I'm a high school senior and I'll be entering a prose piece for a creative nonfiction contest. I'm entering a memoir/personal essay and touching on the major points of my life. This contest is very competition (maybe about 700 high school students enter every year), and I want SOOO badly to win the $5,000! My intent for my piece is to cover autobiographical elements and build on the theme of indomitability. I want to, towards the end, show that all of my experiences (hardships) have not inhibited my intellectual curiosity. Ultimately, the theme I build on throughout my work is that a desire to learn, broaden one's horizons, and discover can't be hindered no matter what the circumstances. It must be a maximum of 10 pages, and I've been working on it for a couple of months now.
The site states: "The awards are for excellence in creative nonfiction which is truth/fact-based writing with literary merit, work that features authorial voice and, often, personal experience, and often has a significant narrative quality."
Does anyone have any writing tips to offer? What do you think of what I've written already? Should I revise this topic/theme?
The site states: "The awards are for excellence in creative nonfiction which is truth/fact-based writing with literary merit, work that features authorial voice and, often, personal experience, and often has a significant narrative quality."
Does anyone have any writing tips to offer? What do you think of what I've written already? Should I revise this topic/theme?