Fanfare, please!
Fun fact: the word “fanfare” comes from… well, nobody can really seem to pin it down. It shares common phonemes with French fanfarer and fanfaron, as well as Arabic farfar. Overall, it’s a sort of onomatopoeia that ends up meaning “make a joyful sort of flourishing chatter, but, like, could you do it with an instrument?”
I go down word holes like that a lot when I’m writing, but our Super Challenge writers won’t have time to, because starting right now they have 48 hours to complete a prompted work of creative nonfiction for Round One of the 5th YeahWrite Super Challenge.
This round is for personal essays: the mostly-true stories of your life. This round you’ll be writing within the framework of an assigned subject. Make sure that you center the subject, although the entire essay doesn’t have to be about the subject. For example, if the subject were horses, you could write about your first horse, about how much you wanted a horse, about a plastic toy horse, or about your summer camp experience in the Rockies. What you can’t do is write about a road trip your family took and casually mention that you drove past a horse in Nebraska along the way.
Writers, you should have received an email within the past 24 hours letting you know which group you’re assigned to; hit us up at superchallenge@yeahwrite.me if you didn’t get that already. REMINDER: please only use the superchallenge@yeahwrite.me email to contact us about super challenge questions. With summer hard on us here in the USA, we’ve got several editors on vacation and we want to make sure your questions get answered on time and with your anonymity safely preserved. The only way to do that is…you guessed it.
Now that that’s cleared up, let’s get to the topic assignments.
Group 1
A phrase that gets stuck in your head.
This might mean a musical phrase (whatever you do, don’t start singing My Sharona right now), an unforgettable sentence in a book, or a piece of advice you once heard and can’t unhear. The only guideline here is that it must be a specific, identifiable phrase, not a general idea. If you’ve read Stephen King’s Bag of Bones you’ll recognize “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” even if you’ve never read DuMaurier’s Rebecca. For a more contemporary example, Rob Paravonian’s Pachelbel Rant is still one of the finest bits of musical standup out there.
Group 2
Something you remembered wrong
This could be as simple as a shopping list item or birthday, or as complex as a childhood memory your mother insists never happened. Like Group 1, you’ll need to make your prompt identifiable; that is, probably (although not absolutely) you’ll want to give the correct version as well. Remember that your prompt must be integral to the story you’re telling; that is, your Miracle Whip instead of Best Foods list item shouldn’t be an afterthought or one more item in the list of wrongs a spouse has done you, but it could be the catalyst for a divorce.
Wait, wait, there’s more!
Don’t post your story anywhere on the Internet until after our judges are done and you get your feedback! But if you want to talk up the competition or live-tweet your writing process, use the hashtag #YWsuper. Just remember not to include identifying details about which story is yours!
Your essays are due Sunday at 10pm US Eastern Time. Remember to check the rules for formatting, including all those fiddly details like title page, font, and filename. Don’t get disqualified on a technicality! We know it seems really useless at times, but all those rules have a purpose, from helping get your file where it needs to be to making sure you’re read anonymously and fairly.
Speaking of rules – did you find the typo in your group assignment email yet? That’s right. You didn’t miss a round. The email sending in your essay should have the subject line “YeahWrite Super Challenge Round 1 Group __ submission.” (Fill in the __ with your group number, but it really is Round One and not Round Two yet. Sorry!)
If you feel your work merits a content warning, please go ahead and add a (meaningful! not vague!) content warning to your title page. We don’t want to limit what you write about, but we do want to make sure everyone has the best time they can writing and reading, including our guest judges.
Email your questions to superchallenge@yeahwrite.me—we will not be reviewing other email addresses or social media for your questions over the weekend and we want to make sure you get the answers you need!
We hope you have as much fun with the prompts as we had picking them out. Good luck, and good writing!
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
onomAtopoeia… This is the second time that you are misspelling the word, and I am learning them these days. Count me in the next challenge!