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. Doing that for a living teaches you what holds a reader and what quietly loses them.

I created TV projects that sold to ABC and YouTube Originals, with Kerry Washington producing, and to Warner Bros. TV, with John Wells producing. I wrote Sharon, the Osbourne biopic, which was named to the 2018 Black List, and Mystery White Boy, the estate-sanctioned Jeff Buckley story. I wrote the 2008 feature The Rocker for Fox, with Rainn Wilson, Emma Stone, and Bradley Cooper, and I wrote and directed the indie This Is Happening.

Two of those scripts were about real people, and that's where I learned what an essay actually needs. One had a family and a fanbase still around to read it, so you couldn't flatter your way through a single line. The other had subjects so loud and so well known that the only way in was the small, unguarded moments nobody had bothered to write down. Both came down to the same two things: be specific, and be honest.

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, cum laude, and for more than a decade afterward I interviewed applicants for Penn as an alumni interviewer, never reading a file but sitting across from hundreds of seventeen-year-olds and noticing which ones I could still describe a week later. Most of what makes this process stressful has nothing to do with the writing, and almost none of that stress improves the essay.