The Samford Writers Club (SWC) is one of Samford’s newest student organizations, and it has seen a steady rise in numbers since its establishment last spring. On Sept. 25, they announced their very first short fiction competition.
The theme of the competition is “Stories from the Shadows.” Founding member and SWC Club President Caroline Ingraham shared the details of the competition and certain parameters the stories have to meet.
“The story has to be 2,500 words or less, and it has to involve shadows,” Ingraham explained. “We made the prompt vague for a reason—we want people to really interpret it how they may and use their different interests in their stories.”
The stories will be judged based on the writer’s creative use of the prompt and the story’s literary qualities, such as plot, setting and character development.
“I thought it would be very fun; on-theme for the spooky season,” Ingraham said. “I had the idea one day at a meeting… and automatically I had these competitive responses from people saying, ‘I’m going to write a better story than you.’”
Submissions close on Oct. 20; once submitted, they will be anonymously judged by a panel of eight club members. Ethan Howard, a freshman English and creative writing major at Samford, is one of the judges. Like several other panel members, he will be working hard to submit his own story to be secretly reviewed.
“Don’t be afraid of your own ideas,” Howard advised. “Maybe sometimes you have an idea, and you think, ‘Oh, maybe people will think this is dumb’ or ‘Maybe people won’t get it,’ and sometimes you just have to go out on a limb, work on that idea. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t.”
Howard first fell in love with writing when taking a community college course, where he was able to form good relationships with his classmates and share stories. This fall, he joined SWC as soon as he heard of it.
“I wanted that same kind of community here at Samford with people who also like to write stories,” he said. “So, when I found out there was a writer’s club, I was like, ‘Yes, this is where I need to be.’”
Since its founding, the Samford Writers Club has followed a steady meeting format. Commencing at 7 p.m. on Mondays at the English annex, they spend the first part of meetings going through announcements and introducing themselves and their day’s writing goals to the group. After that, they write—undistracted—for thirty minutes and reflect on their progress afterwards.
Ingraham styled the SWC meetings after the writer’s club she’d been a part of in high school, called “Shut Up and Write.”
“One difficult thing about being a writer is actually getting yourself to write,” she said. “So, what I loved about the club is that I had these people who would encourage me and provide this positive peer pressure to make progress, physical progress I could look at.”
The SWC has created a similar community, and members can be found working on anything from academic papers to poetry and personal narratives. Once submissions close for “Stories in the Shadows,” they will host a Halloween-themed reveal party on Oct. 30.
Staff Writer
