This year we had 400 students enter THE GREAT KIWI WRITE OFF. It was a marvellous show of support for short story/essay writing by teachers and parents who encouraged their students to enter. However, the greatest applause should go to the students who took the time to write their stories and submit them.
One of the biggest benefits of entering writing competitions is that the writer has a deadline. That calls for a certain amount of discipline and focus.
But there are many other benefits.
Competitions encourage students to use their imaginations and, as a skill for the future, this is invaluable.
When deciding on what they will write about entrants may use prompts to get started. However, from there they are on their own. They cannot fall back on what someone else wrote nor should they recycle something they wrote before.
In having to find a new topic they are forced to access a part of the brain that calls for them to create something out of nothing. All they have is an idea, a thought. Before they write a word they have to decide how they will approach their chosen topic, what angle they will take and what genre they will write in.
Perhaps they have a question that starts with wondering what might happen if certain conditions existed. Questions that start with ‘what if’ often lead to unimagined results. This is how some of our greatest inventions come about.
The imagination is a unique frontier that only the ‘thinker’ can access. Every thought is informed by the thinker’s particular experience of life, their environment, their world. That’s why no-one can replicate another’s writing without dirently copying it.
Competitions force a student to consider a topic they feel passionately about, or they discover a passion in the process of writing the article or story. Regardless of how they land on a topic they are forced to give it more than just a casual consideration. To sound authentic, entrants have to believe in what they are writing.
This process encourages them to explore ideas that they may have never considered before.
Most importantly competitions are not all about having the freedom to write whatever a writer fancies or comes to mind. Those entries are quickly dismissed by judges. Writing is a discipline. The entrant has to think about what he or she wants to write about, then define the idea in a sentence or two before actually starting to write. Along the way there will be rewriting and editing required.
Alongside that there are word limits to meet, literary conventions to follow and a good entry is always one that has had many drafts. These drafts fine-tune the ideas the writer addresses.
Then there is the excitement of getting a prize. Many would say that that is the greatest prize of all. And for those who do receive a prize it is a bonus and an acknowledgement of their hard work. But winning is not what entering a writing competition is about. It is the unique discovery that the world can be shaped in any way the writer imagines. That’s the exciting part; enabling someone to share in a world they might never have known but for reading about it in someone’s competition entry.
That is the real benefit of entering writing competitions.