By Weston Ma

I dashed home from school, my head pounding from thinking so hard. It was right before class was dismissed when my teacher told us we would have to write a 1000-word narrative essay. I heard what she said but I did think much about it. After all, it was Friday and it had been a tough week. I was thinking of finally relaxing after working so hard to complete worksheets and writing responses to stories we read during the week, not thinking about blowing my whole weekend on a long time-wasting essay. Once I got out of school I seemed to recall my teachers’ words. I started to panic and raced home as fast as my legs could carry me. As soon as I got home I started pacing around trying to think of a topic. I decided that I should take my mind off the essay for a little. I opened the tv and forgot all about my troubles for an hour. Later my mom told me to stop watching because I watched too much. I shut off the tv and bounded up the stairs. I started to get sweaty again and was stressing myself out. My mom asked me what was going on, I told her about the essay and she told me not to wait until the last minute. It was four hours and a half into the weekend and I had to start writing a super long essay. I asked my mom for the computer and kept browsing random google images until I thought of an actually good story worth telling. I immediately got to work, typing, removing, replacing words for what seemed like forever. After what I thought was an eternity, which in reality was actually 2 hours, I finished. I quickly copied the whole thing and searched up a word counter. I clicked on the site and found out that I had 1247 words. I then saved the word document and printed out a copy and put it in my folder to show to my teacher tomorrow. At 9 o’clock I finally started to relax. The long tedious writing process paid off, I felt so relieved with no burdens I had my best Friday in a long time. On Monday morning I handed it to my teacher. A few days later when I got it back I saw some notes that she had written. I decided that it must be criticism. I quickly scanned through the paper looking for anything serious, turns out I only had a few grammar mistakes and a few typos. Turns out the essay helped me. I actually didn’t spend my whole weekend working on the essay, and it helped me relax more. Knowing I actually did something this weekend. That is the story of how I overcame my difficulties and received a great reward, a long well-written essay, that counts as bragging rights (Just joking). I received experience, a good writing example for further narrative essays, and I learned a lesson: Work hard and it will pay off.