The following guidelines will prepare you for the audition for the Creative Writing Magnet.

The goal of the Creative Writing Magnet is to:

1. guide young writers as they learn to express themselves in a variety of literary genres.
2. encourage growing writers to develop a love for words and figurative language.
3. help young writers discover their voice as they explore the art of written expression.
4. offer young writers opportunities to publish their work.

Audition Requirements

The Creative Writing Audition shall consist of the following:

• come prepared with pencil and paper.
• read all of the given prompts and choose one that interests you.
• prompts will be different from practice prompts.
• the written response should be no longer than 1 and 1/2 pages.
• please, only one submission per student.
• audition must be completed within the allotted time period.
• due to the large number of submissions, none will be returned.
• your practice pieces should not be brought with you to the audition.

The following prompts are designed to familiarize you with the type of prompts
that may be used the day of your audition.

They are meant to be for practice only and should not be brought with you the day of your audition.

You will need paper and pen, or pencil the day of your audition.

Read all of your choices. When you are ready, choose one that you think will make the best imaginative story for you to write. Think about the story line (plot), interesting characters, and creative idaes for your piece of writing or story. Please do not write poetry. You may want to plan or organize your story before you write it, or you may prefer to go with the flow and follow your intuition.

Reminders

• give your story a title...be original
• use strong vocabulary, use descriptive words
• create images or pictures with words for your reader
• use dialogue...let your characters talk or show your character's thoughts
• write in paragraphs; stay focused on the prompt

Prompts

For practice, you may want to write a story for each of these prompts. However,
during the audition you may only select one prompt to write your story. The following prompts will not appear as story choices during your actual audition.

1. The Captive: develop a story based on this phrase
2. Invisible: use this word as your central theme in your story
3. Everything was going great until you spoiled it by saying something stupid: use this phrase as your central theme in your story

Evaluation of the audition is based on a five point scale with five points
being the highest and one point being the lowest in the following areas:

• opening paragraph
• creativity
• structure / ideas
• figurative / descriptive language
• paragraph / organization
• mechanics / spelling