So I've been doing some volunteer work for the Sydney Writers' Festival and for the past couple of days I've been stuck in a room with a bunch of others doing the preliminary judging for the WriteNow! short story competition, open to year 7, 8 and 9 students.
The students receive a choice of three story starters provided by established children's authors. You'd be surprised how many entrants totally ignore explicit details of the plot already given to them in the starter.
Unfortunately a lot of teachers set this as an assessment task and don't bother to filter the quality work through so we get a lot of clangers, which we need to weed out before the winner and runner-up for each year are decided from our shortlist.
Below are some context-free highlights (all malaprops, misspellings, lack of grammar and punctuation belong to the original work).
A lover is described as "like a brother/father to her"
"The crowd was breathless from shock but still managed to gasp loudly"
"Most people call me Bunyip. I don't really care for my proper name, Aloysius Hercules Fotherington-Snipe"
"The dead dog was standing on its hind legs and staggering towards them like a zombie"
"then they saw an old house, maybe made in the 90s"
"he looked around to find himself face-to-face with some sort of ugly fish/spider"
"The berries could contain poison but they had to try them"
"Her trail through the fog seemed like a knife cutting through a soft spongy sponge cake"
"Then before you know it they had changed the subject, now talking about the food they are allergic to"
"she was losing her patents"
"A fake realisation swooped over Tamin, instantly convincing her"
"A hand out of know where covered her month"
"WOW! Are you series?"
"she brought a new house witch is very big"
"Tamin kept wearing one glob..."
"I fell over like a dead pig"
"my head was full of dough"
"Tamin wasn't sure it was defiantly him"
"Think thinks through thoroughly"
"apparently she was really popular she had like billions of friends"
"The boy's name was Charlie. He was a boy."
"He was murdered by my mother and her lover Harry Pitchmuck"
"Tamin looks up and slice, her throat has just been slit by a German Nazi spy"
(A character in a cell explains why he is there)
"Mr Jackson next door was a formidable man. Fiercely protective of his apples..."
"His eyes started to boil and you look away as a body exploded into pieces"
"You are hanging from the sealing standing on an ice cube"
"You're pretty. I'm Luke."
Next year we plan to draw up a bingo grid featuring elements such as vampires, werewolves, ninjas, Nazis, dragons, sea monsters...
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