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