W.S. Merwin once wrote an entire poem about how every pencil has a story to tell, a legacy lurking somewhere in the graphite. I always thought this was beautiful. The truth is the story doesn’t lie so much within the pencil as it does within the hand holding it.
Everyone has his or her own narrative to tell. And tell it they should, to the world or only on notebook pages. Whether through memoirs, poetry, short stories, songs or whatever medium can fit under the broad umbrella of “writing,” expressing yourself in this manner can be incredibly therapeutic. As Stephen King puts it, “It’s about getting up, getting well and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”
So why is it that so many people love to say, “I don’t write?” Although I’m sure there are lots of reasons, I think our school system is a lot to blame.
American education has put so much focus on meeting standards measured on tests that it totally throws to the wayside very important aspects that encompass actual education. This isn’t a new concept; we’ve been talking about this for ages. We, as a community, complain about sports, art and other extra-curricular activities being cut all the time.
But writing can never be “cut” from the schooling system; it’s too integral a part of our society. You can’t thrive in our culture if you can’t read or write. Instead, it seems that schools only focus on half the concept. They teach us how to write essays, which, of course, are very important, but unless you’re a special breed of English enthusiast you probably aren’t going to write about what’s eating you up personally in APA format.
Before high school, the most encouragement to write creatively I got was during Saint Patrick’s Day when I was asked to write limericks. Maybe limericks are your thing, and that’s totally valid ― please write your heart out in those five line stanzas. But what about the other 54 common forms of poetry? What about free writes? What about story writing? Memoirs? If these were mentioned to me in school, it was for a fleeting moment before we returned to how to properly formulate an essay that even the teacher didn’t want to read.
I began seriously and creatively writing when I was a freshman in high school, when I felt like I had a lot to let out and not a lot of people to take in. I chose to write down the things I wasn’t able to say. I know I wasn’t the only one who needed that. I know that I’m still not the only one who would’ve benefited from a creative writing program in school.
There are efforts to encourage the youth of America to pick up a pen and tell their stories. The Jason Taylor Foundation, for example, founded the Bluapple Poetry Network, an afterschool spoken word program for the Broward, Dade and Palm Beach counties. They’ve played an irreplaceable role in the lives of a lot of young poets, building on the principal mentioned at the beginning of this article: that everyone has a story to tell.
It shouldn’t feel like these organizations are the primary creative guides for students, though. I understand that academics are important, but education can’t be propelled forward unless we start looking at individuals as wholes. In terms of writing, it feels like the system is giving students inkless pens, presenting them with a formula and wondering why they can’t stand writing.
Maybe not every student would love to see a creative aspect added to the curriculum, but I think it’d be hard to argue that they wouldn’t benefit from it. A change like this could foster linguistic ability, intrapersonal and interpersonal awareness and critical thinking, all of which are pretty valuable skills in today’s world and come along with some pretty great stories.
