Shortt Story Showdown

There’s something I love about giving students exactly the same tiny starting point and then watching them take it in completely different directions. And this term, the starting point really was tiny.

One kick.

The ball is already on the penalty spot. The whole world is watching. Write the final seconds before the kick, and the few seconds afterwards.

That’s it.

The challenge, of course, had very little to do with football. Students were asked to take roughly 30 seconds and make it feel like three minutes. To slow time down, notice the tiny things, get inside a character’s head and, most importantly, make the reader desperately want to know what happens next...

Across our workshops, we explored the difference between simply telling a reader what happened and making them feel like they were there. We played with internal dialogue, sensory detail, flashbacks, recurring ideas, misdirection and the slightly cruel art of getting a ball within centimetres of the goal before making the reader wait another paragraph to find out where it ends up.

And that's probably my favourite part of the Showdown. Give 30 students the exact same penalty kick and somehow you get 30 different stories. We had goalkeepers studying percentages, best friends facing each other across the penalty spot, old football boots, hazardous loose shoelaces, family members buried amongst thousands of screaming fans, players having full-blown arguments with their own brains (and, somehow, even a pigeon's viewpoint).

But underneath all of that creativity was the part that matters most: the writing got better. Students brought drafts to workshops, listened to feedback, cut things they liked, rewrote things that weren't working and discovered that sometimes the best thing you can do to a sentence is leave it alone.

The whole process makes one thing very clear:

Good stories aren’t written in one go.

Congratulations to our Term 3 winners; Ashling from F9, Talia from F13, and Sophia from F1, and to every student who was willing to put their writing out there and keep working at it. Outstanding efforts across the board.

Four years in, I still love seeing what happens when we give young writers a blank page, one tiny moment and permission to do something interesting with it.

Read on for the winning entries!

AND, to learn even more, check out my behind the scenes video of the competition, included in the latest episode of Inside Magill, and available on the website. I hope it gives an insight into a really wonderful part of our school: