Twenty years of getting strangers to care about a story.

I'm Ryan Jaffe — a writer, producer and director working across feature film and television for more than twenty years. The work is unglamorous in the way most craft is: you write a scene, someone tells you it isn't working, and you figure out why. Twenty years of that teaches you what holds a reader and what quietly loses them.

I wrote Fox's music comedy The Rocker, starring Rainn Wilson, Emma Stone, Josh Gad and Bradley Cooper, and I wrote, directed and produced the indie dramedy This Is Happening, with Cloris Leachman, James Wolk and Mickey Sumner. Comedy is where you learn that humor isn't decoration. Used carelessly it's the fastest way to lose a reader; used precisely it's the fastest way to make one trust you. That judgment matters in an essay, where a single line of real wit does more than a paragraph of earnestness.

I also wrote Mystery White Boy, the estate-sanctioned Jeff Buckley story. That meant taking a real life — with people who loved him still around to read it — and finding the few hours that actually said who he was. You can't flatter your way through a story like that. You have to be specific and you have to be honest, and those turn out to be the two things a college essay needs most.

Sharon, my script about Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne, was named to the 2018 Black List, Hollywood's annual survey of the best unproduced screenplays. That one was the opposite problem: two people so loud and so well known that the only way in was the small, private, unguarded moments nobody had bothered to write down.

What all of it comes down to is character. My job on a script is to make a reader believe a specific person exists. That is exactly the job in a college essay — five hundred to a thousand words, a reader with a stack of them, and one chance to sound like someone real rather than a category. Nothing about that is beyond a seventeen-year-old. It just has to be taught as writing and not strategy.

I studied History and Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, and I've spent my career in rooms where a story either lands or it doesn't. Most of what makes this process stressful has nothing to do with the writing — and almost none of that stress improves the essay.