Helping My Child Prepare for the Scholastic Writing Awards: A Parent’s Story of What Actually Worked
On a rainy Saturday in November, my daughter sat at the kitchen table with her laptop open to a blank document. The cursor blinked at her, indifferent. She had a month left to submit a piece to the Scholastic Writing Awards, and she was convinced she had nothing to say.
“I could write about the time we got stuck in that elevator,” she said. “But that’s not meaningful. Everyone writes about something meaningful.”
I had a counterpoint: the elevator story was actually the only thing she’d ever told me with the kind of tiny, precise detail that makes good writing. She knew the exact sound the fire alarm made—two short bleats, then silence. She remembered the way the man in the corner kept jangling his keys. But she was aiming for something she called “serious,” which I suspect meant a real-life essay filled with abstract words like identity and connection.
This was our first time navigating the Scholastic Writing Awards, and honestly, the whole process felt bigger than I expected. The portal, the category options, the rules about word counts and teacher submission—it’s a lot for a family that usually just writes school assignments the night before. But the biggest challenge wasn’t the logistics. It was helping my daughter understand what competition judges are actually looking for.
I’m not an English teacher. I’m a parent who sometimes edits her child’s homework and usually makes it worse. But I had one small advantage: I remembered my own eighth-grade attempt at a serious poem about the ocean. It was full of phrases like “the vast, churning expanse of the sea.” It lost. My teacher at the time wrote just two words in the margin: “Too big.” That comment stuck with me for decades, and it came back to me that afternoon.
So I told my daughter to forget meaningful. I asked her to tell me the elevator story again, but this time, I wanted to know what the elevator floor looked like. She paused. “There was a sticky patch near the door,” she said. “And someone had scratched a tiny heart into the wall, but the paint was peeling so it looked kind of broken.”
That was the whole article right there. Not a theme. Not a moral. A scratched heart and a sticky patch. That was the starting point.
The next afternoon, she tried to draft the essay about the elevator, but she wrote a long introduction about fear and confinement. She showed it to me, proud of the big words. I read the first paragraph and didn’t say much. Instead, I asked her to read it out loud to the dog. Halfway through, she stopped and laughed. “The dog doesn’t care about my intro,” she said.
That was the practical lesson that changed everything. We made a rule for that week: every draft had to be read aloud, and the first paragraph had to be cut once we saw what the second paragraph contained. Because almost always, the first paragraph is the writer warming up. The real story starts when you get to the part that surprises you—the part where you realize what you actually wanted to say.
It sounds simple, but it rewired how we approached the competition entirely. Rather than trying to craft a polished, “winning” piece, we turned it into a process of noticing things she already knew. We took a short walk around the block one evening, and I asked her to point out one thing she had never noticed before. She said the mailbox on the corner had a new dent in it, like a truck had backed into it. She didn’t know if that was true, but it didn’t matter. It was the kind of detail that made you look twice.
For parents helping a teen or pre-teen with a writing contest, I’d say this: you don’t need to be an expert, and you don’t need to coach them on structure. You need to help them see what they already know. That means asking questions that start with “What did you notice?” rather than “What happened?” It means resisting the urge to tell them what the story is about. Let them figure that out—or not. Some of the best competition pieces are just a long, careful look at something small. They don’t need to resolve into a life lesson.
There was one more thing that helped, though it felt almost too simple. We set a timer for fifteen minutes and did “ugly freewriting” every day. No stopping, no erasing, keep the pen moving. She wrote about the sound of the school bus door hissing open. She wrote about the weird smell of the gym floor on rainy days. None of it was usable directly, but the practice loosened something in her. She stopped writing the way she thought a contest judge wanted. She started writing like herself.
By the weekend before the deadline, she had a draft she actually felt okay about. It started with the scratched heart, not the elevator doors. It moved through the minutes of waiting, the man with the keys, and ended with her mother, who had come to pick her up and was crying outside the glass doors, sobbing so hard she couldn’t press the zero on her phone. My daughter wrote that line, and I had to look away because it was too true to watch her type it.
We still don’t know if it will win. She submitted it last night, and now we’re waiting, which is its own kind of exercise in patience. She’s already talking about writing another piece—this time about the raccoon that lives in the drainage ditch near school. I’m just glad she has a whole notebook of small, strange observations that are entirely hers.
I don’t know if the judges will like what she wrote. But I know the essay is the best thing she’s written this year, not because of the grammar or the vocabulary, but because it’s the first time she didn’t try to finish someone else’s sentence. She found her own story by looking at the world a little more closely, and in a way, that’s the real reward. The award is just a bonus.
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