Round One Closes in:
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Primed for success!
Hopefully, once you scroll down and grab your prompt, it won’t take you as long to start writing as it took me to start writing this kickoff. I want you to have better this weekend than the mixed feelings I have about sitting down to start YeahWrite’s final Super Challenge. I am so proud of this little competition. Proud of all the work it takes to make it happen behind the scenes (SHOUTOUT TO ARDEN, WHO IS A @#$@# ROCKSTAR) and of all your work, and of all the stories that have come out of this competition. Not just the ones that win – although heck and gosh folks, we love a winner – but of all the ones that didn’t, but that took their feedback to heart, got polished up, and got published elsewhere. I hope everyone who’s about to sit down and start putting words into the data cloud this weekend gets to feel that feeling (shameless plug, this year’s Scarlet Quill series is on exactly that). I’m not ready for it to end. And in other ways, I honestly am. So let’s work together to make this the best last competition a writing site could put on, ok? I’m glad you’re here.
SERIOUS TALK TIME: we’d like to highlight that we’re looking for your personal, individual, creative contributions to the world. Using AI to write your stories isn’t that, and doesn’t create a level playing field where your contributions have value and your feedback is useful. Like many competitions and anthologies, ours is a labor of love; we’d rather not waste our time making suggestions for improvement to ChatGPT – those are for you! To that end we’re reminding you that by submitting your work to the Super Challenge, you are making a promise that it is the creative work of humans (including you, although per our rules you are welcome to collaborate, brainstorm, beta read (please beta read), and assist each other, although the entrant will be considered the author of that work.
Let’s also dispense with the obvious questions: yes, you can use spellcheck. Yes, you can use grammar check, although it rarely helps your writing and often edits out your personal voice and contributions, so you might want to think about whether you’d rather have a person help you with that. No, you cannot use LLMs like ChatGPT to “revise” your story after you’ve written it. No, you cannot write your story “in dialogue with” an AI. Look, however you feel about AI art and writing, at the end of the day there’s a very real question about whether you can hold the copyright to that work, and we’d rather pay you sweet cash for something you can revise with your feedback and feel good about your ownership of.
Speaking of sweet cash, here’s a reminder:
First place: $200
Second place: $150
Third place: $100
Now that the best part is over, let’s talk about the 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, and get a refresher on the rules.
This round you’ll be writing a story in 1,000 words or fewer with two prompts. In order to get the highest scores from our judges, both prompts should 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.
Now, for an object prompt, it’s easy to tell if something’s integral. Use the banana test. Could you replace the object prompt with a banana without changing the story?
For the prompts you’ll be working with this weekend, it’s a little harder, but not much. If you replaced the prompt with the prompt for a different group, could you tell the same story in the same way? If you could, your prompt isn’t well integrated. For an object, that’s going to mean paying attention to the characteristics of the object as well as its existence. For example, if you have a tin soldier toy as your object, you’ll want to think about when those were made in comparison to when you want to set your story. Is it a grandparent’s cherished object in a modern story? Probably integral. And if it’s just basically pocket lint? Not integral. Similarly, for a phrase, the wording and placement of the phrase should advance your story. A setup for a plot twist? Well integrated (but only if it’s an actual twist; please don’t read this as an invitation to hide balls that are better off in play). Just a line in a book a character reads to another? Probably not integral.
Now, the whole story doesn’t have to revolve around the prompt. And as we’ve mentioned, it doesn’t have to be super innovative. 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: a picture of an object and a fragment of dialogue.
PROMPT STYLE 1: object
The object should be integral to the story. Again, for those folks who didn’t follow our advice to read the whole post… An easy test for “is this object integral” is “if I said chewing gum instead, would the story be fundamentally different?” Objects should also fit comfortably within the defined parameters for the object type, if the type is a category instead of a specific object. So if the prompt is “needle” the object might (depending on definition) be a pine needle or a sewing needle or knitting needle, but it shouldn’t be a dog named Needle. Don’t worry: we’ll give you those parameters with your prompt.
Tips and tricks: Object prompts
PROMPT STYLE 2: dialogue
The words we’ve given you must be used as-is, in the order given. That said: you are permitted to add punctuation around them, add dialogue tags, and do the things you need to in order to fit this dialogue into your story. You can also add words after the end of the prompt, so long as they are not part of the same sentence (with one notable exception; you’ll know who you are). Seriously, follow the links here, we’ve given you a lot of help in using dialogue. The speakers don’t need to be in the same room, and they don’t need to be technically speaking – any method of communication that allows for rapid back-and-forth is fine, from telegraph to texting. What we’re not looking for is correspondence. So what does this look like?
Your prompt:
But I thought he was a boy
So did I
Then you can’t call him Winnie
What you might write:
When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are going to say, “But I thought he was a boy?”
“So did I,” said Christopher Robin.
“Then you can’t call him Winnie?”
“I don’t.”
“But you said——”
“He’s Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don’t you know what ‘ther’ means?”
“Ah, yes, now I do,” I said quickly; and I hope you do too, because it is all the explanation you are going to get.
See how we gave you the dialogue without punctuation or tags, and those got filled in later? And yet it’s still clear that the conversation took place as a back-and-forth exchange of words rather than with a lot of time to think and act between comments. That’s what we’re looking for.
and because somebody’s going to ask:
Here’s another exchange with some action in it that’s still within the timeframe for the kind of back and forth conversation we’re expecting.
She looks completely out of place here, and I wonder if she’s ever set foot in a garage like this. Probably not. Assuming she even has a car, she’d probably just drop it off for an afternoon while she went and got her nails done. Closest she’d’ve gotten to this area is the reception desk, probably.
“Sorry about the smell,” I say, more to fill the awkward silence than anything else. “They don’t run the fans when nobody’s working.”
“I don’t mind the smell,” she says, picking her way across the oil-stained concrete, her heels making tiny gritting noises. “It’s a good smell. It smells like… I don’t know, like work, and honesty.”
I look at her in surprise. “That… That’s kinda how I feel about it. Reminds me of my dad. The smell, I mean. I don’t remember him real good but I remember the smell.”
Got it? You could even use your prompt as banter during combat, if you wanted!
Tips and tricks: Dialogue
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? That’s right: you can scroll back, follow the links, and get a sneak peek into the brains of the judges and promptwriters. You might also want to check out our post specifically about combination prompts—that is, what to do when you have to incorporate two or more prompts into your story!
Questions?
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 channels on our Discord server. Please don’t use any of the other channels, as many of 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.
Remember: while you’re welcome to get clarification on the prompt on general principles, “Can I….?” type questions are about your work, and we can’t answer those. Ask yourself if the answer to the question would benefit everyone in your group, or just you–the judges will have the final say on your individual story. (Example: a prompt with the setting “woods” – a valid question about the prompt might be “is woods necessarily a wild space or would any large cluster of trees count even if it’s groomed like an orchard or park?” On the other hand, the answer to “Can I set my story in Central Park” would benefit only you.)
Ready for your prompts? Let’s get to it!
Groups and Prompts
NB: Images are underdescribed here because generating a description is part of your task for the prompt and we don’t want to set something up where you feel like you need to copy/paste our description. If you’re Blind/have difficulty seeing images, please feel free to contact us to work on a description.
Group One
Your image prompt is: [ID: a wooden bowl with an ambiguous implement inside it]
This object must appear in at least one scene in your story exactly as pictured (for purposes of interpreting this prompt, the background need not be as pictured, only the object). The object does not need to start or remain in the state it is pictured in, but it must be like that at some point within the confines of the story. For example, if your object is a lone button it may be sewn to an article of clothing at some point before or after the scene where it is isolated, but it must be unattached at some point. You don’t need to describe every detail of the object, but you should give enough detail that someone who has never seen this image could produce a reasonable sketch resembling the object based only on your description. In this particular case, you should be able to pick the bowl out of a lineup of other wooden bowls based on your description. Feel free to make reasonable additions to the image – placing your object in a house, having somebody hold the object, putting something inside a box or behind a door – but do not make it an entirely different object by changing the details of the object’s appearance.
Your dialogue prompt is:
I guess that makes sense. What about you?
I’m still working on that.
You can assign this dialogue to as many or as few (but more than one) characters as you like. As previously noted, feel free to add dialogue tags or actions around this sequence, but you can’t change the words, the word order, or make the whole exchange take much longer than it takes to read it out loud.
Group Two
Your image prompt is: [ID: a silver metal bowl resting on a doily]
This object must appear in at least one scene in your story exactly as pictured (for purposes of interpreting this prompt, the background need not be as pictured, only the object). The object does not need to start or remain in the state it is pictured in, but it must be like that at some point within the confines of the story. For example, if your object is a lone button it may be sewn to an article of clothing at some point before or after the scene where it is isolated, but it must be unattached at some point. You don’t need to describe every detail of the object, but you should give enough detail that someone who has never seen this image could produce a reasonable sketch resembling the object based only on your description. In this particular case, you should be able to pick the bowl out of a lineup of other metal bowls based on your description. Feel free to make reasonable additions to the image – placing your object in a house, having somebody hold the object, putting something inside a box or behind a door – but do not make it an entirely different object by changing the details of the object’s appearance.
Your dialogue prompt is:
Are you sure
Not particularly
Good, because neither am I
You can assign this dialogue to as many or as few (but more than one) characters as you like. As previously noted, feel free to add dialogue tags or actions around this sequence, but you can’t change the words, the word order, or make the whole exchange take much longer than it takes to read it out loud.
Group Three
Your image prompt is: [ID: a white ceramic bowl]
This object must appear in at least one scene in your story exactly as pictured (for purposes of interpreting this prompt, the background need not be as pictured, only the object). The object does not need to start or remain in the state it is pictured in, but it must be like that at some point within the confines of the story. For example, if your object is a lone button it may be sewn to an article of clothing at some point before or after the scene where it is isolated, but it must be unattached at some point. You don’t need to describe every detail of the object, but you should give enough detail that someone who has never seen this image could produce a reasonable sketch resembling the object based only on your description. In this particular case, you should be able to pick the bowl out of a lineup of other white ceramic bowls based on your description. Feel free to make reasonable additions to the image – placing your object in a house, having somebody hold the object, putting something inside a box or behind a door – but do not make it an entirely different object by changing the details of the object’s appearance.
Your dialogue prompt is:
You meant to do that; live with the consequences
I didn’t expect it to be so effective
Oh well
You can assign this dialogue to as many or as few (but more than one) characters as you like. As previously noted, feel free to add dialogue tags or actions around this sequence, but you can’t change the words, the word order, or make the whole exchange take much longer than it takes to read it out loud.
Group Four
Your image prompt is: [ID: a glass bowl]
This object must appear in at least one scene in your story exactly as pictured (for purposes of interpreting this prompt, the background need not be as pictured, only the object). The object does not need to start or remain in the state it is pictured in, but it must be like that at some point within the confines of the story. For example, if your object is a lone button it may be sewn to an article of clothing at some point before or after the scene where it is isolated, but it must be unattached at some point. You don’t need to describe every detail of the object, but you should give enough detail that someone who has never seen this image could produce a reasonable sketch resembling the object based only on your description. In this particular case, you should be able to pick the bowl out of a lineup of other glass bowls based on your description. Feel free to make reasonable additions to the image – placing your object in a house, having somebody hold the object, putting something inside a box or behind a door – but do not make it an entirely different object by changing the details of the object’s appearance.
Your dialogue prompt is:
You’re pretty good at that
Thanks; I had to learn fast
I never learned how [you can finish this sentence here, or complete it how you like]
You can assign this dialogue to as many or as few (but more than one) characters as you like. As previously noted, feel free to add dialogue tags or actions around this sequence, but you can’t change the words (except where explicitly permitted in the last sentence), the word order, or make the whole exchange take much longer than it takes to read it out loud.
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. If you’re going to need a beta reader for your SC material, remember to arrange it ahead of time and trade contact info so that you don’t end up posting in the main channels!
Your stories 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 be a separate page and 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!)
Note: If you experience trouble uploading your your submission, contact us via the methods above and the admin team will give you instructions for emailing your submission instead.
You’ll receive your feedback on Wednesday, April 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.
