Join the stampede to 2024 writing contests

 Nothing enforces New Year's resolutions like competition. And time crunches. For some incentives to get those writing muscles back in shape -- or keep them strong -- check out this list of 2024 contests and their deadlines. 

Now - January 15: Modern Muse for Writers First Five Pages Contest seeks entries from all literary genres. Free. Submit your first five pages (up to 1,500 words). Winners receive developmental critiques and line edits of their first chapter, up to 15 pages. See the site for details.

Now - January 15: Writer's Digest Short Short Story Competition seeks stories of not more than 1,500 words. This is an extended deadline -- for this contest only, ignore the deadline posted on the site. Winners receive cash prizes and publication. Fee: $30 for first entry, $25 for each additional entry. See the site for details.

Now - January 28: AutoCrit's "Start Strong Challenge" opens, using prompts from its community of writers. Finalist entries will be read live on YouTube, with the audience determining the winner. Word limit: 1,000. There's no fee for the contest, but you have to pay to play by joining the AutoCrit community. Luckily, it's offering discounted subscriptions! See the site for details and those all-important prompts.

Now - February 1: The First Line magazine's contest requires contestants to open their work with the provided first line, currently: "Mr. Morton needed a new pair of shoes," although non-fiction essay entries may deal instead with writers' favorite opening lines from literary works. Free. The contest repeats quarterly with new opening lines. Winners receive publication and cash awards. See site for details.

Now - February 29: The Crime Writers' Association offers two contests for newbie writers: The Margery Allingham Short Mystery Competition and The CWA Debut Dagger. Entry fee is £18 for the Margery Allingham contest, £42 for the Debut Dagger. See the site for details. 

Now - March 1: Speak Your Truth contest (site). This one's just for Dallas, Texas, residents/students ages 15-20. Apply to become the Youth Poet Laureate of Dallas for 2024-2025. Winner receives a $1,000 scholarship. See the site for youth poet duties. Email libyouthservices@dallascityhall.com for more information.

Image by Brigitte Werner for Pixabay

Nowish - mid-March: ArmadilloCon, Texas' feisty sci-fi/fantasy/horror convention returns with a flash fiction contest. No fee but contests must be the convention's writing students from 2017-2024. (Hint: if you're thinking of joining for the full convention in August, now's the time!) This year, contests will be able to provide input for themes. This information just hit my inbox, with the 2024 website not yet online. Contact writersworkshop@armadillcon.org for information. I'll also update this site as soon as possible.

Now - May 1: ThrillerFest's Best First Sentence contest is looking for the to-die-for opening of your work of mystery or suspense. This is also pay to play -- entrants must be members of the ITW (International Thriller Writers) or registered for ThrillerFest XIX 2024. See the Best First Sentence site for details.

Now - June 30: One of my favorite goofy writing contests is the annual Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, commemorating the 19th century novelist infamous for the opening line: "It was a dark and stormy night. . ." Each entry must consist of a single, unpublished sentence of any length, although the authorities recommend (i.e. plead) for it not to exceed 50-60 words. The winner will receive a certificate and bragging rights. Free. See the site for details and hilarious previous winning entries.

Now - October 1: If every story must have a first line, it must also have a last one. Check out The Last Line magazine (sister journal to The First Line) for a contest with an ending prompt. For 2024, that prompt is, "I didn't want to admit it, but Lee was usually right." See site for details. Winners receive cash and publication.

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Want more contests? Of course, you do! See the likes of Poets & Writers, Reedsy, Erica Verrillo's month's lists, New Pages, The Submissions Grinder, and Writers of the Future for inspirations!

Writing like a Martian, the Bradbury way

While dithering recently over whether to register for the Roanoke Writers Conference, I checked the list of presenters. There were some fine ones, writers and instructors I already knew and appreciated. And then there was Sam Weller, the authorized biographer of Ray Bradbury. 

Sam Weller

I spent my middle school and high school years devouring everything my small-town school libraries contained of Ray Bradbury writings, and still check for newer works. (Bradbury died in 2012, long past my middle school years.) So, yes, I pulled out my credit card and signed up for Roanoke, to learn from a teacher who had learned from Bradbury.

The prolific Bradbury is perhaps most famous for his volume of linked short stories, The Martian Chronicles. Or should that be, most famous for Fahrenheit 451? Or The Illustrated Man, or -- well too many other books and stories to name. (Bradbury’s official site mentions hundreds of short stories, nearly fifty books, as well as poems, essays, screen plays, teleplays, operas. If you can name it, Bradbury wrote it.)

I’ll provide a sampling of the tips Weller learned from his 12 years of association with Bradbury. But what most struck me from Weller’s two-hour creative writing class (which included some of Bradbury’s own writing prompts) was Bradbury’s dedication to his craft. Unable to afford college after he graduated from high school during the Great Depression, Bradbury became an autodidact, haunting the public library. He would later declare, Weller said, that “the public library is the only university that matters.” It’s a statement still worth considering even in these days of the Internet. 

image: wikipedia

Bradbury’s method of teaching himself to write fiction was simple but grueling: write one story every week for a year, deciding that it couldn’t be possible to write 52 bad stories. In the first year of this experiment, he sold three stories. The next year six, then nine. Five years after finishing high school, he became a fulltime writer.

(Considering how much emphasis current writing classes put on beginnings – although I’ll have more to say about that in a later post – one of the advantages of short story writing, Weller said, is that “you learn how to end things.”)

I may not be able to keep up the story-a-week schedule with NaNoWriMo looming tomorrow, but Bradbury’s suggestions resonate for any writing form:

1)     Find a community of writers (Lucky us – NaNoWriMo brings out writing groups like earthworms after a thunderstorm.)

2)     Write from a place of emotional truth – your truth (It’s not writing what you know, Weller said, it’s writing what you’ve felt.)

3)     Stay immersed in art – read books, poems, essays, listen to music, watch movies, go to the theater, to museums – what Bradbury called “stuffing your mind”

4)     Develop a routine – “all you really need is two hours a day”

5)     Write about your interests and passions, write about things you think are cool. Write about what you love. “Can you imagine,” Bradbury said, “if I’d lost my childhood fascinations with Mars?”

6)     Write for you – the first person you write for should be yourself

7)     Think beyond clichés and tropes

8)  Ignore discouragement 

9) Let your stories by written by your subconscious, write them quickly. ("Finish things! Try it! Stop being so damn precious!")

10) Generate lots of ideas until one comes along that won’t leave you alone

By now, aren't you wondering why an image of a pensive young woman illustrates this post?

Weller’s exercises for us at Roanoke are ones we can try in the coming NaNoWriMo, or all year round.  Edward Hopper’s 1927 painting “Automat” was one of those pieces of art that resonated with Bradbury (see #3 above). Bradbury favored pictures of solitary women, famously including Andrew Wyeth’s eerie “Christina’s World.” But choose any work of art that appeals to you as your own writing prompt.

A second prompt is to make a list of five or more things that interest you (see #5 above). “Don’t be afraid of being weird!” Weller urged us. “Embrace the weird!”

Bradbury also loved to make lists of nouns (file cabinet drawers full of lists, Weller said, all starting with the article “the.” For your final prompt, list five to 10 nouns, as diverse as possible. And yes, start each item on the list with “the”. 

(“If you don’t know where to start, just start describing the noun for a paragraph,” Weller said. “Then bring in characters to interact with the object. Immediately, a story will appear.”)

Mix and match prompts to taste, add a dash of weirdness, a heaping cup of determination, and see what magic happens.  

Wordcraft -- Every picture tells a story

A recent workshop at the Dallas Writer’s Garret included both University of Alabama professor Michael Martone and author Robin Hemley, who co-edited the short story anthology, Extreme Fiction. I wrote previously about Martone’s half of the workshop. This week, it’s Hemley’s turn.

For his portion of the workshop, Robin Hemley asks us to bring family pictures. Since Hemley is known for his book, Turning Life Into Fiction, I suspect we will use these tangible objects as writing prompts. And, well, he doesn’t say the picture had to be of our own families -- so I raid my father’s stash of World War II-era photos of families of New Guinea natives. Aren’t other people’s stories more open to interpretation than our own?

Hemley tells us not to show our treasure trove of objects to other members of the workshop. The prompt: To write a description of our actual picture, and a picture wholly imaginary. He challenges the group to determine which description is of the “real” picture, which one fake.

Strange to say, we often find descriptions of the imaginary pictures more compelling, more evocative than the real ones. Is this because the actual picture limit us too strongly to the realm of “it really happened this way”? Are we emotionally tongue-tied at describing things too close to our hearts? At any rate, the imaginary pictures often evoke more complex descriptions. After a few tries, the degree of detail becomes a clue to which is real, which unreal.

“What do you learn?” Hemley asks.

“That memory has a different lens,” a participant says.
Writing instructors often advise us to choose “telling” details for our descriptions. But, Hemley say, “the (telling) detail could be different for me than it is for you. . . There is the emotional memory, but even when you think you’re describing it, you’re still recreating it. . . We think that fictionalizing is a taint, but we can’t help fictionalizing.”

It’s a view science supports. An interview in the March 2013 issue of Discover magazine suggests that, far from being fixed, our brains revise memories every time we remember them. In fact, one participant is slightly embarrassed to see, after looking again at her “real” picture, that she didn’t remember what it showed. She remembering a picture of Disney character Goofy when in fact, it’s a picture of Yogi Bear.

But whether we’re writing fiction or nonfiction, how can we use these photographs to enrich our writing?

“It really works to frame memory in terms of a photograph,” Hemley says. “Consider creating a kind of tableau where you extract the memory within the photograph. Thinking about the photograph is a really poignant way to extract memories. It forces you into a
real world relationship with the memory, so you‘re able to rein habit the episode.”

Even in a fictionalized setting, imagining a scene as a photograph gives us an opportunity to visualize a setting and the characters within it. “If this were a photograph, what would it be?” Hemley asks.

Already, some participants frame their photographs, both real and imaginary, as before and after versions of the same scene. Hemley applauds this for “giving the reader a sense of ambiguity but also of history before this story,” but urges us to move beyond the scene within the photograph’s frame.

“I often think,” he says, “what are the secrets the characters have? Not only the secrets they keep from others, but the ones they keep from themselves?”

For more about Hemley’s work, see www.robinhemley.com/.

For Martone’s portion of the workshop, see “A new word for writing critiques” and “New critique technique, part II,” at this site.

For more about the Dallas Writer’s Garret, see www.writersgarret.org/.

(Next Monday -- Wordcraft looks at a book built from pictures, Mark Doty’s Lost Dallas.)

So good for you it's scary

I filled out the questionnaire yesterday while waiting in the doctor's office for my checkup.  You know, that questionnaire, the list of your diseases and unhealthy personal habits.  I got to the bottom of the sheet of paper and turned it over, looking in vain for the most important of questions for a writer's health -- are you writing regularly?  Well, are you?  Do you, like me, sometimes need an incentive to write?  Or do you perhaps need something to ponder while you wait, something to distract you this Halloween season while the phlebotomist -- a sanitized modern vampire disguised as a pleasant-faced young woman in pastel blue scrubs -- draws the last drop of blood from your body?  I suggest Judy Reeves's A Writer's Book of Days, a compilation of those, yes, dreaded and scary writing prompts.

image: Wikimedia commons

I've had an aversion to prompts for years, but in Reeves's case, the only scary part is how good they are.  Writing friend Robin Y. recommended this book to me and insisted we work on one together.  Then she set her cell phone timer for fifteen minutes.  The results amazed me.  Okay, lightning doesn't strike every time, but every time there's another page and a half in my notebook.  (Reeves urges you to write by hand, on paper -- love it!)  And besides the magically evocative prompts, she offers practical advice and gossipy tidbits about famous writers and their habits.  In honor of the season, I'm quoting an excerpt suggested by her September 10 prompt -- "a list of her hungers."

"She hungered for hunger, fearing satiation above all things.  To be satisfied, to rest, was death to her.  So she pushed away lover after lover, dissecting the faults of each, picking each to the bones.  So she yielded to the urge to leave here and go there, moving on before the terrible moment of consummation.  Her penultimate hunger was for money, the money to pursue the other hungers.  And the only way to amass the money she needed, the only way that wouldn't interfere with following those other hungers, she realized, playing with the thought until its horror receded, was to kill.  To kill the selfish people standing between her and the hungers she longed for.  So that, in the end, she hungered for blood."

A Writer's Book of Days is widely available in bookstores or through links on her website, http://www.judyreeveswriter.com/  Happy Halloween!