Writing Competition - Rankings & Reader’s Notes
Fiction (Top 6 out of 61)
F#_ (Score: 10) - This story is dream-like and tragic, set on a farm with retrospective narration from a grown woman looking back at her childhood. The syntax explores many iterations of one moment or poth in taut language and punctuation, to draw the story of the narrator's brother's death, which ruined the family, and happened on the same day as mystical, deadly wolves and an angel appeared to her. Language moves between morose and lyrical to succinctly descriptive, through prose with brief poems to cast a sense or mood to each part of the text.
F#_ (Score: 10) - The acuity in the language, paired with varied syntax, depth of character, solid dialogue, and multiple narratives running, make this complicated, somewhat eerie and drug-filled motel narrative captivating throughout; both protagonists we've met are complex yet likeable, with tragic cores and desperate needs. There's urgent tension built into every scene, with a sense that the narratives are building towards one another.
F#_ (Score: 10) - The narrative begins with an avalanche overtaking skiers, continues with the struggle to survive, and ends in an interesting projection of what will come in future tense with perspective shifting into a dream-like state while two protagonists stand, rescued, on the mountain, while the story projects forward into the deaths that will come. Gripping in it's pacing, urgency, and tragedy.
F#_ (Score: 9) - Synoposis gives a full context detailing a prominent woman's life and her fight against anti-Semitism. The excerpt winds through the experience of a teenage boy, emotionally pummeled by childhood trauma from his late, abusive, anti-Semite and racist father. The boy seeks refuge at a hippie commune, which adds layers of interesting characters and imagistic scenes, and sells weed to pull himself into independence and away from his shell of a mother. Needs editing in dialogue, dialogue tagging, and some descriptions to bring them more authentically into the POV of the narrator, but overall, the context is rich, with complicated and important themes and well-crafted writing.
F#_ (Score: 9) - Third person narration stays close to the well-intentioned, haunted protagonist who remembers the horrifying scene of her mother hitting and killing a man with her car while her baby brother slept in the back seat; the narration jumps about fifteen years into the future, to that baby brother now a teenager living with his older sister, checking the mailbox for a note from his still alive but now seemingly absent mother. Solid pacing, flowing dialogue, and depth of conflict weaves the narrative together and keeps the reader intrigued throughout.
F#_ (Score: 9) - Complex, flawed characters on a tenuous journey make for a captivating narrative wherein a family of four picks up their normal life and head into the unknown together; the marriage has love but also disconnection, mother and father both have their faults, and the young daughters’ trajectories seem to shift with each move the family makes. The excerpt suggests this story could ultimately be a story of redemption, or one of tragedy; there’s enough craft to explore what the expansion could bring.
Memoir (Top 4 out of 27)
M#_ (Score: 10) - This essay is haunting and crisp; editing could tighten up some syntax and language, but in well-chosen details and an honest voice, the writer steps into telling a story she has long hidden, out of fear: that of the discovery that a friend brutally murdered many, many people. The retelling reads like fiction, but is grounded in that fearful knowledge that only true stories can carry.
M#_ (Score: 9) - Reminiscent of Eat, Pray, Love, Euphoria, and Julie & Julia, this is a story about re-discovering who you are in middle age with a companion in the mind of a great, late female pioneer. The writer travels to Morocco, a place rich in memories for her, to reflect on her own life and to chronicle Edith Warton's time there. Easy to read prose with a structure that allows the writer and Edith's lives to run seemingly in parallel invite the reader into this journey of creating space for reflection. (*Only 4 pages.)
M#_ (Score: 9) - A pleasant read that feels a bit like watching a sitcom, with a mixing tone of comical and serious that fits the writer's context of coming-of-age in L.A. as a young, female Iranian with the complexities of being a teenager in modern America and a young woman in Iranian-American culture.
M#_ (Score: 9) - The story needs editing in pacing and needs more dialogue inserted in moments that are presenting as expository, but overall, the writer etches crisp, visceral, complex imagery of the psychological grief of her father's suicide. The content is painful without feeling out of the writer’s control; the writer has creative distance over the material to an impressive degree as she speaks to the reader and the father, one feeling like the other.
Poetry (Top 3 out of 12)
P#_ (Score: 10) - This collection draws clear and cutting images, complex relationships painted in tragic scenes, with rich motifs of flora and wedding dresses, in rhythmic and intense language. The most imagistic and cohesive of the group, it leaves a lasting impression in the psyche.
P#_ (Score: 9) - The poet draws beautiful, striking images and the taut emotion of a lonely, female millennial narrator moving through an everyday life with snapshots of curling irons and phones buzzing amidst the feeling of chronic emptiness. Complex without being melodramatic.
P#_ (Score: 9) - This collection feels and sounds like true poetry, where the lines seep into each other in breaks, rhythm, and flashes of imagery to almost magically express a deep, shifting emotional state of longing and hope.
Personal Essay (Top 4 out of 25)
PE#_ (Score: 8) - This essay, about the writer's family trip to visit the Mursi tribe in South Sudan, is fascinating and more nuanced in theme than the feared white-people-explore-the-world. The text needs editing for urgency, dialogue, and deeper description, but does well in basic descriptions of setting, people, moments of tension, and above all else, narration that is at once sure, troubled, and reflective.
PE#_ (Score: 8) - A moving testament with a talented narrator; readers get the sense that the writer is the step-mother in the story, as the POV distance feels closest in moments discussing her experience. The essay chronicles a son's journey into rebellion, drugs, and alcohol, through the Army, and into his death. Needs editing to frame the son’s death, but overall is written with a bird's eye view of his whole life, embedding exposition into varied syntax and well-chosen details. It holds the reader's attention and brings up emotion without being a melodramatic expose on the effect of drugs.
PE#_ (Score: 8) - This essay needs editing to build sensory details, and could be re-structured to include scientific information about the character’s disorder(s), but overall explores a tragic life without acting as a PSA. The writer doesn't specifically name the disorders until near the end, but it could come earlier with splashes of a more technical tone throughout. Overall, it's written with an earnest heart to tell an audience about the son the writer loved, and lost to suicide. It captivates the attention and brings up emotion.
PE#_ (Score: 8) - This writer lightly chronicles her teen years with the structural support of the history of Bon Iver, the musical artist, who is from the writer's town. The writer is lyrical and imagistic as they weave Bon Iver’s history into their own upbringing in a way that feels cohesive and narrative without being overly biographical of either. There's a strong sense of setting - a wintery, forest-laden town, and a feeling of how legend in a small town can attach to identity.
Middle Grade (Top 3 out of 19)
MG#_ (Score: 9) - This story is told through the retrospective narration of a loner kid with a curious and steady temperament, whose crafted voice is paired with a mysterious and classic central conflict of the odd neighbors next door. Tension is naturally built, dialogue sounds authentic; this tale feels classic without being derivative.
MG#_ (Score: 9) - This story has really sensory language with varied syntax that creates a rich and layered tone, with tautly drawn characters (some very whimsical), and a striking plot that begins at the young female narrator's father's funeral, with suspicious characters poking around. The premise fosters an exploration of life's bigger questions, with the narrator’s late fathera acting as a moral guide as he is remembered in the narrator’s experience and as a conflict builds when his (very odd and seemingly superhuman) lawyer attempts to read out the particulars of thewill.
MG#_ (Score: 9) - This story has a striking premise that resembles that of The Uglies or Never Let Me Go, in which an “un-modified” narrator is juxtaposed against a society of genetically-modified kids. She is natural born and therefore a second rate citizen, relegated to the margins of society, even within her class of non-modified folks. The descriptive language, outsider-orphan voice of the narrator, solid pacing, and natural dialogue support the intriguing premise to make this story impactful and commercial.
Book Editing (Top 3 out of 16)
BE#_ (Score: 9) - In this fictional story, the narrator moves between different women in a Colombian family. One character and, separately, another cook arepas to sell. The latter takes in a street kid as her own. It's not clear where the story will go, but the narration moves like a film camera through the women's perspectives with rhythm, imagistic language, and a culturally authentic tone that invites readers into the world of the story.
BE#_ (Score: 9) - A commercially marketable memoir with large-scale appeal. Intriguing topic of the history of a family: generations of the poor Jewish family live in tenements until one of them, the narrator’s grandfather moves to Hollywood and fights his way into Fox. For generations to come, the family works on sets at Fox. The grandiose nature of Hollywood as setting and the family as moguls is juxtaposed against the writer's simple memories of the family, written in imagistic detail.
BE#_ (Score: 9) - In this fictional story, the varied sentence structure and taut language creates a rich, layered rhythm with vivid storytelling about female bonds, pregnancy and abortion, and life afterwards. Characters have depth and reliability, dialogue sounds authentic, and the conflict of the abortion is central and urgent without being overwrought.