Every teacher who's ever taught or is currently teaching creative writing and every aspiring student who's ever written creatively or who is likewise creatively writing in the specific here and the specific now under the tender tutelage of a certified writing instructor, and all this whether said instructor was or is in high school, college, or an MFA writing workshop, should drop what they're doing right now and read "The Assignment" by Kirby Wilkins. That's my impromptu assignment to anyone who reads this now or at any moment in the future: read "The Assignment"!
"... using illustrations and examples as well as vivid description to communicate your feeling for the person, describe a person who has had a great influence on your life..."
Oh, God, yada yada yada, Teacher, here we go again with another lame assignment, and yet that's exactly how Kirby Wilkins began his short story "The Assignment"--with an uncreative assignment designed to somehow mysteriously elicit that all too elusive quality in literature that is, in fact, vanishing right before our collective very eyes--creativity. Doesn't take Wilkins long to mock what is so asinine about such writing assignments as italicized above: their stay-within-the-lines instructions are inherently restrictive, and do more to limit any would-be creative writer's creative conceptualizing than to unloose their imagination and truest potential, their natural, perhaps as of yet untapped, artistry, that no assignment, no matter how many times a teacher badgers her students over the head with, can successfully tap.
I recommend reading An Interview with Kirby Wilkins by William H. Coles to learn more about this unknown writer a lot more readers should read. That's my second (and it's as mandatory and supplementary as it is imaginary) reading assignment for you.
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