Okay, maybe my story wasn’t good enough to win, I thought, but it was not a-hundred-and-twenty-fifth level bad. A hundred-and-twenty-fifth? What humiliation.Īnd amid that sense of shame was a sense of anger and injustice. I called myself a writer and had been working towards that for three years, only to have my first public attempt at writing deemed, effectively, a piece of shit, in front of my family, and the teachers and parents at the school, and my peers, who could all publicly see where my story had ended up. Kid thinks he’s some kind of writing genius, huh? That’ll take him down a peg or two. I have a much sharper recollection of all the adults present looking at me with what felt very much like schadenfreude. I have a vague recollection of one of the library staff telling me and my mother that there were something like six hundred entries. I remember, vividly, feeling sick with disappointment. Worse, what I remember is seeing my story with a number written on it in pencil. My story not get any kind of placing or recognition whatsoever. Had I won? Had I been placed second or third, or highly commended? I went to the library and hunted excitedly for my story on the display. I can’t remember what the competition was, but I know it was only for young writers, and I think it was across the whole of Western Australia.Ī while later, the competition results were being announced with the stories entered being put on display at the Geraldton Regional Library. This was twenty years ago, so nothing was digital – hard copy was the only option – and this wasn’t the adult world of publishing, this was primary school, so everything was also handwritten. I wrote my piece, and even drew a small illustration of the story’s crime scene on the bottom of one of the pages. I knew I was a capable writer and that it was one of my strengths. There was almost nothing emotional or powerful about any of my writing, but the mechanics were pretty solid for a boy of my age. I had, at this point, been actively writing in my spare time for three years.

Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown books I was devouring from the primary school library at the time. It was an original mystery/detective story in the style of Donald J.

An eleven-year-old Holden Sheppard submits a short story to a writing competition for the first time in his life. Or, more accurately, picture it: Geraldton, 2000. I’ll set the scene, Sophia Petrillo style. It was only tonight, here in 2020, when I was in the middle of judging a writing competition myself, that I reflected on this failure and realised it may not have been what I thought it was. One failure in particular has always hurt me, because it was the first. Like most writers, I have been sculpted by failure far more than success.

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