The Shape of Essays: Montage and Narrative
In my previous two blog posts I spoke about how crafting a personal essay actually involves
showcasing your values and quirks,
demonstrating your growth and maturity,
admitting your faults and insecurities, and
meditating on conflicts and difficulties.
That’s a lot to do! If you don’t have experience in personal writing, you might feel like you are baking a cake or planting a garden or building a house without even knowing the basic shape of your final product. This guide will help you envision with more clarity how you might blueprint your essay.
The Common App personal statement generally takes on one of two shapes: the montage and the narrative.
Montage
According to the dictionary, Montage is a cinematic term, denoting
the process or technique of selecting, editing, and piecing together separate sections of film to form a continuous whole.
Translated to a college essay context, then, Montage would be
the process or technique of selecting, editing, and piecing together separate episodes of your life to form a thematically coherent self-introduction.
As such, the shape of a montage essay is similar to that of a bracelet—beads strung on a thread. Metaphorically speaking, the “beads” would be the separate episodes you want to present, and the “thread” would be the common theme underlying those episodes. Put together a collection of vignettes or snapshots and unify them under a common theme, and there you have your montage essay!
For example, if you are an adventurous rockhound, you might be able to tell separate stories for the time you hunted for a piece of agate, the time you came across a piece of amethyst, and the time you found a piece of topaz, and how, each time, your thirst for adventure helped you achieve your goals. If you are a violinist who’s had multiple teachers at different stages of your career, you might be able to talk about specific lessons you learned from each of them—perhaps consistency, accuracy, freedom of interpretation—and how you internalized those lessons to live life outside music.
If you have diverse interests, multiple defining experiences, or simply have many stories to tell, I definitely encourage you to experiment with the montage format.
Narrative
The narrative structure, on the other hand, entails a single story complete with exposition, conflict, and resolution. In successful narrative essays, authors turn themselves into characters who go on a “hero’s journey”—first finding themselves beyond their comfort zone, then encountering and grappling with a crisis, and finally undergoing a transformation that allows them to see the world anew. Because a narrative is linear, and because the main character in a narrative moves upward in life, the shape of a narrative essay is comparable to that of a ladder, where ascending each rung represents an effort toward improvement and rebirth.
For example, if you volunteered to introduce robotics to kids who sabotaged your efforts, you might be able to reflect on how you had to reconnect with your childlike, imaginative self to become closer to the kids you intended to empower, thus changing your worldview by incorporating a sense of wonder into all your future endeavors. Or, if you overcame a speech impediment as a debater, you could recount the embarrassment, patience, and discipline it took to be able to establish a program where underclassmen could enjoy a safe space to learn and practice to speak confidently, too.
I encourage (in fact, I challenge) everyone to use the narrative format to showcase their personality, resilience, or unique perspective. Telling a story about yourself is a lot of fun! Or at least it might end up a lot more fun than you think!
Challenges you might run into when writing Montages and Narratives
With the montage format, many students hyper focus on the “beads on the bracelet” and forget to also strengthen the “thread” that ties the beads together. That is, students really try to embellish individual short stories, but forget that a good montage essay needs to have a strong backbone made of personality. You need to signal to your readers through detailed reflection what kind of person you are.
On the other hand, the challenge of writing a narrative lies in the fact that narratives are doubly reductive. First, having lived through so many conflicts, it is difficult to pick one whose overcoming satisfactorily represents your character and values. Second, 650 words is a very short space to establish setting, introduce conflict, and develop character, so this word limit becomes a natural barrier to a successful narrative.
Is one better than the other?
The short answer is no.
The long answer is also no, but I almost always encourage my students to at least try walking the narrative route, because the narrative’s entertainment value can be immense, and it can really be a showcase of skill, ability to practice restraint, and proof of thoughtful revision. This is certainly not to say that a montage can never reach the levels of a narrative—it all depends on how well you can turn yourself into a character, and tell amusing stories to introduce yourself to a reader.
Start early, try your hand at both essay structures, and see which one suits your life story better!
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