Fostering Creativity Through Words by Kinnedy

Fostering Creativity Through Words by Kinnedy - August 2018 Scholarship Essay

From a very young age, writing has frustrated me. The infancy of my writing endeavor was consumed with the intricacies of letters, an assemblage of delicate lines and edges that seemed impossible for my immature, untrained hands to replicate on paper. Day in and day out I sat with a student teacher tuning out whatever lesson the rest of the class had given their attention to because my r’s looked like v’s and my continuous efforts to memorize those simple motions were futile. In a way, this was a prelude to my future in writing, a maddening task that a pertinacious child refused to give up on as I struggled with creative writing for years to come. I do not believe this is a unique experience. As children, we are hardwired to be academic writers and nothing more. Our creativity is neglected while we detail the chemical makeup of a leaf or analyze the rhetorical devices used in a George Orwell novel. As teenagers we find ourselves thrust into creative writing classes only to discover all of our creativity has been snuffed out like the flame of a candle before lights out. If I were given the opportunity to host an educational podcast, the most important topic to cover would be teaching young writers to reclaim their imaginations, to utilize the things that inspire them, and to build entire worlds with their words. I would create a podcast to not only inspire more creative writing amongst students but to share their creations as well.

I’ve had writer’s block since the age of nine. In a school notebook from 2010, a much smaller, inexperienced version of myself wrote, “This is the story of a girl who had nothing to write so she wrote this.” I was unaware of it at the time, but I had just written the life story of every creative writing student in high school. The autobiography of thousands of teenagers straight from the pen of a nine-year-old. Student’s must be retaught the power of words and possibly the best way to do so is to listen to them. A podcast that utilizes storytelling to not only spark the imagination of students but also to reteach creativity is exactly what I would host. Imagine a world wide writing club through podcast that exposes students to various genres of writing and and encourages them to share their own attempts. The system of public education has relentlessly rammed research papers and book reports into the minds of students everywhere. Introduction, thesis, body, conclusion. Introduction, thesis, body, conclusion. The rules of academic writing have been ingrained in us while creative writing has been neglected and for that reason our only response to a writing assignment that hasn’t come from a scientific theory is confusion. My podcast would remind students that words are limitless, label-less, formless, and completely unrestrained by boundaries. They may be poetic or they may not. They can be nonsensical, or empowering, or caustic and with them, young people can create universes. We as students are not writers before we relearn to access the creativity of our childhoods and as much as I would like to claim the opposite, the few desultory combinations of words I called creative before I had truly relearned the meaning of the word were not only uninspired but incoherent. My podcast would foster creativity through words and prevent these failed writing attempts from students that haven't been exposed to any writing other than academic.

Many students want to be writers. They dream of holding the emotions of another person in their hands with one sentence. They want to be able to persuade the hearts of strangers with a single paragraph. A very small number of people hold that power in their hands, and for as long as I can remember I have considered them magicians. With the creation of a podcast that not only exposes students to more creative writing but also encourages their imagination through prompts and even using the podcast to share students newfound creativity with the world, I believe it may be possible to save the creative minds of teenagers across the globe. My educational podcast would break students out of the turnstile of academic writing and teach that rhetorical analysis and research papers, while important, are not the end of one’s writing capabilities. With a pen and paper, we hold the world at our fingertips.