OUAN602 - Writing Competitions

Since the beginning of third year, I began to realise how important story writing was for basically every piece of media that exists, regardless if it is a video game, comic book, novel, film or television series. From this, I concluded it was in my best interest to pursue this and refine this skill as much as I could, with the intention of drastically improving the quality of my story writing and story telling as a whole. This endeavour casually began during the COP3 module where I attempted to write the basics of a cohesive and immersive story world for my practical piece to illustrate the concept of transmedia story telling. This was along side the incredibly useful task of writing a dissertation which I tried hard to write as well as I could for not only the purpose of creating a well written essay but also to practice writing longer pieces that flow and don't stray from the topics and subjects at hand.

After a useful attempt during this module, I tried to push this further during the longer extended practice brief. Here I wrote part I of a novel I wanted to create. In combination with a story bible which outlined my ideas for a magical realist story universe set in Japan. This was an enjoyable and useful project to undertake from the point of view of improving my writing. But I wanted to continue to push it in any way I could. I knew that writing was the kind of creative outlet that required time and dedication to refine, and is something you just have to do to improve. So to tackle this I began researching on forums and online at my options.

It would have been both easy and difficult to attempt to write stories with no purpose behind them. By this I mean that it would of been beneficial for my writing but difficult to set constraints and guidelines for a specific piece. This led me to discovering a resource that listed all of the main writing competitions around the world for the next year. By entering the ones that appealed to me I could create stories of different genres and lengths within the competition guidelines - thus solving the problem of having unconstrained writing. The ones that appealed to me most from the start were the story story and flash fiction competitions because it mean having to come up with ideas rather than having a single idea that required months of writing to be completed. It also meant I had to convey a story idea in a few hundred to a thousand words, also meaning I could endeavor to enter and complete more than one at a time and forcing myself to work on multiple stories. This is a good starting point for me, so right now I'm looking into what competition I can enter and continually checking back for new ones that appeal to me in order to push this aspect of my work as far as possible.