As a ninth grade student in high school, I found out that one of my biggest passions was writing. With the ability of putting every kind of idea I had in my head on a piece of paper, I wrote a story about a young man who grew into a sport and became very popular afterwards. I was able to compare and identify myself very well with my own characters. I also noticed that each villain that I included had something that I personally did not like. This most likely caused them to be known as the “evil” characters in the story. Then again, I think murdering someone is something that any normal person would think of as evil. I liked my final draft, and to know that I got an A on my assignment, but I didn’t feel comfortable because I had so many ideas that I had to leave out, due to how long my story had gotten. So I decided to make a sequel. Because I just kept getting more and more ideas every time I sat on my computer and typed, it ended up being approximately 16 typed pages. I also used this writing piece for another English essay. Unfortunately, since it was so long I was not able to turn it in on time. But thanks to the support and that my teacher was able to understand why it was time consuming, it was not counted as late. The result was an A again. At the time, I did not really care about the result I got, as long as I knew that I enjoyed the time I was in front of my story while creating it. This was how I got the idea of wanting to become a writer.

At the end of my junior year, I still had the idea of wanting to become a writer. I wanted to make my senior project about this, what I liked to do. So I thought to myself, “How many other students have gone through the same process I have? To actually be able to find a future thanks to writing?” I didn’t think twice to use this question similar to my thesis for my senior project. The following statement was my original thesis: “Creative writing can influence students by seeing the importance of becoming or staying educated”

I had to do community service that could relate to my project in some way. A teacher that I have known since Kindergarten helped me out a lot with this. I guess you could say that she “loaned me” a group of 6th and 7th grade students so that I could go to the middle school on Tuesdays and Thursdays and helped them with their writing abilities. On Tuesdays I helped 6th grade boys, and on Thursdays I helped 7th grade girls. Although it was quite difficult to get to understand the minds of younger students at first, I got the hang of it around the fourth day for each class or so.

Some students I helped had great ideas in their writing; they just needed the help of someone who could make them expand them to make their ideas longer. This was something that I tried to teach them. One of the students that I helped on Tuesdays wrote a short paragraph over what a hero means to him.
“Martin Luther King Jr. was a hero because he changes the lives of all Americans and made it possible so that white people and black people could come together. Mostly everyone looked up to him. He showed everyone that violence is never the answer”.

The days went by, and my community service was halfway done. I suddenly had the idea of making a project that could take up enough time to make a rough draft and a final one as well about anything they wanted – as long as it was made up and an idea that only came from their imagination. I introduced the idea to the students the next week. My idea was to only do the stories at the afterschool class with no homework at all because I felt like the kids already had homework from their regular school classes, and I did not want to add something else.

The project took the rest of the time from my community service, which was 20 hours. But I believe that it paid off because it let me see exactly how much imagination some students had when it comes to creative writing. One of the students made up a story about World War II and how a family kept on trying to escape the wrath of the Nazi soldiers. The title of the short story: “Close Call”.

I tried to make my community service fun for the students and at the same time helpful so that they could become better writers when the moment of having to write creatively came. For our last day together in each class, I wanted the students to have a party as a token for all the hard work and effort they put in their work for the 2 ½ months I was meeting with them. The 6th grade students wanted to watch a movie, eat subway with root beer floats and popcorn. They all had a great time. Unfortunately, since the 7th grade girls did not get much progress done through the almost 3 months that I was meeting with them, the teacher staff and I decided not to make a party for them because they did not really deserve one.

Creative writing can change the opinion of many people when it comes to education. But I believe it’s easier to understand this at an older age – preferably at a high school age so that the student still has time to see the importance of getting educated and to have time to do so. My thesis obviously cannot support every single person or student, because you can’t force someone to like writing creatively. Therefore, my thesis was proven to be both true and false.

Overall, my project was something I enjoyed over my senior year. When I leave high school, my senior project will be one of the first things I will remember about these times… Moments that will never come back – because what you live today will only be a memory tomorrow…