When we sat down to design the Super Challenge, we asked ourselves three questions: what makes a writing contest great, what do we enjoy doing, and what is hardly anyone else doing? We came up with our prompts because they make the kind of stories and challenges that we’d love to write for and that we weren’t finding anywhere else on the ‘net. And we give you your feedback before your results because there’s a difference in the way you hear and internalize feedback when it’s not directly tied to “this is why I advanced” (ignoring the negatives that you need to work on) or “that’s why I failed” (focusing on the negatives and having a hard time hearing the things you did well and should do more of).
That means you’ve had your feedback in hand for a little while, and you’re scrolling frantically past this paragraph to figure out if you’re one of the ten writers advancing to take on our brand new summary prompt in the final round. Don’t worry – I’ll also give you some tips and tricks here about how to handle a summary prompt so that you can warm up before Friday!
Once again, anything that went right in Round Two is entirely due to our admin team’s untiring work behind the scenes, and anything you hate is probably my fault.
Let’s see who’ll be taking on that, er, super challenge:
Congratulations to Our Advancing Writers
Last round saw some thrills, chills and spills, but it also saw some great writing. Let’s have a hand for the following writers, who will be advancing to the next round of the Super Challenge:
Nikki Bennett
Melony Boseley
Laura Duerr
Christina Grant
Michelle Hanley
Annmarie Lockhart
MM Schreier
Jaimie Smith-Windsor
Trish Tuthill
Gail Webber
Let’s Talk About That Final Round
The final round of Super Challenge 6 is a little bit of a departure from the usual flash fiction prompt. Instead of telling you what to put in your story, we’ll tell you what the story is and you’ll decide what to put in. Since this might not be a style you’ve encountered before, we’ve decided to give you a behind the scenes peek at what we’re telling our judges. One of the judging standards for this round will be that the summary on the title page (the summary we’re giving you) must accurately describe the story told.
When we first started batting this idea around in the dark corners of the entirely imaginary YeahWrite offices, a couple folks expressed some concern that they wouldn’t begin to know how to do that without a sample. You can thank them for what’s about to follow:
Let’s unpack a sample summary together, and talk about what kind of stories would be accurately described by it, and what elements would be out of bounds.
Abandoned by their family, the protagonist must use their wits to survive until they can be reunited with their loved one(s)
To unpack a prompt like this, you’ll need to get pedantic. Let’s take a look at the big macro stuff first, though.
What characters do you need for this prompt? Well, you’ll need a protagonist, and the protagonist’s family, which consists of “loved one(s).” If you look up “family” you’ll see several definitions, not all of which require shared DNA. You’ve also probably already noted that the summary structure doesn’t set a number of family members that must exist. This means that you can use family to mean one or more blood relations, or one or more other loved ones as long as you establish that they consider themselves “family” of the protagonist.
There aren’t any clues to the setting or the genre (no cue words like “mysterious” or “future” nor any descriptions of location).
So that leaves us to break down the plot. Let’s go bit by bit.
- Abandoned by their family. What does that mean? it means the family, not the protagonist, did the abandoning. And “abandon” means leave, forsake, cast away, desert. So the family has to have actually left the protagonist, who can’t just feel sad that their family doesn’t like them.
- Next up is the protagonist must use their wits to survive. So there has to be a chance that the protagonist won’t survive. They have to be in actual danger of drowning, starving, being eaten by dinosaurs, falling into deep space, whatever. And to avoid this fate, they can’t use brute force. They can’t fight their way out of it, or find something lucky. They have to use their brain to come up with a solution to their dangerous dilemma. This might mean finding something that wouldn’t ordinarily work as a solution, but using it in an innovative way. It might mean coming up with a method of navigation using a needle and a cork, or combining chemicals, or outwitting the deadly cyberbear and luring it into a trap.
- Finally, the last piece of the puzzle is until they can be reunited with their loved one(s). That means the loved ones can’t be dead, or have decided never to come back. The reunion itself doesn’t necessarily have to be in the story, but the potential has to be there and it has to be plausibly anticipated by the protagonist.
So, considering there are no genre or setting restrictions, what famous stories might this summary describe?
One of our editors even suggested that this summary could loosely describe The Force Awakens. As you can see, we’ve got everything from animal protagonists looking for their human “family” to fairy tales, from modern (well it was modern at the time) comedy to science fiction.
But. And this is a big but. There are some stories that this summary just doesn’t describe. Annie, for example, looks like it fits within the summary but the story just doesn’t. While the movie begins with Annie hoping for a reunion with her birth family, it ends with her finding a home with someone else entirely, her birth parents having been dead the entire time. (Sorry for the spoilers, y’all.) And while Annie’s wits get her out of trouble, her survival is mostly not in question.
So as you unpack a summary, don’t just look for what has to be included; look for what can’t be included. If the summary says the entire story takes place on a raft, the raft can’t drift ashore. If the summary says the protagonist can’t find something, don’t include a scene where they find it. How would that look? While protagonist is looking for their keys, they find something else entirely and it changes the way they perceive love.
So there you have it. If you want to practice unpacking summaries, this writing prompt site has quite a few summaries or summary-adjacent prompts for you to hone your skills on. Good luck, and we’ll see you Friday night!
Wait, wait, there’s more!
Writers, if you don’t have your feedback, please send us an email at superchallenge@yeahwrite.me, ’cause that email should have reached you about twelve hours ago.
Now that this round of the competition is over, you’re free to post your work anywhere on the Internet you like, or take our judges’ suggestions and rework your submission to send on to other venues. We’ve even got a special Super Challenge grid to link your post to if you put it on your own blog or page, to make it easier to share. Later Super Challenge writers will thank you for the example!
Loading InLinkz ...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.
