On Reflection
a memory from earlier writing days
The first creative writing class I ever took was in high school. It was the first year I had free space in my schedule for an extra elective, and I was more excited about it than I’d ever been for any class.
But this wasn’t just a class. Oh no. Like choir, band, or yearbook, this class was a built-in club. Sure, you had instruction periods during the day, but it also expanded beyond the classroom to serve the school in some way. For choir and band, it was competitions and showcases, for yearbook, it was…ya know…the yearbook.
And for creative writing, it was writing contests.1
Every month or so, we’d write a short story on assignment based on a theme or prompt. Unlike the rest of our assignments, these were not shared with our classmates and instead went into an anonymous pool of submissions. Simultaneously, those themes and prompts were announced to the entire school so anyone could submit their story for a prize (usually a gift card and some candy).
After the submission deadline, we’d “grade” a handful of these anonymous submissions individually based on a rubric created by our teacher. This was a definitively unsubtle way for our teacher to avoid having any student rate either their own or their friends’ submissions, but it got the job done.
So now you’ve got the gist of it, yeah? You’re seeing how this all worked and you’re wondering what the hell my point is. Fair, noted, and moving on.
Here, Reader, is where I run the risk of sounding like a Very Large Ass. Because the rest of the story hinges on this awkward detail: my submissions kept taking first place. Like, every time.
I came by it honestly—there was no underground bribery or threatening my classmates at pencilpoint to give me a good rating or else, they didn’t even know which submission was mine—and for the most part, it was a positive thing. Only a handful of the students in my class actually cared much about writing2, and of them, most were my friends. And also…you know…nobody really cared about the contests. They were a thing we had to submit to as part of the class. Glorified homework.
Or so I thought, I guess. Let us immerse ourselves now in the body and mind of a younger, dumber Aly circa 2012.
One day my teacher asks me to stay behind after class and tells me that my submission has won the most recent contest. “Okay,” I think, “cool? Thank you?” Usually the winners aren’t announced until the morning announcements over the loudspeaker, so I don’t get why she’s telling me now.
She’s telling me, I learn, because this will be my final win. From now on, I still have to write and submit the short stories like all the other students, but she’ll secretly set mine aside…where it will sit unread, unrated, and therefore, ineligible to win.
“To give the other kids a chance,” she tells me.
Because this is younger, dumber Aly, in this moment, I’m beaming with pride! I go home and tell my mom that my teacher thinks I’m that good that she has to completely take me out of the running to keep me from winning.
My mom is not so thrilled.
She has caught onto something I have not: that were I a little less confident, a little more vulnerable, this singular experience could have turned me off from writing forever. She’s also realized that while I might feel like my feathers are fluffed right now, the first time I watch my submission be put aside on the teacher’s desk, never to be considered by my peers and never to know whether it was even worthy of winning, I might not be quite so proud.
She sends my teacher a (nice) email and gets a response immediately.
Apparently my (lovely and sweet) teacher has been fending off nasty emails for a while, sent by my classmates’ parents. It’s this teacher’s first year and the first time she’s had to deal with this kind of thing, so she caved under the pressure. She also says she’s been regretting it all day. Of course, that could be a lie, but I believe her. Teaching is harder than it has any business being, and a certain sort of parent usually doesn’t help matters.
Nor a certain sort of student.
She never tells me the names of the kids who complained, but I know who they are. One of them has made no secret of the fact that he thinks he’s the best writer in class. The other is supposed to be my friend, which stings a little. Both have been trading second and third place in the writing contests all year.
To make an even longer story short, my teacher apologizes to me the next day. She lets me know she told the other students (and their parents) the submissions have always been anonymous for a reason, she’s done her due diligence to keep things fair, and that’s the end of that.
I keep submitting to the contests like all my other classmates, and those kids go on complaining about it. I end the year with some Almond Joys and a cumulative $20 split up between Starbucks and Sweet Frog gift cards.
And I keep writing. The end.
Sometimes I think back on that moment and wonder. If my mom never said anything, if my teacher had not reinstated my ability to participate, would it have changed anything? Would I be writing this newsletter now, having since that day taken many more creative writing classes, written multiple books, one of which secured an agent and God willing might get published one day? I don’t know.
Did winning writing contests really positively impact me that much? Did not winning those contests have a hand in why those other two kids, as far as I know, stopped writing entirely? If they got my Almond Joy and $5 coupon for frozen yogurt, would they be writing this newsletter instead of me?
But, I think…nah. My mom did the right thing by emailing my teacher, and that teacher did the right thing by not cutting the creative legs off one of the only students she had that truly enjoyed writing. No, when I think about the things that made me love writing, it wasn’t winning writing contests.
It was the way my History teacher told me to let him know when I became a published author after I turned in a written assignment. It was when my English teacher complimented my essays or said I had a “gift for dialogue.” It was getting into a summer program for young writers, it was writing a novel in a month for extra credit, it was sneaking my dad’s laptop upstairs so I could write stories about fairies, it was printing out my words and sharing them with my friend on a long bus ride, and on and on and on.
Maybe winning those contests gave me a little more confidence in my abilities as a writer. But those other moments…I don’t think they happened because my writing is particularly great. Especially back then…I’m not even sure it could count as good. Instead, I think there were simply some people in my life I really respected who saw in me a passion and love for writing that maybe even I hadn’t fully discovered yet, and they fostered that love in me. Fostered it so well and so generously that when the first real challenge to that love arrived on the back of some snooty parents and jealous kids, it didn’t even begin to shake me.
Sometimes I wonder if maybe those other kids stopped writing not because they weren’t good or didn’t have stories to tell, but because they had adults in their lives who foolishly let them believe, or even encouraged them to believe, that the most important thing art can do…is win.
I’m not sure why this memory found me again. Maybe it was to remind me why I wanted to be an author in the first place: to share stories, not win prizes. Maybe it was because I think, in general, we could all be a little more generous with ourselves and with our peers. Kindness costs so little, joy is abundant, and at the end of the day, the game is made up. The competition isn’t that important.
After all, you’ve gotta write the thing anyway, don’t you? It’s practically homework.
And literary magazines and some other stuff that’s not relevant to this particular story.
I vividly remember at least six Senior boys who took the class as an “easy A” and would just play Yu-Gi-Oh in the corner while the rest of us clacked away at our keyboards. Hope they’re doing well ;)