Stories Need to be Your Creations!
It’s okay to get a little bit of assistance from your teacher or parents, but please remember that entries must be fundamentally yours. It’s not okay to copy someone else’s idea and simply change the names. Do your best to be creative and original.

Only stories that are exactly 100 words in length will be eligible to be finalists.

Finalists
Teachers will select up to three stories from each class to go through to the finals. These three stories will come from three different students.

Student Voting - 20 June to 23 June 2022

• Students become the judges for Storyathon!
• Students will be asked to select their two “favorite” stories from a choice of six.
• The stories who receive the highest percentage of “favorite” votes will be the winners.
• Students will not know who wrote the stories they are voting on and they will be judging ones not from their school.

Publishing of Stories

• We will be publishing many of the stories. Student first names and surname initial will be used to protect privacy.
• Please be aware that by creating stories on Storyathon you are granting us permission to publish the stories in both digital and printed format. Students still retain creative ownership of their stories and they may publish them anywhere else they may wish.

• Jot down ideas
  • brainstorm funny events, strange happenings, things that go wrong, unexpected events, family stories with a funny ending, fascinating facts, unusual achievements or events
• Let the words flow
  • Just start writing. Forget about the 100 word limit. Edit and iterate later on
• Ask “what if?”
  • About the topic to inspire and create new ideas. Revisit throughout to create twists, unexpected events, new characters
• Include dialogue
  • Make the story come alive and give your characters a voice
• Use punctuation with purpose
  • Send strong messages to your reader with powerful punctuation (!) (-) (...) etc.
• Use sentence length wisely
  • Short sentences grab attention, long sentences create atmosphere
• Improve the opening grab and ending twist later
  • These will come more easily once the body of the story is written
• Pay close attention to words and sentences
  • Eg ‘Quick, jump off right now!’ can become ‘Jump!!’, or ‘There were many strange things happening that didn’t make sense’ can become ‘Strange things were happening. Very strange.’
• Walk away and think about it
  • Take time think about other ideas, to look in news and to experiment with ideas and words.