Your college application essays must pull you off the page in three dimensions, and that is not an easy thing to do. Goethe, among the best writers in the world, said Shakespeare was the master of creating characters. After a handful of lines you know who Hamlet, Lear, and Falstaff are. They are flesh and blood characters, as real today as they were 400 years ago in the late 16th and 17th century English theater. You might not be another Shakespeare or even an F. Scott Fitzgerald, but you might as well use the same tool they used to pull Gatsby and Nick Caraway, or Lady Macbeth and Romeo off the page: action. Fitzgerald wrote in his notes, while working on his unfinished novel, “The Last Tycoon” that “ACTION IS CHARACTER.” Similarly, admissions officers are attempting to discover your character.