Writing takes up big part of 10-year-old’s free time

Olivia Heisey’s story, “The Elk Skin Map,” reads more like the start of a novel than the short story that won her second place in the Western Writers of America contest in the fourth- through sixth-grade category. No surprise, since the 10-year-old said that the hardest part of the competition was keeping the story short. Her mother, Anna, who home-schools Olivia, told her daughter not to worry about the 750-word count limit and just tell the story.

“I stopped her at around 1,100 words,” Anna Heisey said.

Writing the Western-theme story came easily to Olivia who reads and enjoys tales of Lewis and Clark. Her piece was a fictionalized account of their meeting with the Nez Perce Indians and looking for a map to the ocean.

Olivia and the other winners received awards at a luncheon at the Western Writers of America 2005 convention in Spokane on June 17. The organization was founded in 1953 to promote literature of the American West and bestow awards for writing. Students in grades four through 12 from the Idaho Panhandle and Eastern Washington were judged in the youth competition on organization, content, style and convention.

Olivia’s prize included a backpack of writer’s tools: a journal, pens, pencils, books about writing, and a $30 check. Winners received a copy of a CD including all of the prize-wining stories narrated by a professional reader.

Olivia listens to that while cleaning her room as she thinks about writing other stories. She found that writing serves several practical uses in her life. To occupy the younger children at her mother’s Bible study group, Olivia creates a list of intriguing titles and lets kids choose which they’d like her to elaborate into a plot.

For Mother’s Day she took facts and bent them into fiction with a story written about her grandmother. She printed it on her computer, put punch holes through the cover, and bound the book with yarn for a present.

“I like to give my stories away as a gift,” she said.

The story surprised her grandmother and was mostly factual, except for the part about getting a kitten to take home.

“My mother was touched, and she read it to everyone at our big Mother’s Day celebration,” Anna said.

With so many stories kicking around in Olivia’s head, her mother decided to teach her to keep file folders on the computer to keep track of them. Olivia recited 20 or more potential titles to her mother one day.

“Sometimes I think of a really good story that I don’t want to forget so I just start the beginning of it,” she said.

Olivia writes after school, to kill boredom, or to pass time on car trips. For the last three years writing has occupied much of her free time, she said. She lives in Coeur d’Alene with her mother and father, Darryl, and brother, Josh, 7. Her mother says she’s a good student except for one thing.

“It’s like pulling teeth to get her to write for school,” Anna said.

Olivia prefers the freedom of choosing her own topics with no one checking on her spelling. Her creative talents were rewarded in another contest last year for an advertisement she designed for Daanen’s Deli in Hayden Lake. She likes to draw and enters needlework in the county fair.

In the future she’d like to be a dog trainer or a veterinarian.

“I also want to be a author,” she said. “It’s fun. You get to use your imagination.”