An Ongoing Impulse Buy

I've always had a knack for writing, so much so that I participated in a competitive creative writing program called Power of the Pen in middle school. Participants are given a prompt, then have 40 minutes to craft a story related to that prompt. I had a great time on that team in middle school, and all of my friends in high school were people I had met through the program. But my high school did not have a team, so I pretty much stopped writing creatively once I left middle school. I did plenty of academic writing, but I didn’t write any fiction or poetry like I did in Power of the Pen.

Fast forward eight years, and I have just graduated college in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I earned a degree in Russian language and literature, which probably wouldn’t have gotten me a job on its own, but my plans were to go to medical school anyway, so I didn’t really care. Luckily, I landed a job working as a research technician in the lab where I did my work-study as an undergraduate. My days were now occupied with mouse work, microscopy, and data analysis, and I usually spent the rest of my nights scrolling through Instagram because I was too tired after a regular work day to do much of anything else.

Enter Vocal.

I had seen their ad for the recent Little Black Book challenge sponsored by Moleskine a few times and hadn't given it much thought, except to convince myself that I shouldn't bother. A Vocal+ membership was required to submit an entry, throngs of people would be submitting for a chance to win the platform's biggest prize yet, and I hadn't done any creative writing in almost a decade. But I kept seeing the ad, and I caved. The chance at winning twenty grand was too enticing. I started writing a story in one of my empty journals, and spent hours researching a number of topics: causes of house fires, how insurance payouts work, and what is involved in publishing a book, just to name a few. My story was called Privileged, and it wasn't the best story I'd ever written, but I had a damn good time writing it.

I wasn't shocked when I didn't win, especially after seeing the sheer quantity of entries and the quality of the winning pieces. The first and third place entries, by Jess Sambuco and Laura Jeffrey, respectively, were both compassionately written from the perspective of characters with some form of mental illness. As a person with mental illness myself, I was moved by these stories and thoroughly enjoyed reading them. Both authors have also clearly mastered the art of showing and not telling in their writing, and I feel I have learned a lot about this skill just by studying their submissions.

Since I impulsively subscribed to Vocal+, I have spent much of my free time reading and writing submissions for their frequent challenges, and I am harkened back to my days in Power of the Pen. Vocal gives me prompts, but instead of just 40 minutes, I have several days or even weeks to craft a story. Middle school wasn't a great time in my life, as I’m sure most people understand, but the pure nostalgia I experience writing on Vocal is simply euphoric. The challenges are fun and even though I’ve always hoped to win, I’ve also loved reading the submissions that do take the prizes. They encourage me to just keep writing, and inspire me with new ideas. With a new challenge for Vocal+ members every week, I don't believe I'll regret this impulse buy anytime soon.