You made it!
Well, you’ve survived the first round of the last Super Challenge – and you hopefully didn’t develop an ulcer while waiting for these results. As usual, anything that went right this round is entirely due to our admin team’s untiring work behind the scenes, and anything you hate is probably my fault. Unless it’s your feedback—hating and loving your feedback is just kind of part of being a writer.
Speaking of feedback, whether you’re moving on or not, our judges were talking about some patterns they saw in the stories. Whether or not you received this as explicit feedback, we encourage you to take a look at your work and see if you’re one of the writers they might be thinking of. Especially if you’re moving on to the next round, or if you plan to rework and submit your Round One story elsewhere.
- Name your characters! Especially if they’re women, but name them all. Yes, there are exceptions: your POV character probably doesn’t know the name of the man in blue shoes who passes them on the way to the train. But they do know: their wife’s name; their mother’s name; their sister’s name; their secretary’s name; their own name. When you think about your friends, do you say “my one friend who I’ve known since high school” or do you say “Hitesh?”
- Think about how long things actually take. Sure, it feels like forever between when the lights go out and when you remember that your phone has a flashlight in it, but it’s probably more like fifteen seconds. It’s definitely not “several minutes.” (Think about how long the microwave takes to heat up your coffee. was it that long? it’s not minutes.)
- When you ARE naming your characters, the names tell readers a lot about the timeline. There aren’t a lot of Steves of school age right now: it’s hovering around the 1,000th most popular name in the US. On the other hand, if your story is set in the late 1960’s or 70’s, Steve is a top 50 name. You can look this up. Kids in school right now are named Liam, William, Mason, Noah, Elijah, Ava, Olivia, Emma, and so forth. [Ed’s note: I am using Steve because it’s my friend’s dad’s name, no Steves were harmed in the making of this post and I hope I didn’t accidentally use the actual name from an actual story /RBG]
- We promise, there aren’t any tricks in the description of what’s supposed to be on the title page. You don’t need fancy fonts, you don’t need word counts, you don’t even need boldface. You do need your story title and a meaningful summary. And while you don’t need a content warning, we sure do appreciate them when the story gets gory (you don’t lose any points for not having one, so don’t second-guess your round one results on this basis, just keep it in mind).
Before we announce who’ll be moving on, let’s take a moment to chat about the next round of the Super Challenge. Starting Friday, the advancing writers will be working on combining tropes from two genres to make a blended-genre story. This is one of my favorite prompts, and the one that makes me REALLY wish I could write for this challenge. It’s also incredibly fun to judge! A few tips and pointers about this round:
- Look. Up. Your. Genres. Even if you know one of the genres well, even if your name is actually Ngaio Marsh and we assigned you “mystery,” it’s good to think about not only what you believe is in the genre but what your judges might be expecting to see. Both genres need to be easily identifiable, so think about which elements of the two will work together and which will not.
- Don’t go offroading with your genres. Sure, there are noir stories that don’t incorporate crime, femme fatales, or hardboiled main characters… but this isn’t the time to be trying to write one. Stick to the main tropes for your assigned genres and let the interplay between the two provide the sense of freshness and innovation you’re looking for to show off your creativity.
Need a little extra help? Check out our Navigating Prompts posts on genres: element-based genre prompts and style-based genre prompts. It never hurts to brush up on the basics, and it’ll give you something to do while you wait for the prompt to drop.
Sound fun? Let’s see who’ll be taking on that, er, super challenge this weekend:
Congratulations to Our Advancing Writers
Let’s have a hand for the following writers, in alphabetical order, who will be advancing to the final round of the Super Challenge this weekend:
Alyssa Beatty
Katie Battaglia Delay
Laura Duerr
Lisa Fox
Ariana Hagan
Martini Lynne
S.A. McNaughton
Charlie Rogers
Beatriz Sasse
MM Schreier
Heather Scott
Jessica Wilcox
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 and anthologies. If it finds a home, we’d love to hear about it in the Coffeehouse! And if you choose to post it to your personal site or blog, you can share that link in the Coffeehouse as well.
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.
