As Halloween approached, Francis Lewis hosted its second annual scary story contest for all grade levels.   Junior Daniel Seog won first place while sophomore Joshua Phoenix Carsula won second place in the competition.

“I feel like our English students don’t have enough of an opportunity for creative writing,” English teacher Ms. Kye said. “About four years ago I just thought, ‘oh it would be really cool to hear from students and give them an opportunity to be creative in their writing.’”

“I feel like if anything, it’s a positive impact for all students because it gives them an opportunity to express something in a written fashion,” Ms. Kye added.

Along with the creativity needed for this contest, there was a limit of 200 words or less.

“It’s been a little bit difficult because we have to limit the amount of words a student can use,” Ms. Kye said. “I think it’s really interesting because it’s actually difficult to make something scary in 200 words or less.”

Participating students also found the word limit to be a challenging factor in the story requirements.  

“There were these specific guidelines,” Seog said. “Initially, I was like, that’s easy enough, but then I looked at the instructions and it’s 200 words or less. If you’ve never written stories you probably don’t understand, but 200 words is not enough so you have to take a lot of creative routes to meet that.”

Carsula also found ways around these guidelines.

“I think word limits are always a challenge,” Carsula said. “With big word limits you’re kind of asking yourself how am I going to fit all that, but with a smaller word limit how am I going to condense my story.  When I wrote this one I looked up like ‘word for blah blah blah’ or ‘what’s a shorter way of saying this?’”

Seog had specific elements and techniques that he implemented into his story.

“I made sure my sentences were very short, I made sure it was more quality over quantity,” Seog said. “I used a lot of dialogue because dialogue is speech and dialogue can say so much about a character without having to write paragraphs and paragraphs.”

“You have to keep the anticipation,” Seog added.  “You have to always make it seem like there’s going to be something that none of the sentences should be conclusive, you should not have closure.”

Seog and Carsula found inspiration from different aspects of their lives. 

“Personally I haven’t been to a spooky forest but I’ve been to places where it’s very quiet and very eerie,” Carsula said.

“I used to go down rabbit holes on YouTube about 911 calls,” Seog said. “I noticed these 911 calls had so much emotion in them and they could really tell a story. I really drew inspiration from that, how powerful voice can be and how powerful phone communication can be.”