I’m a big fan of flash fiction. I love writing the stories for Two-Sentence Tuesday (if you’d like to contribute your own two-sentence story, contact me) and I recently took part in the NYC Midnight flash fiction challenge. I had never done a writing challenge before, but I saw an ad for the NYC challenge on Instagram and thought, “Why not give it a go?”
The NYC challenge is broken into four rounds, with each entrant guaranteed to participate in the first two. Entrants are divided into groups and at a specified time (midnight US time) and date you’re sent a genre, location and object that you must include in your 1000-word story, then you have 48 hours to write and submit that story. The top fifteen stories in each group are awarded points – 15 points for first, 1 point for fifteenth. After the first two rounds, the top five entrants for each group move on to round three, while the others are finished for the competition.
I didn’t move on to round three but I did make it into the top fifteen for my group in both rounds, which I was so excited about (and genuinely not expecting). The real prize from participating was the detailed feedback on my writing from three different judges. Although it’s unlikely that I would return to those stories, they highlighted strengths and weaknesses that I see time and again in my longer work.
I don’t know a lot about NYC Midnight, but they seem to offer a variety of competitions throughout the year. I would definitely give it another go, and if you’ve been thinking about entering more competitions, I would recommend looking out for one of theirs.
After all, there’s nothing like a tight deadline to get those creative juices flowing.
