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Welcome back for Round Two of Super Challenge TEN!
Well, you survived. That negative feedback you broke your heart over didn’t knock you out of the competition. You’ve got your group assignment, you’ve stocked up on caffeine, and you’re ready for the next round.
Round two will combine two prompts again, but this time you’ll be working with an image and an event.
- The event does not need to be the plot or setting of the story. It could take place before the story starts, even, as long as you can make that work.
- The image prompt does not need to be the plot of your story. It could provide a character in the story, something that happens, or a setting, or even a memory that a character has. Do not include your prompt image in your submission. You’re not off the hook for descriptions, though: a reader who sees the picture after completing your story should be able to immediately identify that moment in the story.
- Both prompts should be important enough to your story that the plot could not happen in their absence. That is, if your event is “a robbery” you could write a story about burglars breaking into a house, a detective investigating the scene of a crime, or even Batman having a flashback to his parents getting mugged. If, however, your main character walks past a mugging in an alley on his way to a wedding and the mugging exists only to establish that you are in New York City, that is probably not going to be integral to the plot as there are a thousand other ways you could have established that.
There are no genre or setting restrictions. If you feel your work merits a content warning, a clearly worded content warning on the title page will not count toward your word total.
Now that that’s cleared up, let’s get to the assignments:
Group 1
IMAGE:
EVENT: The Apocalypse
The apocalypse can be real, mythical or figurative, but it must be absolutely catastrophic not just for a few people but for whatever world they are on. Feel free to draw from any mythos you prefer or even to combine them. It could be as small as a nuclear war or as big as the heat death of the universe.
Group 2
IMAGE:
EVENT: A battle
The battle should be a physical altercation intended to resolve a conflict, although it does not need to be a large-scale one. It can be person-to-person or fought with machines, as small as a schoolyard scuffle or as grandiose as large starships firing laser cannons, but there should be physical danger to the participants regardless of scale.
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.
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! Um, also you can disqualify yourself by revealing information to our judging team if you use the other addresses. So please don’t, we want you to make it through this round too!
You’ll receive your feedback on October 24, and we’ll announce who’s moving on to the next round that day at noon US Eastern Time.
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.
