Inspired

"Alright, class. I want you all to write about a court case using all the vocabulary words on this list. It could just be a description, or it can be a story. It doesn't have to be non-fiction. As long as it includes a court case, uses all the words, and isn't inappropriate, it'll work. Now get working on it. It's due by the beginning of class tomorrow."

Emma Williams sat in Mrs. Teson's Civics and Economics class and thought about what to do for her assignment. She didn't really want to do non-fiction, but she had tried writing fiction a long time ago and hadn't been any good at it.

Maybe she could try it one more time, though. The last time had been quite a few years ago, and it couldn't hurt to try. The worst that could happen is her having to restart the assignment sometime later that day. Still, as long as she finished it by the time class started tomorrow, she'd be okay. So she opened a new Google document and started brainstorming.

She decided to pull from one of her favorite books and make her main character an assassin in medieval times. It would be easy enough for her to have to go on trial, and it would separate her assignment from the rest of the students in the class and make it memorable.

She started the scene by having the main character, who she named Alina, sneaking into someone's house to do a job she was recently hired for, killing someone who goes unnamed throughout the story. She does not manage to do so as she is caught before she can, and the scene fades to black as she loses her grip on her blade and falls unconscious.

She gets all the way through the next scene, Alina waking up in a dungeon and seeing the prince of the kingdom, before the bell rings and she has to get to her next class.

On the way to her next class, she thinks over what she wrote and smiles. It was far from perfect, but it was a start, and definitely a lot better than a few years ago.

When she got on the bus, she saw her friend Luke, who happened to like writing, and told him about the assignment and what she'd written. He expressed enthusiasm that she was trying writing and encouraged her even further. So when she got home, she sat on her bed and continued the story, this time writing the court scene.

A few days later, after the assignment was finished and graded, she pulled it up again. If she really wanted to continue it, all she'd have to do was tweak it so it didn't look like a Civics assignment and keep writing. The thought excited her and she really wanted to see if she could really write, so she sat back on her bed, got comfortable, and kept writing.