<p>IP – You have extraordinarily idiosyncratic definitions. Winning prizes in a national competition for high school students, even one as broad as Intel or Siemens, is not really “exceptional” in my book, because every year there are a bunch of people who do it. (And all of them get good grades in school.) An Oscar nomination, on the other hand, or an actual professional career . . . that’s exceptional. (I’ll admit that I violated this in one of my examples, but it was because I knew the kid was considered an exceptional composer, and I heard his work performed. And because that, plus the unicycle act, plus the outdoorsman/Deep Springs stuff was too good to pass up.)</p>
<p>At the other end of the spectrum, “good” hardly requires a national ranking, since outside of some (not all) sports there ARE no meaningful national rankings, and even where there are national rankings, they don’t meaningfully comprise more than a few dozen people, and far more than a few dozen people can be good at something.</p>
<p>The student in my son’s class with the best college admission performance – i.e., he was admitted everywhere he applied, which consisted of Harvard and Stanford – was an Asian student with no national competitions, no ranking anywhere (outside his high school class, where he was 7th), and hardly any ECs (varsity distance runner, but mediocre, unrecruitable times, Japanese school on Saturdays). What he was, was the person all of his classmates considered the smartest, most intellectual, and most intellectually curious person they knew.</p>
<p>The other thing I wanted to add was that your list of ECs that would impress you was completely unrealistic. Anyone can publish anything on a vanity basis, all it takes is money, so that doesn’t count (although if it’s good it sure counts). Very, very few teens publish books with real publishers, and most of them are Disney Channel stars or other celebrity kids whose brands are being slapped on ghostwritten material, or children so closely related to high-ranking figures in the industry that it is the equivalent of vanity publishing. </p>
<p>There was a well-known situation six or seven years ago where a high school student had her novel purchased in a publishers’ bidding war, and she got accepted to Harvard. It later emerged that large chunks of the book had been plagiarized, and the whole thing had been engineered by an admissions counselor. (We won’t discuss her ethnicity.) There may be 3-4 high school students per decade who have books they have actually written published by actual publishers, and that IS impressive, but Harvard isn’t holding its breath waiting for them to apply.</p>
<p>And those articles – that kind of research requires a significant budget, and I don’t know of any sources that would fund that for a teenager. (Again, vanity publishing doesn’t count. Neither does making stuff up. Unless, in either case, it’s really good.) And, just like musicians and dancers, writers don’t simply appear fully formed. There’s a lot of apprenticeship involved, and unless a story can best be written by a teenager, editors are going to trust writers with more experience, whom they know better. (Cameron Crowe was an exception, but (a) he lied about his age initially, and (b) he never bothered going to college.) A cousin of mine has an exceptional career in journalism going now, but getting his first story accepted ten years ago, post-college, without having a big college journalism background, required a year of self-financed travel, research, and writing full time. That’s tough for high school students to pull off.</p>
<p>Realistically, there are many paths to follow for teens who want to write nonfiction. Lots of local newspapers and “shoppers” welcome contributions from just about anyone who is competent, and will give feedback, too. Many teens publish blogs and 'zines that actually get read. There are “national publications” that take content from high school students (and sell copies back to them), including one high school sports magazine I have seen. One high school kid I know got an internship with the sports department of a local daily, and did well enough to be hired as a consultant on a regular basis to produce stats boxes for their feature and background articles. (Which did look good on her college application, I’m sure.)</p>
<p>Remember, unlike every other activity, with writing admissions personnel get to read stuff themselves, and they feel competent to judge it. If you are a really good writer, you are a really good writer in the two essays you write for them, and they don’t actually care much about the hundreds of other things you have written that are also fine. If you can’t do a good job on the essays, why should they read something else?</p>
<p>As for writing education – at the first-cut level, there is a lot less difference between fiction writing and non-fiction than you might think. In fiction, you supposedly make up the ideas, but more often you find them in reality and shape them a bit to your story. In non-fiction, you find ideas in reality and shape them a bit to your story. Fifty thousand workshops, community college courses, writing groups, governor’s schools, and summer programs (at Iowa, of course, and just about everywhere else) will help a kid do that.</p>