The Importance of Creative Writing

[Music]

it’s late at night

on a weekend i have that chemistry

assignment to complete

i think but instead my mind drifts off

to the fantasy world that i’ve been

creating

i open up the google document and slip

into the mentality of my characters

running around in old english-style

messy streets watched over by looming

castles

it’s the cheesy high fantasy setting

sure

but there’s a lovable romance to it like

an over baked cake

critics might say it’s dry but it still

tastes sweet

to me i write short stories on the bus

draft poems in between math practice

sets and hassle my friends

for their feedback in creative writing

club

creative writing is an open-ended prose

or poetic construction

that is intended to entertain rather

than to impart information

and it comes in three main categories

creative nonfiction poetry and fiction

i love all three mediums a lot

but more than anything fiction is my

home

and fiction is my home because it’s so

freeing and it stretches my imagination

but more than anything i find it fun

it’s sheer joy to me and i want to share

that joy

with others and that’s the same reason

why

it comes as a disappointment to find

that the underclassmen english programs

don’t often offer creative writing

and fiction as a class assignment or

educational opportunity

more so they focus on skills like

rhetoric or argumentation

i truly believe that creative writing

and fiction

specifically has so much power and

potential

as an educational opportunity for

students to learn

social english and moral education

and now i shall proceed to use all those

skills

the underclassmen english program

painstakingly

imparted in me about argumentation and

rhetoric

to talk about why maybe those same

skills should step

out of the limelight and share it with

fiction

in my research i discovered esteemed

teacher

harold kieber who has been teaching in

denver public school systems for the

past

30 years he was also life magazine’s

teacher of the year

in 1960. he wrote in the english journal

that it is mostly college-bound 11th and

12th graders

taking his creative writing class with

the occasional sophomore

and from this we can see that creative

writing

and fiction isn’t an opportunity

regularly offered

to underclassmen students now that was

60 years ago and things have changed

since then

but just take a look at any of the

standardized examinations that schools

are obligated to prepare underclassmen

for when they take it in their

upperclassmen years

be it the american sats and aps

international ibs or british gcses and

a-levels

you will be hard-pressed to find a

creative writing or fiction examination

this is not to say that creative writing

and fiction necessarily needs to be

in those standardized tests but only to

say that we can clearly see

where the priorities of schools lie

personally my school only offers

one proper opportunity for freshmen

and sophomores to write fiction and two

opportunities in total

for them to write creatively

and as a writer that’s exhausting

i truly believe that fiction has so

much potential as an educational

opportunity

but every time i i choose to write a

story on the bus

when i really should have just been

taking a much needed nap

or writing a poem when i really should

have just been focusing exclusively on

my math

it reminds me that i’m making a

sacrifice between

my passions and my obligations in

schools

and that that really tires me high

school is still

tiring a big part of why

i wrote the speech is just because i

wanted to stand

up for that one kid sitting at the back

of the classroom

working on their epic fantasy romance

novel

while the teacher is working on simple

and complex sentences

at the front of the classroom

in that same 60 year old store a study

by the english journal

harvard professor edwin h sauer

commented that

there is little value in the able

college-bound student in learning

creative

writing in fact there is a great deal of

harm if he picks up an easy going

impressionism

about all writing and thus aggressively

resists

the disciplines of exposition and

persuasion

now you can tell that this quote is a

little bit outdated

because the default for a college

student is a he

but aside from that you can also see

that fiction

and creative writing in high schools is

so disregarded

why if school is meant to only prepare

you

for the skills that you will directly

use in the future

then i guess it makes sense after all

how often do working adults use skills

such as

writing character development arcs or

magic systems in their day-to-day lives

unless you work in the fiction industry

i’d wager

not much this is what dr harvard was

talking about

but remember that was 60 years ago

the true power in fiction lies in

something that’s really fundamental

these worlds these people these stories

they aren’t real yeah

that’s really obvious but there’s a true

power in that

our world is changing and freeing up the

boundaries of education is the vehicle

for the mindset of our students to

change

with it that’s why liberal arts is such

a popular education outlook

nowadays in the united states one that

the association of

colleges and universities in america

describes as interdisciplinary and

experiential

experiential learning is learning by

doing

by really diving headfirst into the

change you wish to see

in the world and making that happen as a

learning experience

and i want to focus on experiential

learning because that’s

exactly what fiction is princeton

psychologist diana tamir

discovered that reading fiction gives

you better social cognition

well sort of so in her study

participants were first made to

take a test measuring their empathy

levels

and then read a fiction story and then

take another test

measuring how emotionally connected they

were to the story

as researchers were exiting the room

they dropped a few pens it was found

that the participants

that felt more emotional connection to

the story

were more likely to pick up those pens

what’s special about this is that

reading itself

doesn’t make you a better person because

all the participants

read the same story it is instead the

amount of emotional connection with the

text that you actually

feel that delivers the moral and social

education

and fiction writing ups the amp on this

after all

the emotional connection to a story you

have is so much higher

when you’re actually penning it instead

of just reading it

when students create characters they

have to spend time wondering

how this character thinks and speaks

to write about someone else’s emotions

or even to feel them

we only have one pair of eyes

one pair of ears and one perspective

while it very much feels like the world

revolves around us

it doesn’t and fiction offers

the unique perspective to take us out of

that continuum

because at the end of the day when we

write fiction

our world revolves around someone else

when freshmen come into high school they

are

instantly challenged to take on tough

and multifaceted

problems in society be it

totalitarianism

wealth and power that corrupts or a

systemic oppression

when i came into this school the very

first book i read

was night by eli wyzelle which is a

semi-semi-autobiographical book

about his experiences in the holocaust

it doesn’t underestimate the ruler and

it doesn’t underestimate the reader

and it’s a brutally honest retelling

about his experiences

in the jewish genocide the very next

year

i read the hate u give by angie thomas

about about the life-threatening racism

that can explode in

any any normal american town

of mice and men the great gatsby the

crucible

all of these are very popular choices in

high school fiction and literature

and all of these take on difficult

themes

rightfully so from the moment freshmen

enter high school they’re immediately

challenged

to understand these topics through

analysis

debate and essay writing but

that’s all through the role of an

observer

to write fiction students cannot afford

to be

just observers they really have to grasp

the governmental system or the world

that they want to study

and interpret it or come up with it

themselves

imagine a student discussing with their

teacher

how they want to portray totalitarianism

and over surveillance and and what they

want to say about it

isn’t this so much better than just

reading about it in 1984

now don’t get me wrong i don’t think a

high schooler is going to write the next

1984

at least you know i i don’t think so but

at the end of the day what that high

schooler takes away

is a closeness and a deep understanding

and emotional connection to the story

they wrote

and the systems that they wrote in the

story because at the end of the day

it’s theirs and no one can take that

away from them

this is ownership one of the

fundamentals

in experiential learning angela m

passarelli and david a kobe of case

western university

discovered that students develop

subconscious identities about how they

learn

you either have a fixed identity where

you believe your abilities are fixed

you can’t grow and you can’t change or

you have a learning identity where you

believe that you can learn

and you can grow and you can change

unsurprisingly

students with learning identities were

more able

to be flexible and take on more

challenges thus

learning better this is the power of

ownership

now that was a lot of educational jargon

but essentially it means that students

who

believe in themselves are able to learn

better

that’s why ownership is important

because students can look back at how

far they’ve come

and say well that was me

and fiction writing offers this unique

ownership because they wrote the story

and that’s so important and this kind of

education

is so urgent in today’s world just look

at it

covet 19 rising social fractures

oppression hate crimes increased climate

disasters

we are no longer in an era where

students

only need to understand what a writer 90

years ago

said in their magnum opus literary work

no as a young person living in these

times i demand

that the next generation get the kind of

education

that forces them to really think about

what they want to say that really forces

them to figure out how to solve

problems even even in a fictional

context

instead of just analyzing it so that we

have a fighting chance for the future

but aside from that writing is also

something that is

deeply personal when i write

i start subconsciously mimicking the

actions of my characters

for example i’ll just be typing you know

writing my story

and saying my character shakes someone’s

hands i’ll take out my hand

and i’ll intensely stare at it figure

out every muscle

and every shake every way of shaking my

hand

and then i’ll write it or say my

character sees someone in the distance

so i’ll i’ll be typing right and then

i’ll turn my head

with my character and kind of feel how

the other person

approaches imagine it and then i’ll

write it

i think my parents think i’m really

weird when i write but i i’ve just

accepted that

but from this we can see that writing

has always been something that is

intensely intensely personal and it’s

helped me through

many many personal problems so

i used to study in singapore in local

school for eight years of my life

actually an incredibly long time and in

singapore we use a slang known as

singlish

it was and still is my primary form of

expression

my friends in local school like to

describe me as a

disgruntled auntie one that i was very

disgruntled to find out about but coming

to this international school i was

stripped

of that form of communication i mean why

use a slang that no one else around you

understands

don’t get me wrong i could still speak i

could still speak english i could just

delete

all of the singlish from my vocabulary

but i couldn’t truly

express myself it was like there was a

wall of expression

that i couldn’t break through

but i will always remember the day i

stepped into creative writing club for

the very first time

when the eccentric dr seuss like club

president who

if you want a visual on this just

imagine a very very long human being

with a mop of blonde hair at the top

he read out my piece for the first time

to a whole room

of people that politely clapped

and it felt like for the very first time

in the school

that wall had been chipped and that that

meant so much to me

what i didn’t know then was that those

people in the room

the upperclassmen ended up giving me the

best

high school advice i have ever gotten in

my life

and the peers in that room they’re my

closest friends today

from this at least in my experience

fiction writing because i mostly wrote

fiction

in that class is something that is so

intensely personal

and connective at the end of the day i

i strongly believe that writing fiction

allows students not

just to tell a story but to truly

express themselves in a way that

ironically

can’t be put into words and that’s the

true power of fiction

because after i spend 10 minutes

agonizing over

two words in a short story and this

happens way

too often i’m back to doing that

chemistry assignment

due tomorrow 10 am but in that time that

i’ve taken

to write something fictional i’ve gained

some soft skills

creativity sensitivity a new perception

of the historical era that my story is

likely set in

fiction isn’t just an escapism or just a

hobby or just something

fun that people do instead

it gives us space to take a deep breath

to prepare for the next battle and to

gain a new perspective

essentially you can think of it as

a meaningful recess from reality

thank you