tie a bow here and sew a button on there, and then I pop out and do something else,” she said. The results are the same–she’s getting work out—but she’s enjoying more of life along the way.

Think of how much you get done when you’re totally engrossed in something. Now imagine letting yourself be engrossed in writing that way, for just a little while every day. 45 minutes? 30? Maybe just 15 will do. Because, as with yoga, if you really let yourself be present in the writing, you can get a lot done in 15 minutes.

At some points in my life, I’ve been an every-day writer. When I am, it feels great—much better than being a once-a-week writer or a when-the-world-stops-spinning-and-I-can-think-again writer. And because I actually feel my best as an every-day writer, I frequently find myself trying to become one once again.

Whenever I’m shifting back into writing daily, I have to work my way back in gently. I can’t sit down and say, “Hey, today I’m gonna work on my play!” That sort of high-stakes thinking might freeze my writer-self right up. Instead, I need to sidle up to her and be disarming, tell her “We’re just gonna write down our feelings,” or “We’re gonna carve out space to just ‘be.’” 

If I do this well, all those worries I had an hour ago (about having nothing to say, about being too public) don’t catapult to the surface wearing with their Edward Munch faces, and I might actually put some words on the page. For some of us, this low-stakes approach—writing about ourselves as a way of getting to the point of writing other things—works pretty well.

Of course, for some people, the thought of writing about themselves—especially their feelings–is about as much fun as shingles. I live with some of these people, and they have made it clear to me on more than one occasion that writing about feelings is NOT a clarifying or comforting activity and it will NOT lead them to churn out pages about, for example, Sir Isaac Newton, the telegraph, or recent developments in space flight. 

If these people are having trouble getting started, and only if they ask for my help, I tend to rummage in my shelves until I find Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. (Isn’t that a great title? It’s from a moment in Ann’s childhood when her brother was freaking out about the bird report he was writing, and their dad suggested, “Just take it bird by bird, buddy.”) Lamott is no stranger to the terrors of the empty page herself. One way she conquers it is by reminding herself that when she sits down to write, all she has to do is fill one picture frame.

Lamott actually keeps a tiny frame on her desk for this purpose, and if this idea appeals to you, you can too. The frame is there to remind you that you are not responsible for writing War & Peace or Finnegan’s Wake in one sitting. You’re only responsible for writing as much of your story (or essay, application, report, etc.) as you can view through one small picture frame.

Maybe that view is just big enough to show you an introduction or the beginning of an outline. Or maybe you peer into the frame and glimpse an idea from what will probably become page 3, and it’s pressing itself forward now to be reckoned with first. (For the record, I’m a big believer that if parts of your story press forward to be reckoned with first, you take care of them. If they’ve got something to say, it’s your job to listen.)

For a lot of writers, 10-15 minutes of low-stakes warm-up writing makes all the difference in what they can get done that day. What are your favorite ways to get started? 

You know those days when you sit down at the computer, and suddenly there are these “really important things” you just have to do before you write? I’ve decided to call these things Dragons.

I should clarify here that I’m not thinking of Eastern dragons who bring good luck, or Saphira-like dragons who would love and protect me. I’m thinking of European-style dragons who want to fry villages and eat people.

A Dragon is anything that might distract me from my goal. A prime example: the Facebook app on my iPhone. I have put it in a box labeled “Dragons,” which reminds me to think twice before opening it. And since putting it there, I’ve developed a series of useful questions I can ask before I open it:

Am I feeling selfless enough today to be pleased by the exotic vacations my friends are taking?

Is my ego strength strong enough to handle everyone’s brags about their high functioning kids or the new deck they just finished to the tune of $$$$$$$?

Do I really want to know which of my grad school colleagues is doing a TED talk?

If I’m honest with myself, the answer to these questions is “No.” If I want to write today (and let’s say, for argument’s sake, that I do), I don’t want my own green-eyed monster to wake. It will drag me back into its lair, tell me what an impostor I am, and assure me that my time is better spent doing something useful, like rearranging my sock drawer.

If this sounds familiar to you, let’s make a pact right now: Let’s let sleeping dragons lie.