Pen Ohio teams find success at competition

The first high school level creative writing teams at Aurora have earned great success in the Pen Ohio competition this month. The varsity team came in second place overall, and the JV team came in third in their division, as well as two individuals earning special recognition. Kathryn Slates, junior, earned second place as an individual varsity competitor, and Sami Friedler earned third place as a JV individual.

In the competition, each writer gets three prompts from which they write a short story in the forty minute time period. Judges then grade each story on a scale of the strongest story in the room, and a quality scale from 0 to 100, 100 being the highest possible score.

The Varsity prompts were “all those flaws may just add a bit of character”, “waking up, finally...”, and “the giving was better than the receiving”. The JV prompts were “it was hard to ignore”, “this day will be different”, and “using technology to solve the problem seemed like a great idea”.

Many of the writers on the varsity team complained that the prompts were too overused. “The prompts were kind of tough and cliche,” said Junior Emma Kocar. “It was difficult to come up with something original.”

On the other hand, JV writer and Freshman Sidney Hilston said, “The technology prompt was difficult as it was too specific, but the other two were nice and broad, so you could write a lot more.”

Another issue that arose from this year’s competition was, as Junior Gabi Risko described, “There were a lot of technical difficulties and we had to leave before we got the results.” The team did eventually receive their results however, and they turned out to be fantastic.

One of the recognized individuals, Slates described her favorite story written at the competition, “I actually like the one I scored the lowest on, because I felt really in the zone on the second story, so the ‘waking up, finally...’ was my favorite. The short story was basically about some non-binary astronauts in biostasis while traveling to explore another galaxy. They’re having all these amazing dreams and experiences in the biostasis state, and when they finally wake up in the other galaxy, it paled in comparison to their experiences while on the way.”

The other individual, Friedler, commented on the competition and being part of a creative writing team. “You have to be pretty dedicated to writing, not just good at it. You’ll have good and bad days, and the judges can be subjective, but it’s fun cause you get to go out and write with an amazing group of people who are all interested in the same thing.”

There will be two teams led by Ms. Hilston next year, and while it may not be exactly the same group due to the trying-out process, they are expected to be very successful. There will also be a creative writing club next year similar to that at Harmon; both of which will begin in the fall of next year.