Day 347: Art-Based Stories

There are thousands of writing competitions out there, from flash fiction to full on novel-length submissions, for any genre and any kind of writer, any time constraint or wacky theme you can imagine, but there's one I haven't tried yet. Until now. One of my favorite websites, GlobeSoup, hosts paid writing competitions one after the other, and there's one up there right now I'm going to enter.

The theme is based on works of art that competitors will peruse and choose from to create a story around the image. This kind of theme is pretty popular from what I've seen, but I've never actually attempted this before. According to the rules, the stories are judged solely on how entertaining they are, and not actually how related they are to the image that they're based on. The idea is that the images will inspire interesting stories, so the closer a writer sticks to the inspiration, the better the story will be, thus no need to actually judge based on how related they are. Plus, how would you even do that? Judging fiction is already pretty subjective. Adding a new requirement on top that it has to relate somehow to an image would probably make judging the entrees so complex as to be impossible. That said, while reading the rules it did strike me as a little bit silly to create a competition where stories are based on artwork, yet have rules against judging how close your story is to the image.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley