Story Writing Competition Novels & Stories

Flip a coin. Seriously. When it's in the air, you'll know which side you're hoping for. That's your gut answer.

It’s funny you should ask about contests; I’ve been poking around at them for a couple years now, mostly for fun. Honestly, the obvious place to start is just by looking at the big magazines that run regular competitions—'Clarkesworld', 'The Paris Review', sometimes 'Glimmer Train' though I think they’re on hiatus again? Those are the heavy hitters, and winning one of those can be a real career bump. But the submission fees add up, which always gives me pause. I’ve had better luck, emotionally at least, with smaller, themed contests run by indie presses or even literary festivals. They often have more specific prompts, which can actually kickstart a story you wouldn’t have written otherwise.

Lately, I’ve been leaning toward genre-specific outlets. If you’re into speculative fiction, the 'Writer’s Digest' annual competition is a classic, but also check out 'Lightspeed’s' flash fiction contests or 'Analog’s' yearly student one. The entry requirements are usually super clear on their websites—just make sure you follow their formatting to the letter. I got disqualified once for using the wrong font, which felt incredibly petty at the time, but hey, rules are rules. A good trick is to set up a simple spreadsheet: contest name, deadline, fee, word count, theme. It keeps the chaos somewhat manageable.

Don’t sleep on university literary journals either, even if you’re not a student; many have open contests with pretty decent judges. The prize money might be smaller, but the prestige in certain circles is real. The real struggle for me is timing—I’ll see a contest, get excited, then realize the deadline is next week and my draft is nowhere near ready. So my unsolicited advice is to find a few with deadlines a few months out and actually work backward from there. It’s less about the single big win and more about building a rhythm of finishing and submitting pieces, which in itself is a kind of victory.

Does anyone else get weirdly motivated by a specific deadline and prize? Like, I'll have a story half-finished for months, but the second I see a contest with a theme that sparks something and a deadline in six weeks, I become a writing machine.

Maybe it's the pressure. Maybe it's the dream of winning. But use that! Let competition prompts kick you out of writer's block. Even if you don't win, you've created a new piece you can submit elsewhere.