The Deletion Test

I was filling in a hackathon application last week and one question stopped me completely: what motivates you to apply? Funny, because it's the easiest question on the form. Or it looks easy. Hard questions make you think. Easy ones come with an answer already attached, and that answer is never actually yours.

I know because I wrote it. First draft: I want to learn, I love the community, I enjoy challenging myself. Reading it back was uncomfortable. Not because any of it was false. It's all true, sort of. That's what makes this kind of writing hard to catch. It isn't lying, it's compression. You take everything you actually feel and squash it into words so safe they could belong to anyone. Anyone could have submitted my first draft to any hackathon in the world. That was the problem.

So I made up a rule for myself. Read each sentence and ask: could this exact sentence appear in someone else's application? If yes, delete it. Not rewrite. Delete. Nothing in my first draft survived.

What came back when I tried again surprised me. When I asked myself what I actually wanted from a weekend in a room full of people building things, the real answers were weirdly specific and mostly old. Being a kid who took things apart just to see inside them. A lifelong allergy to the sentence "that's just how it's done". Finding out at work what happens when you say that out loud, and discovering I liked what happens. And a thing I keep noticing lately, that action spreads. Watch one person do something real and you start too. None of this was in draft one. Of course it wasn't. It doesn't sound like an application. It sounds like me, which was apparently the whole point.

There's an old idea about essays that I've always liked: you don't write to report what you already know, you write to figure out what you think. I'd only ever applied it to actual writing. Turns out it covers application forms too. I assumed my motivation was a fact sitting somewhere in my head, waiting to be typed out. It wasn't. I had no idea what it was until I'd written the bad version and killed it.

The other test is older and simpler: read it out loud and ask if you'd say it to a friend. Written language drifts towards fog if you let it. If a sentence would make you cringe in a pub, it's not your sentence. "I am passionate about opportunities for growth" fails immediately. "Everyone around me has a hackathon story and I've somehow never gone" passes. I can hear myself in the second one. The first one is the form talking.

The thing I resisted longest is that the honest answer is also the one more likely to work. Honesty feels like a luxury when you want something. But picture whoever reads these. Hundreds of answers, nearly all the same safe porridge. My generic draft wouldn't have been competing against the honest answers. It would have been competing against a hundred copies of itself. The odd, specific, true one has no copies. Nobody else spent their childhood taking machines apart and their twenties in a defence company asking why things are done the way they're done. That's not me being impressive, it's just the one thing on the form nobody can duplicate.

So that's the whole trick. Write the bad version quickly. Delete every sentence anyone else could have written. See what grows back, then read it out loud. What's left is shorter and stranger than what you started with, and it's yours. Try it on the next form that asks you an easy question. My guess is that's what the question was really asking all along.