“Splish splosh heavy boots clomped around in the dark water. Nets looking for their prey only scooping up mud. The purple cabins frolicking around like birds as they water wade. As the others in my cabin searched hopelessly in the deep, I and a few other boys wandered off to a clear, shallow, muddy place.”

When I first wrote those lines, I was determined to write in a way that my friends would feel the same excitement I felt when I discovered a broken turtle egg on my fifth-grade camping trip. Although it was a personal narrative, our teacher encouraged us to be creative when describing the details of our event. I remember sitting in my plastic chair at my tiny wooden desk, fiddling with my pencils, meditating on everything I felt on that camping trip. Creative writing was the first instance in my education that I learned to be intentional with my words. I knew that if I wanted my audience to feel a certain way or understand something, I had to be creative in my writing style. It allowed me to practice writing with the motivation to impact people, even if, at the time, those people were my 5th-grade classmates. Creative writing illustrated the social nature of writing. Writing is a tool for communication that originated from human’s need to document stories. 

Unlike academic writing, creative writing is not subject to as many rules regarding structure and content. While creative writing involves basic ideas about plot, stories do not have to be linear. Creative writing can be anything from narratives to poems to fairy tales. Academic writing, on the other hand, is structured. It is taught as a formula, such as a five-paragraph essay that is simply an “intro, body, conclusion” or an AEC (assertion, evidence, commentary) short answer response. The movement from creative writing to academic writing changes the definition of good writing from effectively conveying a story to how well a student masters a structure. 

As a student, I found the transition from creative writing to academic writing incongruous. Instead of using writing to articulate my thoughts, I was asked to analyze the thoughts of others. In addition, I was not allowed to use first-person. This removal of self from writing suggested to me that there was not enough legitimacy to my own experiences and ideas to make them worth writing about in school. Not only that, but I began to view creativity as a concept reserved for authors of fiction novels and little kids learning how to write. Although I loved writing and continued to excel at it, I found that more often than not, I was dreading having to write for school. 

Instead of abruptly transitioning from creative to academic writing, schools should treat genres as complements. While the existing research regarding the relationship between creative writing and academic writing has involved students whose second language is English, the results have implications for all students. The concepts that English second language students are learning to apply are no different from those that native English-speaking students are learning to use. In the International Journal of Languages’ Education and Teaching, a study on how creative writing impacts academic writing skills found “that creative writing approach significantly increased students’ academic success.” Through creative writing, the students began using more substantial vocabulary, made fewer grammar mistakes, developed their ideas with more detail and coherency, understood how ideas related to each other and scored considerably higher in their academic writing. In other words, the study showed that the skills gained through creative writing, such as knowledge of grammar rules, audience awareness, and rhetoric use, were all able to translate to the student’s academic writing.

 Creative writing is also helpful to students with special learning differences such as ADHD and dyslexia. When I asked my high school-aged sisters, both of whom have dyslexia and ADHD, what they wished was different about writing in school, both said they wished that they still did creative writing in school. My youngest sister said she feels that she is better at writing stories. My middle sister also said she wants opportunities to write about topics she finds interesting. Perhaps my sisters enjoy creative writing because it allows them to explore their thoughts and enjoy the process of writing without the stress of trying to prove an idea or tie a point back to their thesis statement.  

Creative writing would allow students like my sisters, who may struggle with maintaining topic focus or following what are often rigid rules in academic writing, to find confidence in a different writing style. The things that my sisters struggle with within their writing are not unique to them. Indeed, creative writing can provide all kinds of students with confidence. 

 Increasing confidence in one writing style increases resilience when a student writes in a style where they feel weaker. Having previous successful experience in writing helps students recognize that even if they are struggling with one kind of writing, they are not bad writers. Creative writing also helps students see academic writing not as a style of writing where they are only using other people’s ideas to say something but as a story. In Minds Made for Stories, Newkirk writes that “all arguments exist in time. They are responsive to some prior events or prior discourse. In any academic field, there is a body of scholarship that precedes our contribution” (116). Creative writing’s emphasis on storytelling can help students see that academic writing also tells a story. By changing their conception about the purpose of academic writing and viewing it as a way to contribute to a pre-existing story, students may find more success in finding meaning and motivation for their academic writing. 

I remember in school that some of my peers disliked creative writing because they found it challenging to come up with ideas that they felt were unique. One of the creative writing prompts the study with ESL students used involved rewriting the story of Cinderella so that the shoe fits one of the stepsisters. I think that using specific prompts like this is helpful to students doing creative writing and may help with the anxiety students who struggle with creativity may have. Another approach teachers could use to incorporate more creative writing is to use creative writing as a warm-up at the start of class but continue working on the same piece every day. One of the complaints I heard was that when middle school and high school classes did creative writing, it was only used as a warm-up. This suggestion is a slight adjustment to something teachers already do and would allow students to develop a creative piece thoroughly over time. 

Creativity and the ability to contribute ideas is a skill that is important to any career path or area of study. Creative writing challenges students to think beyond what they know. Writing fiction asks students to question how the world could be different. Writing narratives develops students’ awareness of multiple perspectives. Schools should not aim to produce students who all think the same if the school seeks to produce notable students. Students who are going to advance scientific research or solve world problems will not be students who only know how to analyze other people’s research, but students who are creative enough to contribute to existing dialogue or try approaches that have not been tried before.