Les Voleurs
Out of the closet and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief. All the artists of history, from cave painters to Picasso, all the poets and writers, the musicians and architects, offer their wares, importuning him like street vendors. They supplicate him from the bored minds of school children, from the prisons of uncritical veneration, from dead museums and dusty archives. Sculptors stretch forth their limestone arms to receive the life-giving transformation of flesh as their severed limbs are grafted onto Mister America. Mais le voleur n'est pas presse - the thief is in no hurry. He must assure himself of the quality of the merchandise and its suitability for his purpose before he conveys the supreme honour and benediction of his theft.
Words, colours, lights, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l'originalite, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons as it creates. Vive le vol - pure, shamelss, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.
-william s. burroughs

Well, robust, why do you want to go to school for architecture? That is all you need to communicate.

And why do you want to go to the schools where you're applying?
Write out your honest reasons and get them out. Don't worry about eloquence, punctuation, grammar, spelling. Go from there.

with a 100,000 words ahead of me-i know i have to train myself to avoid the blocks. i try to practice free writing and do 2 hours every day. dont worry about structure -- just write as continuous and as long as possible.

start with not the 'statement' but something you have a strong attitutde about - sports, the city, a place your remember when your young. the free writing will just bring your confidence back.

freewriting isnt just a list of bullet points. try as much to write in continuous sentences as much as possible - just dont get hung up on the formal structure. take the last sentence of every paragraph and use it as the starting point for the next paragraph. after the freewriting session break away for about 30 min before you read it- youll see its really not bad as a starting draft.

-100,000 words-..... just write that and see what happens....

you can always do it in morse code


2:37am

or try writing in Urdo.

(1) If damsons words didn't inspire you, seriously reconsider architecture.

(2) If you wish to proceed, 237 am proposes Morse code – brilliant and cool idea! Use this translator to assist in your statement writing.

(3) If all else fails, use TK's suggestion. The downfall is if you try to install the Urdo language plugin on your PC it messes up your English spell checker…

All in good fun; Seriously, I hope you get that inspiration and get that grad school statement completed. You can do it if you have the drive and inspiration!!! Good luck.

TED has got it. just write write write. it will be mostly crap but you'll find a paragraph or a sentence that you believe and off you go.

don't think about what anyone wants to hear, tell them exactly why you want to do something as foolish and fulfilling as study architecture.

try being really honest, jot that down and then articulate it. a 'writer's block' (especially in filling out an application ) can sometimes simply be a result of really wanting to impress (upon) a blank page. personally, i find that sometimes being masochistically honest bypasses all the staged theatrics of introductory rhetoric. the most difficult sort of writing is one justified by a constant 'i' pronoun. For instance, theres this book i was leafing through yesterday...'the sea' by a john banville...and the language is quite pretty but quite blah. the staging 'i' is distanced from all the observations and events it relates, as if faking an observation of one's observation. its an unintentionally fake 'i'. many writers deal with it differently. for instance (since these authors are on my current list) proust sinks the 'i' in a litany of sensuous details and the 'i' is plotted against them rather than the other way around and murakami 'i' volume is very nicely balanced and serene. i must rush.

writers block and procrastination are not the same thing.

I'm with SH and TED, just start writing. But here's a strategy at the end of an anecdote:

Dan Savage, gay sex columnist, wrote a book about the adoption process he and his partner had to go through to adopt their little boy. Part of the requirement of the agency was to write a letter to your potential adoptee's mother, though you didn't know who she might be, explaining why you would be a good couple for her to select to raise the child.

Well Dan Savage wrties for a living but he had total block when it came to writing something this significant. So his strategy was to write the "anti-parent" letter, a joke version of the letter in which he described exactly the opposite of what a good parent would be. So he talked about his and his partner's sexual fetishes, how the partner made extra money on the side selling meth on the corner ("so he'll always be close to home if the baby cries!" etc. In writing the opposite of what he needed to write, he was able to start thinking about what the letter actually should sound like.

Just a strategy. Anything that gets you writing sentences and thinking verbally will help. Good luck.

I suspect Vado called this one correctly.

Actually, Katze, if Burroughs was right, there'd be little point in the effort of all this, or in anything.

awesome thanks for the ideas
i got a draft now, its just, um, too long and kinda not personal enough (sounds more about architecture than about me!)