Scholastic Writing - Draft

A: The aim of this experience is to create my first draft of my submission to the Scholastic (Art and) Writing Contest.

C: Everything in this piece is created from my imagination- from the worldbuilding, characters, and plot.

T: I took many nights to think about what topic I wanted to write about. I actually did not have much of a plan when writing this; I developed the storyline as I went, and only knew what I wanted to be my beginning and ending scene. Yet, this plan of having a relatively nonexistent plan worked well.

I: I had to find out what kinds of topics and themes were award-winners on the contest's gallery, but also the rules and constraints of the contest- such as having a maximum of 3000 words.

V: I have gained experience in writing at a higher level. When writing casually, I often think less about using complex words and sentence structures and having a deeper theme and connecting my story to said deeper thing among other tasks to keep track of; this allows me to write faster. However, whenever I do write in a more profound fashion, I write slower, but I am able to create a work I am truly proud of.

E: Whenever I work on writing, I am able to quickly enter the legendary flow state. Time seems to become infinitesimally short, and before I become aware of myself again, my eyes are half lidded, my stomach empty, and my mind half asleep- my clock that once read 11PM had clicked 2AM in the blink of mere 400 words. (In reference, I wrote 4.5k words for a casual work in the span of 7 hours).

LO4: It took me 6 arduous nights from my Fall Break to work on this piece. Usually, my pieces are simple and meant to not have as much meaning and depth and density of symbols, content, metaphors- anything that may add complexity to the piece, but since this is a competition piece, I really wanted to make it really fine. The fine tuning will come later... anyways, it took a lot of effort and concentration to write it, so much so that I sometimes even felt pushed out of my flow state after finishing a single section.