Scholastic Writing Competition Tips: How to Help Your Child When They Say “I Have Nothing to Write”
The permission slip came home in a plastic folder on a Tuesday. My daughter slid it across the kitchen table and said, “We can enter a writing contest. I have nothing to write about.” There was still a little syrup stuck to the table from breakfast, and the dishwasher was running. I remember how much I wanted to say, “Just write something. Anything.” But I didn’t.
I’ve seen that look before. I used to teach middle schoolers, and every fall I’d hand out the same contest prompt and watch a room full of perfectly smart kids stare at blank pages like they’d never had a single experience in their lives. “I’m not surprised by anything,” my daughter told me now, when the prompt asked for a story about a time she was surprised.
So instead of telling her to brainstorm, I asked her a different question. I said, “What happened today that you didn’t expect?”
She thought for a second. Then she told me about lunch. Her chocolate milk carton had slipped out of her hand and splashed onto her sleeve and the table. A quiet boy in her class, the one who never talks much, had slid his own unopened carton across the table toward her without saying anything. Nobody laughed. The teacher didn’t even notice. She kept looking at the boy, but he just looked down at his tray.
The whole story took her maybe ninety seconds to tell. She had every detail I needed: the cold feel of the milk on her shirt, the silence at the table, the boy’s hand pulling back.
“That’s your story,” I said.
She looked confused. “But it’s so small.”
That is the first thing parents can do when a child freezes in front of a writing contest prompt: get the story out of their mouth first. Before they write anything, have them tell you what happened. You don’t need to correct their grammar or suggest better words. Just listen and write down the phrases that stick. When my daughter said “He didn’t look at me when he did it,” I knew that was a line she would never find by staring at a blank page.
Small moments are also what contest judges tend to remember. Kids often think they need to write about the entire school year, or the whole trip to the beach, or the complete story of winning a soccer game. But a single scene has room for real details. The chocolate milk, the quiet boy, the teacher looking away — that was enough. It didn’t need to be a bigger event. It just needed to be true.
The next night, she sat down to write her draft at the same kitchen table. I sat in the living room with a book. I tried not to hover, because hovering is the fastest way to turn writing into a performance. Every time she looked up, I kept reading. She needed to know that the writing was hers, not mine.
When she finished, she read it aloud to me. That was another useful trick, and honestly, it works more often than people expect. We heard the word “normal” three times in the first paragraph. Her first sentence was, “The day I got chocolate milk on my sleeve was a normal day.” She could hear how flat it sounded. So we took a different approach: she circled every repeated word, then we talked about which ones she could cut. She crossed out one “normal” and changed the opening to, “Tuesday lunch started like every other Tuesday lunch, until someone handed me a chocolate milk I didn’t ask for.” That wasn’t perfect, but it was hers.
Reading aloud is a low-friction revision method because it doesn’t require any special vocabulary. You just read the words on the page and notice when your brain trips. When she read, “The boy offered his milk and then he kept eating,” the phrase “and then he kept eating” actually sounded fine, but the sentence had too many “and”s. We broke it into shorter sentences. No big lesson. Just the ear catching what the eye misses.
I also showed her a simple version of “show, don’t tell.” She had written, “He was a nice kid.” That told the reader everything and showed nothing. I asked her, “What did he do that made you think he was nice?” She looked at her own story and wrote, “He slid his carton across the table without looking at me.” It took less than a minute. I think she finally saw why her favorite books feel so alive.
There is a practical side to the contest itself, too. Most kids get stuck because the deadline feels far away until it suddenly isn’t. We put the contest deadline on the fridge and worked backwards. We left about a week. Monday: talk through the story. Tuesday: write a messy draft. Wednesday: read it aloud and circle repeated words. Thursday: type a clean copy. Friday: print it out. That schedule gave her time to think without turning the contest into a crisis.
If your child only has one evening, a writing sprint can help. Set a timer for twenty minutes and tell them to write without stopping. If they don’t know what to say, they can write “I don’t know what to say” until something else appears. Then after the timer stops, they read through and find the one sentence that feels true. It sounds strange, but it works. That sentence becomes the beginning of their next draft.
There’s one more thing I want to remember for next year: the first idea is not always the best idea. We almost settled for the first thing she thought of, which was a story about a school field trip she didn’t really want to write about. The chocolate milk story only came out after I asked her a different question. So if a child says “I have nothing,” try asking sideways. Ask about what made them laugh today, or what annoyed them, or what they saw on the way to school. Those questions often unlock a real story faster than “What is something important that happened to you?”
Her name wasn’t on the contest winner list. We checked together, and she shrugged. I thought she might be disappointed, but she just asked if we could do the reading-aloud thing before her next school essay.
That was the closest thing to a win I needed. I still don’t know if she’ll enter any writing contests next year. The blank page is still a little scary, and some prompts will always feel too big. But sitting at the kitchen table with a story in her mouth before she puts it on paper is a habit now. She knows writing is less about magic and more about noticing the things that already happened around her. That seems like enough for now.
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