I spent my summer writing a book called Perfect Phrases for Writing the College Application Essay. My effort was to come up with sentences (sometimes questions, sometimes statements) to help those who have to write the application essay focus and draw specific details from their experience and then organize the details into compelling personal statements.

I read and reread the manuscript before I turned it in to make sure I’d found all my mistakes. While reading the question phrases I’d come up with, I remembered a famous essay by Margaret Atwood called, “Nine Beginnings.” in which the question, “Why do you write?” appears nine times and is answered by the author nine different ways.

I found my copy of that essay inside the anthology Tell It Slant, by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola. I also found passages from it online. I realized that the question-phrases I had created were perfect for another purpose besides helping students cull ideas and decide which application essay question topics to choose. As personal essayists, we could consider some of these questions as interview questions and answer them from our life experience, memories, dreams, and reading. We might think of ourselves as interviewing with an admissions officer or filling out an application for the School of Life, a School for Scandal, the School for Wives (or husbands), a School for Scoundrels or the Wayward Girls’ and Boys’ Academy. We might be interviewing or applying for entrance into The School for Wooden Boat Building, Bartending School, Finishing School, or the Sex Therapists’ Institute. We could write a title like “Nine Application Questions to Answer in Applying to School for Husbands.” We could start off with a question, write an answer, follow it with another question and answer and so on. It doesn’t have to be nine questions, of course. The essay might be titled “An Application Question to Answer for…” or “Three Application Questions to Answer” or “An Interview for Entrance Into ….”

When Miller and Paola discuss Atwood’s essay, they dub it “hermit crab essay,” or a kind of lyric essay that appropriates another form “as an outer covering to protect is soft, vulnerable underbelly.” Atwood’s essay is built inside the shell of the question and answer format — in her case the same question is repeated nine times.

I have excerpted and amended the questions I wrote for Perfect Phrases to make them useful to you in writing an interview-style hermit crab essay. From the list below, select as many or as few questions that you need to write this essay. You can repeat questions as Atwood does and provide different answers each time or you might select different questions and provide something of the same answer. You might choose three questions or ten or fifteen questions–whatever number seems to help you evoke your experience and thinking.

 After each of the questions on the list, I’ve added a twist to help you think in terms of the “school” you might be applying to. Those twists are in parentheses following the questions. You might read this list with a “school” in mind or you might let yourself read through and select the questions that seem to make you want to write and decide what school your “interviewer” or “application” is from after you have some “answers” down. Your selection might lead to a very humorous essay or to a very poignant one.

The List
Have you won awards that make you proud? (Any of which you are ashamed? Can you think of awards you could have been awarded if they existed?)

Have you contributed to a person or group in a way that makes you proud? (Have you contributed to a group or person in a way that was unwanted or that they never noticed?)

If have mastery in playing an instrument or a sport or in understanding a subject, how do you evaluate your mastery? (Are you a master at telling fibs, covering up hurt, making others feel uncomfortable, eating your way through pain?)

If you have overcome a difficult obstacle, including handicaps, how did doing so help you develop your character and abilities? (Has overcoming the obstacles you can think of somehow created characteristics in you that you are not proud of?)

If you speak more than one language, how did you learn the language or languages that are not your native language? (What if you consider the language of love, the language of anger, the language of manipulation, the language of not standing up for oneself?)

If you immigrated and had to adapt to a new culture what was the most difficult part of doing that and how did you succeed? (What if the culture is the family of your in-laws or your own family, perhaps very different than you had imagined, or the culture of your teen or pre-schooler?)

Was there a very difficult decision you made? How did you make it and what did you learn about yourself in doing so? (You could handle this one as is or for satire, you could discuss a decision usually seen as less consequential–whether to buy heels or flats, a low cut dress or one with a turtle neck, whether to steal your husbands briefcase or your daughter’s journal or your pre-schooler’s special blanket or stuffed animal, for instance.)

Are there particular people you admire? How do you know you are developing the traits you most admire in them? (Of course, easy satire is to choose traits you wouldn’t normally think of admiring.)

If you have a demanding health or physical or emotional situation that you learned from, describe what you have learned by caring for yourself. (You can take a serious or satirical attitude here.)

How has involvement in a community service program at home or abroad changed you? (You might choose something that succeeded and made you proud or something that failed and made you sad. Or you might name a an experience like folding laundry for the community of your household or following your mate around Europe in a way that was not your favored way of traveling.)

What particular character trait do you most value in yourself and how did you discover you had this trait? (This could lead to whimsy very easily: I am selfish. I think I discovered this when I went to the edge of the lake where my grandparents had a summer home. I thought of myself as the same size as the frogs I saw on lily pads. When I chased the frogs, and caught them one at a time under my hand, I felt as if I wore a green felt hat with a buckle, like any minute, green clad friends of mine would show up holding frogs of their own.)

Have you experienced a loss that has shaped the way you feel and think and behave? (This loss can be monumental or small and that will determine the tone of the piece of writing.)

What are the most meaningful ways you help others? (These may be ways they don’t find helpful!)

If you have been involved in helping yourself or others deal with difficult life situations, what have you learned? (This can be taken straight or satirically, depending on the life situation and whether you want to discuss success or failure at dealing with it.)

Have you been in a situation where the right thing do was not clear? How did you resolve the situation and how did that impact you? (This one, too, can lead to humor or to poignancy.)

Has solving an ethical dilemma led you to a career choice? What is it and how did solving the dilemma get you interested in the particular career? (Again, if you are writing for a school like the School for Scoundrels, whatever ethical dilemma you choose and the interest it lead to will lend you a way to write about your life experience differently than you have before!)

Have you had deep disagreements with parents and other family members about your goals for the future? What were the disagreements and how are you addressing them? (This one should allow you to reveal yourself!)

What do you most hope to get out of your college studies? What courses are you most excited about having the opportunity to take? What professors attract you to a particular school and why? (There is a lot of room for interesting writing here when you write about why you have selected the “school” you selected.)

What clubs will be significant ones for you and why? What special programs attract you and why? What attracts you to the school’s location and how will being there help you? Has a teacher, coach, relative, boss, community leader or peer interested you in a particular college? How did they spark your interest? (Answering any of these for the particular “school” you are “interviewing for” will offer you a new way of considering what you need to learn in life.)

I am sure you get the idea, but here are a few more questions the “interviewer” in your essay could ask:

What will you bring to the school and to your classmates there? (This can be quite literal, such as my Dell Laptop with files of writing since 1998 or the antique brooch my grandmother gave to my mother and she to me or the fork my father was eating with the night he died.)

What clubs do you hope to join and what roles will you take on?

Are you a member of a minority or special needs group? (Invent your own here!)

Are you an immigrant or the child of immigrants?

Was there a problem in your community or in your family that you identified, defined and addressed?

****

If you haven’t selected the “school” for which you are writing or “interviewing,” do that now. Select the questions you feel most inspired to explore and answer. Remember, your list can have as many or as few questions as you’d like. Arrange the questions that inspire you in an order that seems right to you–very scattered can work as well as an order that seems to assign increasing emotional weight. It occurs to me that for some schools, you might be writing an application to teach there: “Interview with the Hiring Committee to Teach at the School of Hard Knocks.”

Write your answers to the questions you chose, being sure to use anecdotes and imagery from you life. Some answers might be long, others short. Maybe one or two are single word or single sentence answers. You might include passages that describe dreams you’ve had, or events like giving birth or training puppies or cooking particular recipes, finding out a spouse is being unfaithful, that someone you loved kept a big secret, or that you are suffering from a psychological condition.

You might describe a scene from a movie or television show and tell the interviewer why you are doing that. You might write an obituary for the “old” you and a birth announcement for the new “you.” You might write an answer by saying, “My brother’s answer” or “My mother’s answer” or “My husband’s answer,” etc. In this way, you could write about what they would say about you.

Imagine the interviewer asking the question seriously and imagine yourself being able to report whatever might be in your head that you would edit out if you were being interviewed for real. Now that you don’t have to make a great mainstream impression, take your censor and critic away and see what flies!