Worlds within Worlds by Thomas

Worlds within Worlds by Thomas - June 2017 Scholarship Essay

- Have you ever gotten home from a long day at school, your brain filled to the brim with information, and found yourself slumping down into the familiar folds of the living room couch? Have you ever picked up the remote control to your television and then turned on a set of cartoons filled with adventure, action, thrills, drama, and laughs? Finally, after all of that, have you ever sat back and thought to yourself, “Wow, compared to what I just watched, my world sucks and is really boring.” If you said yes, congratulations, you are now inside the mind of me when I was six years old until...well basically now.

Before I go on, I have to say that I don’t think the world “sucks”, in fact there are millions of interesting aspects and places in it that I hope to explore before I die. The keywords to look at in my statement from before, though, are “compared to what I just watched…” If we're being honest with ourselves, there is not much in our world today that could top wielding a Light-saber from Star Wars, training and battling in the world of Pokemon, or changing into a super-powered alien in Ben 10. As a kid, I didn’t say “I want to be an astronaut” or “I want to be a singer”. All I wanted to do when I grew up was be able to go into those worlds and live a life filled with energy and excitement instead of one filled with school and monotony.

So, with that riveting backstory, you might be thinking that I am destined to become a hopeless dreamer constantly trying to live in a reality that doesn’t exist. Hold your horses, there is a part two to this story. In fact, that is what this part two is about, stories. In particular, the stories that I started to write beginning with a line of superhero comics produced in fourth grade. Sure these comics weren’t visually pleasing, in fact most of the characters were stick figures, but they had plot lines and characters that I would spend hours creating. Eventually, middle school came around and I started thinking about why I loved creating those comics. It was then that I came to the conclusion that it was the stories that I had enjoyed so much and that kept me immersed in the process. Then it hit me, how I could live in a world of adventure, excitement, magic, spaceships, aliens, and drama. However, not only would I be able to live in it, but I would be its creator as well.

Creative Writing my friend, creative writing soon became my gateway to an infinite amount of worlds and characters. Entire universes could be brought into being by the power of my fingertips and just as easily destroyed. I had now been given power over life and death, and what greater superpower could there be besides that? Thus I transitioned from being a hopeless dreamer to a hopeless creative writer. You might be asking yourself why I decide to keep the word “hopeless” even though I had just figured what I wanted to do with my life. I said before that I would spend hours on creating characters and plot lines for my pieces, I never said that this made them any good. Just as the artwork of my comics in elementary school was sloppy, disjointed, and not very inspired, my early attempts at creative writing were as well.

This is where the rest of my education comes into play, but not in the way that you might think. During the courses I took in high school, I gathered information from each new teacher, test, and homework assignment. The information gathered, on the other hand, wasn’t usually the facts presented in the classes, but rather the meaning behind them. For example, let's say my history teacher assigned each person in the class to research an event related to the Civil Rights Movement. The information I would use for my Creative Writing would usually be figuring out how to develop a better work ethic, how people react to certain situations, or even the event itself as a possible story for a Creative Non-fiction piece. It was the same for my other classes. Science helped me develop realism in pieces regarding realistic and science fiction, English helped me develop structure with continuity and an expansive vocabulary, and Theater helped to build my repertoire of plays and other creative works by providing me with access to read them.

Ironically, I’ve never taken a course in Creative Writing throughout my entire educational experience. However, I view this as an advantage. Because of the previously stated fact, I was able to become more fully rounded with my understanding of the world I live in. Yes I still think this world is comparatively boring and dull in regards to many of the things we see on screen, but understanding one’s own reality is one of the first steps in creating another reality that an audience can relate to as I have come to find out through several trials and errors. Thus, through the indirect lessons in my education, I am now able to enter the exciting worlds I could only dream of when I was six years old. Not through some inter-dimensional portal, but through the imagination of the mind.