Whiz Kid of the Week: Meredith Chen

Name: Meredith Chen 

Age: 17

School:

Accomplishment: Chen is one of 12 finalists in the high school short story contest at the , an annual all-day celebration of books, writers, and literary excellence on May 21 at . "Whiz Kid of the Week" will feature several of the Rockville finalists in the contest in the weeks leading up to the festival.

Her story is a piece of meta-fiction about a writer who enters the short story contest at the Gaithersburg Book Festival.

Chen explained the idea behind the story in an email to Rockville Patch: "In the beginning of the story, [the main character] sees herself as a critic. She sits in the back row of the audience and rips apart everyone else’s stories. Then she learns unexpectedly that she will have to read her own story behind the podium, and she begins to consider the event from the point of view of an author instead. I wrote the story thinking that if I became a finalist, it would be amusing to read a story at a book festival about reading a story at a book festival."

Key to Awesomeness: "I’ve always told myself stories," Chen writes. "At home, I subjected my beanie babies and model dinosaurs to epic battles, and at school I would often tell the same sorts of stories, only with pencils and scissors, which were more readily available in an academic setting.

"I sometimes wrote illustrated chapter books (with one or two pages in each chapter), but most of my stories were unfinished and lacking in ambition. I have always tended towards fantasy and science fiction, even though the particular short story that I entered into the GBF contest lacks fantastical elements.

"When I first began to write seriously, I was unable to find real-life friends who would criticize my writing. I showed my stories to friends and teachers, and the feedback I received was positive, yet generic. They were asking when I would be published, when I was only looking for ways to improve. I solved this problem by joining several online communities (www.teenagewriters.com and www.youngwritersonline.net), where I met strangers who would give me valuable feedback, in the form of line-by-line critiques.

"I also began to participate in National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.com), an event that forces you to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. Although I now have writing friends in real life (I’m a president of the Richard Montgomery Creative Writing Club), my online experiences have been immensely valuable in improving the quality of my writing. It was also a nice ego-boost to learn that perfect strangers could also be interested in my stories."

Of her writing process, Chen writes that "it’s up to each one of us to try out different methods until we hit upon the most effective one."

She found that outlining first worked best for her. "The important thing about an outline is that once you’ve written it, you’re not required to follow it," she writes. "I’ve also learned to always write the entire first draft before going back to edit anything. If I become too fixated on editing and rewriting, then I become the writer who loves to start novels but never finishes them. Of course, one cannot actually avoid the editing process. It’s laborious and takes ten times more in effort and resolve, but happily, a well-polished draft is less shy about showing its face in public."

Chen said that she credits Davina Smith, her creative writing teacher at Richard Montgomery, "for pushing me to bring my writing back to the pressures of the real world."

That included Chen's "personal end-of-term assignment" of submitting her novel to at least two literary agencies last year, "which required me to not only actually finish editing my novel, but also figure out how to write query letters."

This year, Smith required that the class submit a story to the GBF short story contest.

"I was having a lot of trouble with the writing prompts, until I realized I could make the opening sentence be the beginning of someone else’s story," Chen writes.

Chen also credits her parents for nurturing her writing. "Neither of them are huge fiction readers, but they continue to be supportive, when they could have nudged me down the science/mathematics/lawyer/doctor/accountant path, where the pay is stable, but the boredom (for me) is high," she writes.

She also credits George R. R. Martin—who she calls "the Master"—with stoking her interest in writing fantasy stories. 

"Game of Thrones," the television-adaptation of Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series premiered on Sunday on HBO.

"If not for him, I would have long ago abandoned the fantasy genre to its clichéd prophecies and teenage heroes with wavy blond hair," Chen writes. "[Martin] rose above the drudgery of Tolkien rip-offs and managed to create a sprawling, epic fantasy still rooted in the complexity of human relationships. His series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire,' has inspired me to continue in a newish tradition of building my worlds with moral ambiguity, grittiness and abject despair."