The Advocate

How it Began

Over the course of the last three years I have alongside my co-editor Youzhi Wang founded and led the schools literature club, The Advocate. We began in an attempt to promote literary talent in the school, as we observed that there was currently very little in the school to do this besides a few reading related events at the library. We wanted to encourage the creation, and the appreciation of literature in OSC as is already done with music, art and theater. When we first started this group our plan was to gather and digitally publish works of literature from the school, with ideas of eventually attempting a print publication as well as a holding a literary competition. We were open to all types of poetry and prose pieces.

Initial  Projects

-Gathering Material

We initially planned on gathering works of literature requesting submissions and gathering written pieces from various teachers, however we quickly realized that this would not be efficient or effecting as it did not create any incentive for submissions. And so we launched our first competition, with the two categories of poetry and pose, with cash prizes of 5000, 2000 and 1000 for first second and third place. We publicized the competition with posters set up around the school, which also gave out regulations in size and swearing, as well as our gmail address for submissions. We also sent out messages to the individual homerooms encouraging submissions. All prize money was given by the school in support of our activity.

-Enthusiasm

Interest in the project was light at first, few in the school really new about us. But with our advertising efforts for the competition and the process of getting our first publication out, which was probably our most difficult publication, we eventually became an acknowledged part of the OSC community.

-Judging

We immediately ran into the problem of judging the submissions, we could not do it ourselves as we and others in the group also wanted to compete in the competition. As such we found outside judges, mostly various Sri Lankan authors, to judge and rank the pieces. Always a single judge per competition as it was difficult to get many more.

-Publication

Through time and experimentation we came to a rough system of taking the top ten competition winners and dividing their pieces across two separate publications, so we usually did about two publications per competition. We chose to do five per publication system to increase the chance that readers read and appreciate all the works, it was also meant to honor the works that while not award winning, were still strong contenders. I should note that besides the top three  competition winners, we would choose the other pieces based on our own judgement from the whole pool; the competition was only ever meant as a tool for us to gather material from and the magazine had the potential to include a lot more than just a ranking for the competitions.

-Editing

After the competition, once we had chosen the five for that edition, we would read through and edit the poems and prose pieces. Any correction we made to grammar or spelling, or liberties we needed to take for formatting were always run by the authors first so as to not overall effect the impact of the piece.

What Now?

With a track record of four competitions and counting we are now attempting to expand our activity to focus more broadly on encouraging the creation of literature. We are doing this by gradually introducing literature games and activities that result in at least small finished products within the group, gradually turning from just a magazine and competition to a club and activity. To see some of our later work you can visit our website at-

https://oscadvocate.weebly.com/publications.html

and to see our most recent releases where we are testing out a single weekly release model-

https://oscadvocate.weebly.com/