Yesterday I found out about a website that hosts regular writing competitions that they call writing battles, and I knew I had to sign up immediately. The concept is too cool. Every competition is centered around a deck of cards, where each card represents a particular genre, an object, a subject, a setting, or a character. Participants draw cards to form a prompt that they use to create a story, usually within a week. The competition is huge, with thousands of participants for every battle. The entry fees are pretty expensive at upwards of $20 or $30 but the structure is very fun and the competitions are run so regularly that it’s justified in my opinion. I signed up for this week’s competition that started yesterday, but you can still join if you’re quick right here:
The most interesting part centers around the ability to mulligan, or reroll the cards you get to make a new prompt. It’s a lot like poker in that if you throw a card away, you can’t get it back. Strategically selecting which cards to keep, and which to use your (extremely) limited number of mulligans on is almost as important as having solid writing skills. Right now I’m sitting on …
Genre: Comedy. For this competition, the genres are limited to drama, romance, rom-com, and comedy. I’m not too sure I can pull off a winning comedy, but I’m absolutely certain I can’t write a winning rom-com, and I only get to mulligan the genre card once. Genre cards, by the way, will always become other genre cards.
Character: Landlord. I think there’s some comedic potential here, but since I haven’t met many landlords, I was considering using one of my five remaining mulligans for this one.
Object: Sewing Needle. I think the needle has a lot of potential actually. I could be a physical object that a character uses, perhaps a tailor, or I could use a more metaphorical needle and thread that ties things together. Pairing this with comedy however might be more of a challenge. Poking someone with a needle is all I can think of, and it’s not particularly funny … I’ll consider using a mulligan for this one too, but I only have a week! I need to settle on a prompt soon so I have plenty of time to write a good story.
Some competitions have professional authors as judges, while some of the battles have a peer based review. The peer reviews are a neat idea, structured almost like a tournament, where each participant goes through several rounds in which they receive two stories to review against one another. With thousands of participants all working to review the stories, the feedback times are phenomenally quick. For all the problems of being reviewed by your peers brings up, finding a winner within a couple weeks when usually it would take months of painstaking review from a single judge is well worth it. In many ways, the structure is actually a fairer judgement of quality anyway, since your story will have many more chances (many more rounds, and many more eyes) to get some attention.
I read through several of the previous winning entries, and man are they something else. This might be the stiffest competition I’ve ever come across based on the quality of the stories I’ve seen. Every single one of them has been amazing, something I can’t say for any other competition or publication I’ve read. I’m really looking forward to seeing the results of this one I’m participating in, and there’s another one right around the corner in March too. I hope every body who reads this joins in because they can use all the support they can get!
Thank you for reading,
Benjamin Hawley
Dangerous Day Job 