In February I participated in a new-to-me contest “Writing Battle.” In fact, it was kind of new to them as well – while they’ve hosted a number of screenwriting battles, this was their first Flash Fiction battle.
It’s a very interesting premise. Each participant gets assigned one of four possible genres. (We don’t know what the possibilities are in advance.) In addition, everyone gets individualized location and object prompts. Then you have the weekend to write a piece of flash fiction. Pretty standard, yes?
The twist is, once the stories are in, all the participants become judges. You get a handful of “duels” to judge. In the duel two stories are presented for you to read, leave both positive and constructive feedback for, and then vote on which you thought was better. You never judge in the genre you wrote in, so you aren’t voting for stories in direct competition with you. In this way, stories are slowly weeded out, until the final two stories in each genre are passed on to industry professionals to crown the winner in each genre.
I ended up in the “Vampirical Romance” group, with my location as a “station” and my object as “roots.” I wasn’t super thrilled with getting a romance, but I wrote something pretty out of the box… this is not a typical vampire or romance.
And, yet, I won!
You can go and read my winning story here, as well as an interview with yours truly. For any of my family following along, you’ll probably recognize some of the inspiration here. Enjoy!
MM Schreier 
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