Basil Sylvester is judging the First Page student writing challenge — and wants you to get creative!
CBC Books | Posted: February 22, 2024 11:46 AM | Last Updated: February 22
The First Page student writing challenge is open for submissions until Feb. 29, 2024.
Basil Sylvester is a non-binary middle-grade writer. They are the co-author of The Fabulous Zed Watson and the recently published second book in the series, Night of the Living Zed.
In 2021, The Fabulous Zed Watson was one of five finalists for the Governor General's Literary Award for young people's literature — text. In 2022, the book was a finalist for the Forest of Reading Silver Birch Award, a TD Children's Literature Award and a Lambda Literary Award.
Sylvester is the judge of the 2024 First Page student writing challenge.
The challenge will be accepting submissions until February 29 at 11:59 p.m. ET. Finalists from each category will be selected by a team of expert readers. Finalists will be notified by email in the spring of 2024. The exact timing will depend on the number of submissions received.
Both winners will receive a one-year subscription to OwlCrate, which sends fresh boxes of books to young readers across Canada on a monthly basis. In addition, each winners' school libraries will receive 50 free YA books.
Last year's winners were Christian A. Yiouroukis for his story Where the Maple Leaf Grows and Bee Lang for their story One Question.
Sylvester spoke with Fresh Air host Ismaila Alfa about what they think makes a great first page.
LISTEN | Basil Sylvester on why you should enter the First Page student writing challenge:
I'm really happy to have you here and dig into this contest. This is such a cool sounding contest. Tell us a bit more about the writing challenge though. What exactly are you asking writers to do?
The contest is open from Grade 7 to 12 and we're asking them to write about 300 to 400 words as the first page of a novel set 150 years in Canada's future. So we're asking them to take an issue that is contemporary and imagine what it's going to look like in 150 years and write just the first page of a theoretical novel about that.
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This is such a great thought experiment for middle school or high school kids to go through. What made you want to judge the contest?
The idea of the first page was something that drew me as a kid. I definitely wrote a lot of first pages and didn't do the follow through.
It's a little bit less pressure to write just the first page. It's not a totally completed short story. You're introducing some things that you would, theoretically, if you were to write the full novel, tease out later. So it's just setup, which is an interesting task when you think about pacing and writing.
I'm interested to see what the kids are going to come up with and also the idea of 150 years in the future as you say, it's an interesting thought experiment. I'm a children's author. I do a lot of school visits and it's great to see where the kids are at and get a window into what's going on in classrooms today. This is one of the ways that I'll be able to do that.
I want to get a bit more into your writing and your youth. When did you decide that you were going to become a writer?
Right around middle school, when my dad published his first middle-grade novel, that was when I realized you could do it as a career. Which is also why I'm excited to judge this contest because it's important at that stage to have people who are going to take your writing seriously. I'm excited to to do that for these students.
How cool to be in a position where you might be in contact with one or maybe a few of the next big writers coming out of this country, right?
Yeah. I'm really excited. You see the news and can't ignore that it's a tough world out there. I'm hoping that when they're thinking issues to take 150 years in the future, they're not just thinking of the serious ones.
It's a great exercise to let your imagination run free without worrying. - Basil Sylvester
If you're in middle school and you're into baseball, what's baseball going to look 150 years in the future? I want them to have fun with it. I don't want you to write something that you think is going to have people take you seriously by writing, you know about a serious topic or writing something that you think me and and the judges are going to respond to. I want you to think about things that you're interested in. I would encourage students to get creative with it.
Now you mentioned earlier in this conversation that when you were younger you'd written a bunch of first pages that you didn't finish. What did you determine was the most important part of a first page and why is that such an important thing to focus on?
Part of it is the the excitement and the sort of promise. There's so much potential and that's what excites me. I wrote a bunch of first pages that then led me to other ideas, which is partly why I kept writing first pages.
It's a great exercise to let your imagination run free without worrying about, 'Oh well if I write this then I have to follow it up with this and then this has to happen.' You can just completely blue sky it. There's just something exciting about that that I resonated with.
Were you always comfortable with sharing your writing with other people? I'm just thinking about the kids will be hearing this and what advice you may have for them?
I would encourage you to find someone who takes your writing seriously. It could be a friend or someone at school or at an extracurricular. Find someone who takes your writing and your creativity seriously.
Find someone who takes your writing and your creativity seriously. - Basil Sylvester
It's difficult to open up about your writing. For most people, writing is a solitary activity so it can be hard to open up. Which is also why I encourage kids to read their writing out loud. This helps for a lot of reasons. One is it helps you hear what it sounds like and how it's going to come across to a reader.
But it also requires a little bit of putting that cringe factor aside of hearing your own writing read out loud. So even reading it out loud to yourself is a good way to work through that a little bit.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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