My mom suggested I submit a chapter for the annual Province Serial Thriller writing competition. I have been trying to motivate myself to do some creative writing soon, so this was a great opportunity. A clear motive and a deadline, easy peasy – or so I thought. Turns out being creative is tough business!

A total of 9 chapters will make up the series – the first and last by novelist Daniel Kalla, and chapters 2-8 submitted by aspiring writers and detectives to a panel of judges, who choose the most coherent and interesting one for publication in the newspaper. We saw Chapter 5 this past Sunday…and writers, you have until Wednesday at 9am to submit Chapter 6 for consideration.

I went through about 5 pages of notes to try and get the story straight after reading Chapters 1-5, thinking the next events would magically become clear to me. I guess concocting a clever plot is not my forte…my biggest frustration was knowing I couldn’t finish the story. I wanted to have all the answers laid out right away. But this limitation actually turned out to be my saving grace – it forced me to embrace the challenge of writing in the moment, letting the direction pave its own way. Like life, we don’t ever really know how the end will come or what it will look like. But we write and live on anyway, don’t we?