This year, for the second year in a row, I wrote a short story to submit for Writes of Spring, an annual writing contest hosted by the Lafayette Public Library. Since I have now submitted to this contest twice, I thought it would be interesting to compare my timeline and process in writing these pieces. My two short stories “The Turning Pointe” and “Between the Lines” are both heavily inspired by my own life, the things I love, and the things I am scared of. 

For last year’s work, “The Turning Point,” I started writing in January after being inspired while doom-scrolling on Instagram to tell the story of a ballet dancer. I of course drew from my personal experience in the dance world as well as the experiences of others and after dancing for over a decade, I had a lot of material to work with. For this story, I started my writing process by writing the first few lines and then the ending, and then I went back and filled in the middle. This is definitely not a convenient way to write, and I do not at all recommend it—I had to delete the ending I had originally written to stay true to what the characters had become. But finally putting the pieces of the plot together was so rewarding. 

For “Between the Lines,” I started writing in early February, 5 weeks before I completed the short story. This work tells the story of Olive and Theo, two young people in love. For this, I drew inspiration from many different events throughout February from some musicals I watched, from my friends and their relationships, from new music I listened to, and mostly from my own love life. The first real inspiration came while I was completely zoned out at school and was stuck with the inspiration for this story. I didn’t think much of it at first since I think of writing ideas all the time without putting pen to paper but something about the idea stuck with me. I kept the characters in the back of my mind for a while and they developed as I watched the people in my life outline the story with their actions. After a while, I had six pages of gibberish that didn’t tell a story but did stay true to the characters. I realized that any good story needed a plot so I committed to the story and wrote nonstop for a long time until Theo and Olive had the story they deserved. I still have two pages of unused content from the original dump-draft of the story that I hope I can use for another piece soon! 

Writing both of these stories was so rewarding! I love being able to create such personal stories with nothing but my mind and a blank Google Doc. Overall, I think even though both of these stories were created in very different ways, they both represent very different, very unique parts of me as a person, and writing them has been such a satisfying experience!