On Wednesday, November 8th, Dakota High School’s Writing Club hosted its first writing competition for the 2023-2024 school year.  

For this competition, writers had to draft a story that would shock or make readers feel severe second-hand embarrassment. During the meeting, the competing authors were kept anonymous as the stories were read aloud by the club’s Vice President, Cal Gai.  

The classroom had a light-hearted atmosphere. Snacks were available for the members while students would react to the bizarre stories that their peers had come up with.  

These stories included:
A story about a girl whose poem gets recognized by her crush and then the whole school falls in love with her writing in an instant.  

The diary entries of an alien disguised as a normal human girl while failing to understand the norms of society and plotting to take over the world.  

The tale of the romance between bread, butter, and knives.  

A short story detailing a romance between the reader and a creepypasta, Jeff the Killer.  

A nine-pages long story about two lovers who act a little too much like wolves running through the streets by Dakota High School to sleep underneath the bleachers.  

And finally, a three-paragraphs long story about a “beta who was afraid to become an alpha,” but it was all a dream.  

Overall, this competition was done so that the members of the club could recognize what to avoid when writing, and what elements of a story may turn readers away from their stories. And although the competition had been postponed for a few weeks due to Senior Skip Day, the leaders of the club made it work.  

There were some things that the President, Emily Chavez-Martinez, and the Vice President, Cal Gai, stated that would like to improve on for future competitions. Some of these things included stricter deadlines and a word limit for the stories.  

According to Emily and Cal, eleven members of the club agreed to enter the competition. However, only six stories were submitted before the meeting even with the postponement of the competition. Another issue they encountered was how long some of the submissions were. Because of this, the meeting was longer than expected, causing some of the judges to go home before all the stories were read. This led to there not being a winner in the competition since there wasn’t enough time for voting.  

Despite this, Emily and Cal say that, if they host another writing competition, they will make necessary changes to ensure that it would go smoothly.