Lucy’s yarn wins writing award
Lucy has a passion for telling a good yarn.
And this passion has earned her the Elsie Locke Writing Prize, a narrative writing competition open to Year 7 and Year 8 students.
Her story will be published in the level four New Zealand School Journal this year.
Lucy, a Year 8 Matamata Intermediate student, says writing and ‘‘creating ideas’’ is a passionate hobby.
‘‘It’s fun to make up your own world because you can do whatever you want with it. ‘‘It’s very freeing in a way. ‘‘Writing or reading is what I am doing most of the time.
‘‘Time just whizzes by, sometimes it’s 10 minutes if I am not inspired, other times it’s hours.
‘‘It really depends if I need to eat or get up,’’ she said laughing.
This is the second time her writing has won an accolade.
Last year she won the River Short Story competition and her story was published.
But the Elsie Locke award is a very prestigious writing competition and the young girl is still ‘‘in shock’’.
‘‘I was in disbelief, thought I’d win.
‘‘It was very exciting, I definitely feel more confident in my I never writing and I think I would share them with more people.’’
The assignment was to write a 600 word story based on early New Zealand.
Her story, The Moa, is about a young girl who has an encounter with the extinct bird.
The story was written over two weeks with a heavy editing pro- cess to keep to the word count.
‘‘I had a basic idea and then you just go off on different directions.
‘‘I just wrote and cut hundreds of words at a time and then kept re-crafting that.
‘‘I don’t normally read it to anyone, but this time I read it to my mum and she helped me edit it,’’ Lucy says.
‘‘I was quite proud when I finished, I never expected it to win.’’
The Elsie Locke Writing Prize commemorates Elsie Locke’s life, both as a writer and an activist.She was the author of many children’s books and contributed more than 30 stories to the School Journal over 40 years.