The recent FAD (Flash-A-Day) event was incredibly productive and fun for me, and it got me thinking about the last time I'd been so prolific in such a short amount of time. It was an informal writing contest called "War of the Words," held at another forum that I frequent for two years, and it went a little something like this:
1. Authors sign up and are paired off in an NCAA-style bracket.
2. Each pair of authors gets a prompt and a deadline.
3. The submitted stories are anonymized and put up in a thread with a poll. People read both, offer constructive criticism for both, and vote for the story they prefer.
4. At the end of the voting period, the voting is closed and the authors' identities revealed.
5. The author with the most votes proceeds to the next round, where they are matched up with another winner and given a new prompt.
In the contest as we ran it, the prompts were usually quotes or the titles of songs, with 1-2 weeks allotted for writing and voting. The pieces had a 2500 word maximum length, though there were no genre restrictions on entries, which saw everything from litfic to sci-fi to poetry. There was no prize.
We did run into some difficulty, as many authors signed up that weren't able to complete, which resulted in a lot of "bye" rounds. Where people didn't bother to read the single story. This could be solved by having the contest organizers pen "house stories" that could be slotted into these situations alongside real entrants.
I thought I'd post this as a trial balloon, to see if anything like it has ever been done here at AW (or if it's a regular tradition), or to gauge interest if it hasn't been. I found the contest immensely stimulating, and wrote a story for every prompt whether I'd been assigned it or not
1. Authors sign up and are paired off in an NCAA-style bracket.
2. Each pair of authors gets a prompt and a deadline.
3. The submitted stories are anonymized and put up in a thread with a poll. People read both, offer constructive criticism for both, and vote for the story they prefer.
4. At the end of the voting period, the voting is closed and the authors' identities revealed.
5. The author with the most votes proceeds to the next round, where they are matched up with another winner and given a new prompt.
In the contest as we ran it, the prompts were usually quotes or the titles of songs, with 1-2 weeks allotted for writing and voting. The pieces had a 2500 word maximum length, though there were no genre restrictions on entries, which saw everything from litfic to sci-fi to poetry. There was no prize.
We did run into some difficulty, as many authors signed up that weren't able to complete, which resulted in a lot of "bye" rounds. Where people didn't bother to read the single story. This could be solved by having the contest organizers pen "house stories" that could be slotted into these situations alongside real entrants.
I thought I'd post this as a trial balloon, to see if anything like it has ever been done here at AW (or if it's a regular tradition), or to gauge interest if it hasn't been. I found the contest immensely stimulating, and wrote a story for every prompt whether I'd been assigned it or not
