Many peoples first memories with writing will have to do with school. Writing is of course one of the first things you learn. Expanding on that is something constantly taught to everyone. However, many people never find writing to be anything to remember, they do it for work and that’s it.
Writing is something that can leave you with memories and get the creative juices flowing. Plus, there is a surprising number of ways people use to express their imagination via writing.
Some of the most common forms of creative writing that people work on nowadays are;
- Songs
- Poetry
- Short Stories
- Personal Essays
- or even entire narratives for things like D&D.
My first truly enjoyable experience with writing was a actually a competition at my school. We were to talk about some portion of United States history. With complete freedom to write about whatever I wanted, it was the first time I felt like I really got to choose the topic of discussion, and with money as a prize I had plenty of motivation to do my best.
My topic of choice was the Korean War, I have Korean family members and at the time my father was deployed in Korea so I had an interest in Korean history. On top of this, knowledge of Korea and its history has been widely ignored by people in America. These two things combined gave me a unique history and story to write about when compared to the other writers at the time, who mostly did work on topics like the Civil War and the discovery of America.
The Forgotten War:
Image provided by David Duncan
To know the story of my first writing experience you need to know the details of the topic. The Korean war was a conflict between South Korea, which was backed by the United States and the United Nations against North Korea, which was supported by China and the Soviet Union. The fighting in the Korean war began on June 25th of 1950, as the North Korean military pushed into the lands owned by South Korea, moving past the border and beginning their attack.
The war almost ended as quickly as it began, after two months South Koreas army was on the verge of collapse. The intervention of the United Nations and the United States, forced China and the Soviet Union to dispatch their own military to counter their forces.
Image provided by Getty Images
The war would quickly go on to become a war of attrition, which resulted in over 3 Million deaths. Even more concerning, the Cold War was still ongoing and the conflict threatened to spiral out of control. And turn into an all out conflict between the worlds largest superpowers.
It finally came to a standstill on the 27th of July in 1953 when an armistice was signed. They agreed to create a zone between the two nations in which no military units were allowed to cross. Which has now become known as the Demilitarized Zone, or the DMZ for short. However, while the armistice was signed there has still been no ending to the Korean war. No treaty has ever been signed, making it one of the longest wars in history.
What can writing do for you?
I went into detail about the war because I needed to prove a point, how much is really out there. The sheer amount of things I learned about history I previously thought I knew a lot about stunned me, which is one of the reasons why the writing experience stood out to me. It made me realize, that no matter how much you think you know about a subject. How much research you do and how much time you spend, there will always be more for you to learn about it. Writing isn’t just a way to put fantasy’s into words, those little ideas that come into your head that you think might make a good story. Writing in of itself is a tool you can use to research things that you’re passionate about.
The best way to learn something is to be able to put what you know into words, after all, if you aren’t able to explain it to someone else, do you really know what your talking about? Which makes writing about something the perfect way to learn new ideas. You’re able to find topics that interest you and describe them in a way that you personally understand. Writing things like essays on a subject is one of the best ways to learn a topic inside and out. As boring as it sounds, my first memory with writing was learning just how much of an impact it has.
