Members of Creative Media Competition Club at last year’s JustWrite regional competition: Samipa Patel, Winston Yu, Audrey Wang, Nour Omar, Alex Gilkey, Eve Abounader, Pimmy Asawalaitongkul, Minseong Hong and Ms. Laura Lagania. Photo provided by Minseong Hong.

The Creative Writing and Creative Media Competition Clubs have joined forces this year to form a single group. The “new” Creative Writing Club, advised by English teacher Laura Lagania, aims to bring together students interested in the creative writing process. Lagania answers questions about the club below.

Q: From what I’ve gathered, it seems that Creative Writing Club and Creative Media Competition Club joined together. Would you say that’s accurate?

A: There used to be just a Creative Writing Club at school, and then we had some people graduate. There was a fluctuation in leadership/group membership, and that was around the time that we created the competition aspect of the club. Ms. Kinney was the advisor for that club. We kind of just decided to merge them together. So now there’s creative writing and there’s a competition component within the club, if that makes sense.

Q: People in the club will be competing in a competition called JustWrite. Can you describe what JustWrite is?

A: There’s a couple different components of the club. If students are just interested in creative writing, they don’t necessarily have to compete. What we’ll do is we’ll have meetings where we are learning some sort of new writing skill. And it’s all creative writing. So this is writing short stories and poetry, more of the stuff that students really like to write, so it gives students a creative outlet in that way. We’ll play a lot of different types of writing games. Then the actual competition itself, if anybody’s familiar with Power of the Pen, it works just the same way that would work, just at the high school level. So the way that the competitions are, there’s a regional, and then we were fortunate enough to make it to states last year. So we participated two separate times last year during our season. You have three writing rounds, each writing round is 45 minutes long, and you walk into the prompt totally blind. You have 45 minutes to respond to the prompt in however you see fit. Let’s say it’s science fiction and the prompt might be a hostile alien takeover has landed on Earth, and then you’re given 45 minutes to be able to come up with some sort of a story based off of that. Each round gets judged by a panel of judges.

Q: Can you talk more about these writing games?

A: We focus each meeting on some sort of different writing [skill]. Let’s say the writing skill is building our characters, then we might do some sort of a writing activity where students are given a prompt and based off of that they’re inventing a character on the spot. We get to practice that skill in real time. Other times it might be how to incorporate more color into writing by using figurative language. So each week we have a different focus on different types of skills.

Q: What are you hoping for this year for Creative Writing Club?

A: I have a really good team of kids this year spanning across the grade levels. I would say the bulk of our membership right now are juniors, and that’s nice as a club starts to grow. We have lots of leadership positions currently. We have two different divisions for the competition. There’s a 9th and a 10th grade team and then an 11th and 12th grade team. So really, I would like to see the club continue in two years after these juniors graduate, keeping the club going and giving that outlet for students. Kids want to be able to do this type of writing more, and we don’t always have the time to do it during English class because we have so many other standards we need to hit. So it’s a great space for like minded kids to be able to come and meet with each other.

Q: Do you have any goals for the club just beyond gaining more membership?

A: We talked this year about also expanding some of the competitions that we are in. Our officers have found other types of [writing competitions] and some of them have different goals, like [wanting] to be published in something. Some [competitions]…have younger grades, school age kids. They have cash prizes attached to them which may be in the form of a scholarship. So that’s kind of cool. So just giving students outlets where they feel like their voice can be heard, basically.

Q: Did you want to add anything of your own about Creative Writing Club?

A: It’s a fun time, and everybody should join if they like to write.

Creative Writing Club will have its next meeting after school on Wednesday, Oct. 15 in room 178.