Letter from the Editors

Dear reader,

Welcome to our fourth issue of The Student Record! Admittedly, our last issue that came out at the beginning of the school year had a quiet release, but this time we hope get as many readers as possible to see all the hard work both the writing and design teams did. Having a design team is particularly helpful for more… physical things. Perhaps even for a physical copy of the best-written articles we’ve had. To hopefully be sold next year. We’ll just leave it at that.

Creative Writing Challenge

This new issue accompanies multiple new additions, and the most significant one is the Creative Writing Challenge that ran from October to November. Many of you may have seen this challenge on the Bulletin, and even more of you took part in it! The challenge was to write a piece of work following 13 prompts grouped into scenarios, dialogues, and extras, which can be seen at the bottom of this letter. Every single person who submitted an entry is featured on the Spotlight section (which you can go to at the top of the page), but as this is a challenge, Vianca and I have chosen three winners who have really pushed the boundaries of imagination: congratulations to Minha, Diana, and Tonhom from Year 8 for impressing us! Special thanks to Ms. Ray who pushed this challenge with the younger years, resulting in a massive, massive Word Document of 33,000 words.

Fun Page

As per tradition, we also have our Fun Page filled with fun puzzles to do if you’re bored. This issue, we have a challenging crossword created by Bhadra from Year 12- see if you can solve it for house points!

New Leadership Team

Say hello to the new leadership team! You can see each member as well as a short summary of their role.

Vianca and I have been working together on The Student Record for over a year now, and we both wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support. This club would not exist without you. Happy reading, and we’ll see you next time for Issue 5!

Prompts from the Creative Writing Challenge:

Scenarios 

1. You are the inventor of a popular video game. One day, the main character from your game knocks on your front door.

2. A vampire has worked at the local 7-11 for the past five decades. No one has the heart to call the vampire out or slay them. A little because they're such a good employee, mostly because they think they're doing such a good job hiding the vampirism when they're really not.

3. When you were sent to Hell, you expected fire, brimstone, and hordes of demons. But upon your arrival, you found nothing but a barren wasteland and a single lonely imp.

4. At the airport, a stranger offers your character money to carry a mysterious package onto the plane. The stranger assures your character that it's nothing illegal and points out that it has already been through the security check. Your character has serious doubts, but needs the money, and therefore agrees…

5. You walk into a room to find that the only way to escape is by writing a name of a real person on a piece of paper. This will kill that person.

Dialogue Prompts 

1. “You always smile like you’re about to cry.”

2. “Look, I may be desperate, but i’m not that desperate.”

3. “Being stranded out here has been nice and all, but I haven’t taken a shower in a week and I kind of need one.”

4. “How much longer are you going to stand out there? It’s raining. You’re gonna catch a cold.”

5. “Everything is temporary; this was merely one of those things.”

Extras

1. Practice your poetic imagery: overwrite a description of a character's breakfast routine.

2. Start and end your work with exactly the same sentence.

3. Write a story that begins in the middle of the plot's action (en media res).