Two ways to start
Two openings for the same piece.
A. Everybody has regrets in life, and in this essay I am going to write about one of mine, which is something that happened when I was young.
B. I stopped playing the cello at seventeen, three months before an audition I did not want and had not admitted I did not want.
Four questions.
1. How much of opening A could be deleted without losing information?
2. What does the second half of opening B do?
3. Why does had not admitted matter?
4. In 300 words, what does an opening like A cost?
The model · 302 words
The Person I Did Not Become
I stopped playing the cello at seventeen, three months before an audition I did not want and had not admitted I did not want.
If I had taken it, I would probably not have got in, and I would be a person who once auditioned rather than a person who did not. Those are different people, and I have thought about the difference for twenty-three years, which is longer than I played.
The clean version of the regret is that I gave up something I was good at. It is also not quite true. I was good enough to be told I was good, which is a very specific level and one that produces a great many people who stop at seventeen.
If I were the kind of person who could tolerate being ordinary at something, I would still be playing now — badly, in an amateur orchestra, on a Tuesday. That is the version of the sentence that costs something, and it is about me rather than about the cello.
I wish I had told my teacher the truth. I told her I was concentrating on exams, which was a sentence she had heard before and did not believe, and she let me have it, which I have never quite forgiven her for.
What I actually regret is not the playing. It is that I learned, at seventeen, that you can leave something by not mentioning it — that this works, and that nobody chases you. I have used the method several times since, and it has never once been the right thing to do.
If I could go back, I would not make myself audition. I would make myself say the true sentence out loud, in the room, to the person it belonged to. The cello was never the point.
Four questions about the model.
1. Paragraph three does something to paragraph two. What?
2. If I were the kind of person who could tolerate being ordinary… — what makes this the costly version?
3. What is the actual regret, in the sixth paragraph?
4. The last paragraph refuses the obvious ending. What does it choose instead?
Repair a weaker one
The five moves of the model: the decision, with the evasion inside it · the counterfactual, in the present · the clean regret, then its correction · the costly conditional, whose condition is about you · what you actually regret, which is rarely the thing you lost.
Below, a second piece with four sentences removed.
Four sentences have been removed. Put each one back where it belongs.
I turned down a place on a research team in 2011 because the salary was lower and I had a mortgage. [1]
If I had taken it, I would be doing work I recognise as mine. [2] I would also be poorer, and I have never once been able to say that sentence without noticing that I say it second.
[3] What I did was choose the safer thing and describe it as the responsible thing, which is a translation everybody accepts and nobody checks.
If I were less frightened of being unable to pay for something, I would have gone. [4] My parents lost a house when I was nine, and I have organised twenty-five years around not doing that.
I wish I had said, out loud, that I was afraid. Instead I said the salary was too low, which was true and was not the reason.
Register, and the forms it carries
Rewrite each line for a reflective written piece. Keep the meaning and the honesty; lose the speech.
Spoken → written reflection
Yeah so basically I just stopped going and nobody said anything, which was kind of weird tbh.
Spoken → written reflection
If I would have known it was gonna be like that I obviously wouldn’t have said yes.
Spoken → written reflection
I really really wish I would have told my teacher the actual truth at the time.
Spoken → written reflection
Like, the thing is, I’m just not the sort of person who can be bad at stuff, so I quit.
Overwritten → plain reflection
The devastating loss of my musical vocation haunts my every waking hour to this very day.
Six sentences from drafts. Four are grammar; two are about what 300 words can afford.
1. In this essay I am going to write about a regret from my life. — 300 words
2. If I would have taken the place, I would be somewhere else now.
3. I wish I would have told the truth.
4. If I had gone, I would have been happier now.
5. In conclusion, we should all follow our dreams. — a personal reflection
6. If I was braver, I would have said it. — in writing
Write it
Task card · Writing · Alone · 17 minutes
Write "The Person I Did Not Become" — 300 words on a decision that produced a different life from the one you have.
Five moves, in order. Seventeen minutes writing, six checking.
- Open with the decision and, if you can, the evasion inside it. No announcement paragraph.
- Give the counterfactual with a present result at least twice.
- State the clean version of the regret and then correct it. That correction is the piece.
- Include one conditional whose condition is a permanent fact about you.
- End on what you actually regret, which is usually not the thing you lost.
Task card · Checking · Pairs · 6 minutes
Swap. You are not marking. You are answering four questions in the margin.
Six minutes, four answers, written where the writer can see them.
- Underline every conditional. Beside each, write the two times: past → past, past → now, now → past.
- Is there at least one now → past? If not, the piece has stayed on the outside.
- Find the correction of the clean regret. If there is not one, say where it should go.
- Last: does the final paragraph name something other than the thing that was lost?
The two-times notes are the whole check. A reflective piece that never marks a present consequence has written about the past; a piece that never uses a permanent condition has written about circumstances. Both are readable. Neither has said anything the writer had to risk.
What the margins said
Two questions.
1. Did your piece contain a now → past conditional?
2. Which move was thinnest across the room?
The condition that is about you
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. What makes a reflective piece cost something?
2. What is usually the real regret?
Next. The same reflection, spoken, to somebody who will ask for the sentence you left out — and a look back at the unit.