The Daily Journal of an Average Teenaged Girl

Creative Writing Festival 2015

This year was my final year, and my teacher had set both of us on the track of the most heart-wrenching yet incredible peice I had written for him in my junior year. Now that I have him for my yearbook class, I could see him a lot more. And we got cracking.

Around the time he would usually tell his creative writing classes about the writing festival/competition, he handed me a sign up for it. We talked about it and immediately decided thatvthe peice I wrote for my final last year should be the one I submit to this years competition. This story is a non-fiction story that kind of stems off of a different peice. It's plot really isn't as important as what the focus is.

In the story, it's basically about how my brother gets kicked out of the house, but the purpose of the writing was about my sexual abuse. It had been really hard for me to write, and simple sentances would just make me want to throw up. One certain word took me 15 minutes to type. When I wrote it, it had an ending that wasn't quite true, obly because in real life, the ending haddn't happened yet.

However, when i saw that flyer, the ending had came, and I knew I needed to edit the shit out of that story. I had a 10-page limit, and the story was already at 5. So I rewrote the ending of the story, having a difficult time skipping time periods while still being in present tense. But with a lot of help from my teacher, we got it done, and even got around to fixing punctuations, wording, and decriptive addititions to the peice. It ended up being about 7 or 8 pages long. I had read it over and over, nit-picking. I wanted it to be perfect. There came a point where my teacher pretty much told me to chill. Relax. It's great.

In fact, he helped me so much. He was and still is my favorite teacher of all time. He not only helped me with this story, but all my writing skills, my persistance, confidence, aaaand not to mention he helped me pay the $15 admission cost for this competition. I don't know who I'd be without him honestly, he has helped me grow in so many ways.

The day of the competition was stressfully on the first opening night of the Fall Play at school. I honestly would have been fine with not being able to make it... Except I was co-stage manager with Sydney. STAGE MANAGER. I couldn't just not attend. I wanted to be, and needed to be, part of both events. Luckily, the play didn't start until 3pm... But the competition didn't end until around 6pm. So I had to cut corners.

I was part as much as I could be, and then I was able to book it back home, thanks to David being such a boss friend, and make it back in time for the show. I had told friends at the competition to text me about how things went, and I would check my phone after the show. Well, anticipation ate me up, so I checked my phone during intermission. The first text that showed up made my heart lurch to my throat.

"You got first place."

At first, I thought they were joking with me, just to be assholes. Eventually I accepted it as the truth, and the next day I got my $50 award, and certificate. I felt so proud. I later found out that it was a tie for first place, but that really didn't matter. I am just so happy that my writing was even worthy.

After that, my teacher and I wanted to publish it. We are still kinda working on it, looking for places that can publish it. I've gotten a little lazy on my end, but It is still a goal.

Keep Smiling. Good things are to come!
-Sharpie