rejected senior seeking advice

Hi! I hope you all are well. Last night, along with many other people, I was rejected from the remainder of my top schools (and have since rejected myself from Stanford). Now that I've done most of my crying, I'm trying to figure out some actionable next steps.

I have decided to reapply to these top colleges eventually, but I am very conflicted as to how I should go about this, and I thought the people on here might have more knowledge/advice. I read through the wiki and found it extremely helpful, but I still have a couple more specific questions.

1. Is there even the slightest chance of taking a gap year and reapplying? My original application was very passion-oriented, but I also see where it went wrong; my extracurriculars were too scattered when they should have been more focused (they are very specific and I would likely doxx myself if I shared them, but my highest award was only state-level and I think my application generally failed to produce proof of talent. For example, I had no awards related to my major).

I am an English major, and if I were to take a gap year, I would plan to do the following:

-submit to writing journals and competitions

-query my (now nearly-finished) manuscript to literary agents

-apply for writing internships

-cold email professors for research opportunities

-possibly start a blog/continue Youtube on a more serious level (I discuss writing and literature)

-take the JLPT to prove proficiency (have self-studied Japanese for 5 years and studied abroad there)

-raise my SAT from a 1500 (780 RW, 720 M) to at least a 1560 (780 M)

My question is: would this make any marked difference? Reading Yale's rejection letter, wherein they stated that getting accepted in later cycles is very unlikely, put a huge damper on my confidence, and I'm not keen on potentially losing a year if things also go badly in the next cycle. However, I failed to ED to UChicago this year, and I think doing so might improve my chances--I would have loved to attend, and I live very close to the school. My high school GPA was a 4.0 (my high school was online and does not weight), so I wouldn't mind reusing that either. There are many things I could have done better in this application, but