Round One Closes in:
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April showers bring May…
Allergies. Also flowers, I guess. I had no idea until I started wearing masks and not getting sick how many of my seasonal colds were exacerbated by having moved away and back and given up any tolerance at all I had for my local pollen. Anyway, as I huddle down in nests of tissue and antihistamine, I’m excited to see what hypoallergenic worlds will tempt our writers this weekend! (And if you were at our birthday party, you’ll remember my best advice: READ THE #^$%!^% DIRECTIONS, PLEASE, DON’T BREAK MY HEART AND YOURS.)
I also hope you’re as excited as we are about our FINAL PRIZE AMOUNTS:
First place: $350
Second place: $225
Third place: $125
Now that the best part is over, let’s talk about the good stuff: prompts. You should already have received your email with your group assignment, but before you check your number again and dive in, let’s take a quick look at how to handle prompts in general, since after a whole year of pandemic everyone’s a little scattered.
This round you’ll be writing a story with two prompts. In order to get the highest scores from our judges, both prompts will need to be integral to the story, so let’s take a minute to talk about what “integral” means. (Some of you will have read this or something like it already. You know what? You still shouldn’t skip it. It’s a good reminder.)
First of all, here’s a long, unpacked version of what I’m about to say, and it’s worth a read if you’ve never seen it. Second: integral means that if the prompt were changed, the story would necessarily change.
One friend calls it “the banana test.” Could you replace the prompt with a banana without changing the story? Then it wasn’t integral. So if your prompt was “picking up a coin” you might write a story where the main character finds bus fare to a magical place. If they picked up a banana, that would change the whole story, right? But if you were writing a story about a character riding a bus and they found a coin under their seat and put it in their purse and it never showed up in the story again, what would change if they found a banana instead? Nothing. One word. Meh. That’s the difference between an integrated and not-integrated prompt.
Now, the whole story doesn’t have to revolve around the prompt: in the magic bus fare story, the plot is about going to a new place and maybe what the character finds out about themself there, right? And it doesn’t have to be super innovative. Using a coin to buy a bus fare isn’t unusual at all. But you’re going to tell your story in the way only you can tell stories. That’s what makes it unique, not necessarily the plot or the characters. Don’t worry too much about coming up with a unique take on the prompts or pushing the limits of what the prompt might mean. Worry about telling a good story, the way you tell it, edited well and with the prompts integrated.
Now that that’s cleared up, let’s talk a little more about these prompts, specifically.
For this round, you’ll have two prompts: an image and an object.
Image prompt: The image prompt is NOT the plot of your story. It must, however, be the setting of at least one scene in your story. You don’t need to describe every detail of the image prompt when setting your scene, but you should give enough detail that someone who has never seen the image could produce a reasonable sketch resembling the scene based only on your description. Feel free to add reasonable additions to the photo – fish to a river, a carving on a tree – but do not make it an entirely different scene by adding, say, a city to a barren desert image.
Object prompt: We’ll do our best to describe the object, but this is a pretty flexible prompt – within limits. So if your object is “bread” then you might have leavened or unleavened bread, crackers, etc. depending on the description, but we might also carefully point out that we do not want you to use the definition of bread that’s slang for money.
Good news: This year we’ve been running a free workshop called Navigating Prompts, and both of these prompt styles are addressed in the series. If you’re at sea with either of the prompts you’ve been given, why not check out the post written by the people who wrote your prompt? The two prompt styles you’ll be working with this weekend are covered in Setting prompts – images and Object prompts.
As always, if you need clarification on a prompt, don’t contact our general email! That means don’t use the contact form, don’t email or DM the editor you’ve talked to personally, just use superchallenge@yeahwrite.me. You can also get in touch with us using the Super Challenge channel on our Discord server. Please don’t use any of the other channels, as our judges are on the server and may accidentally see your post. We don’t let the judges into the Super Challenge channels, though, so you should feel free to discuss the prompts, ask for beta readers and editors, and chat about your story ideas in there.
Ready for your prompts? Let’s get to it.
(A quick note about our prompts. Yes, all the object prompts are the same this time. Don’t panic! You have the same object prompt and a different picture prompt compared to your friend in that other group. We hope you have fun comparing your options!)
Group One
Your image prompt is:
[Image description: A two-story rustic European cabin, with gabled and half-round windows peeking out of its shingled roof. There is a stone chimney and the walls appear to be made of half-hewn logs. The cabin sits in a snowy unlevel field, surrounded by mountains with coniferous forests. Smoke is coming out of the chimney, and the sun is shining through fog or light snow.]
Your object prompt is: a single glove.
This glove cannot at any time in the story have a mate. It can be any type of glove, from nitrile to fur-lined to gauntlet to spacesuit. It must, however, be a glove: designed to be worn on a hand and with separate fingers. It must be integral to the plot of your story.
Group Two
Your image prompt is:
[Image description: A red-tinted wooden fence with three rails divides the picture from lower left to upper right (the vanishing point of the picture’s perspective would be offscreen to the right). To the right of the fence is a grassy area that appears to have been mown but not recently, with small white blossoms in it. To the left of the fence is a garden area containing several species of flowers like sweet peas and hollyhocks as well as plants sometimes considered weeds such as teasel and milkweed. There are trees in the garden area and it looks tended but overgrown. All of the flowers are some shade of pink.]
Your object prompt is: a single glove.
This glove cannot at any time in the story have a mate. It can be any type of glove, from nitrile to fur-lined to gauntlet to spacesuit. It must, however, be a glove: designed to be worn on a hand and with separate fingers. It must be integral to the plot of your story.
Group Three
Your image prompt is:
[Image description: There are three planes of distance in this picture. In the near foreground, there is uneven ground covered in tall grass which has gone to seed. In the background, there is a skyline with many skyscrapers of various heights, and no shorter buildings visible. In the far distance, the sun is shining through and reflecting on many small high clouds, so many as not to let any sky show through. The overall color of the picture is a light yellow-brown.]
Your object prompt is: a single glove.
This glove cannot at any time in the story have a mate. It can be any type of glove, from nitrile to fur-lined to gauntlet to spacesuit. It must, however, be a glove: designed to be worn on a hand and with separate fingers. It must be integral to the plot of your story.
Group Four
Your image prompt is:
[Image description: An in-color but sepia-toned photo of bare dried deep mud, possibly volcanic or from flooding, around the base of a forest of short charred tree trunks. The trunks have few or no branches, and twist as they go upward. In the background, the sun shines through hazy clouds over an indistinct low mountain range.]
Your object prompt is: a single glove.
This glove cannot at any time in the story have a mate. It can be any type of glove, from nitrile to fur-lined to gauntlet to spacesuit. It must, however, be a glove: designed to be worn on a hand and with separate fingers. It must be integral to the plot of your story.
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! If you’re dying to chat about your WIP, our Discord Super Challenge channel is open! Just remember to STAY IN THERE so our judges don’t have even the slightest chance to see what you’re working on.
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.
Your title page should include: title, group number, 1-2 sentence summary, and any applicable content warning. Your title page info does not apply to your word count total.
Email your questions to superchallenge@yeahwrite.me or post your question in the private (judge-free) Super Challenge Discord channel—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! (Also, we don’t want you to accidentally email your questions to a judge; it’s happened! Don’t be that guy! We felt so bad for that guy!)
You’ll receive your feedback on Wednesday, June 2, 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.
