Extra, extra, write all about it! The Pirate’s Eye is holding a writing contest in honor of South’s 50th anniversary. The theme is Pirate Pride, and it will be open to everyone, from aspiring career writers to hobbyists to people who’ve never put a word on a page.
Since not everyone sending in entries may be seasoned professionals, this article puts together a variety of tips and tricks to help you overcome any challenges you might encounter.
For one, quick web searches are an easy way to find advice on writing. An especially useful tip from grammarly.com suggests writers “start with an outline.” According to Grammarly, making sure that your story is structured will help you to “organise yourself from the start.”
Another way to organise your writing is nanowrimo.org, a website dedicated to National Novel Writing Month in November, during which writers challenge themselves to write an entire 50,000 word novel- in only a month.
Although November has already passed, the site boasts an incredible community of writers and is a wonderful space to challenge yourself to write. It allows you to log your progress every day, so you can see how your progress goes, and what your writing trends are.
Along with the writing community found online through nanowrimo.org, finding others in person who write is a must. A writing community can help you get through an especially troublesome paragraph, and give you a second perspective on what you’ve written.
Ms. Mary Desmond, South’s school librarian, minored in Creative Writing, so she has plenty of tips. If you get stuck while writing, she suggested taking a break and doing something else. In Ms. Desmond’s case, she likes to bake cookies. This will let your mind relax and enable you to keep writing.
But everyone is different. If, like Judy Akel (‘25), you find yourself more unproductive when you take breaks, you may want to take a different approach.
“I put the action or the scene I’m writing in a bracket,” Akel said, “and just move past it to come back to it later.” She finds that the flow of her writing is best left uninterrupted.
Everyone’s writing patterns are unique. But one thing that is universal to everyone is that inspiration can strike like a bolt of lightning, but at least lightning strikes only during storms.
“Always carry a notebook around with you,” Ms. Desmond suggested, “because you never know when inspiration is going to hit. I have had inspiration hit at a baseball game, and my story had nothing to do with baseball.”
She also suggests starting with what you know, and researching later on. It’ll help get you situated before you start doing heavy lifting. And if you want to get better at writing, you have to write every day. “Even if it’s just ten minutes,” Ms. Desmond said, “and it doesn’t matter what it is.”
Writing can be hard sometimes. Everyone faces difficulties when trying to put words on a page, but these obstacles are only temporary. If you work through it, you’ll have a finished product in no time at all. Remember, as Akel writes, “You are your own harshest critic, but never let your own criticism get in the way.”
We are very excited to see your wonderful work. Go Pirates!
