Why Writing Contests Suck My Soul

I didn't make it to the finals. I didn't write the story... my brain did and I just typed it for her. No one believed my story. Weird, because my story wasn't any more fact based (or lack of fact based) than any of the others... I guess readers are reluctant to buy the idea of an alien in a well.

Oh well.




PS today someone told me "you always look nice," and I responded "I am nice!"...

Val Von Deep... on just blurting out the story I hear in my head.

I made it to the 3rd round in the NYC Midnight flash fiction contest! Woot.

For the third round, I got 1,000 words to write a horror story set in a private school, and I had to mention a mouse. I almost gave up on this one. I wrote and then deleted and then rewrote the first 400 words three times, each time with a totally different spin on the story. I almost gave up when I only had eight hours left and was staring at a blank page, but I was still feeling regret for dropping out last year after I got a disappointing score on my 1st round Romance story, so I pushed myself to finish.

And I'm so happy I did! I am not all that concerned with how 'good' or 'bad' my story is- my true victory is that I learned a valuable lesson about my own writing process: I wasn't having trouble writing this story because I lacked ideas. I actually knew exactly what story I wanted to tell. I had that familiar flash I always get when an entire story just POPS into my head all at once. The best way to describe how quickly and completely I get the idea for my stories is by quoting my favorite  actor in my favorite movie: "Whoa, I know kung foo!"

Awesome and useful right? The problem is that even though I know exactly what I want to say, when I sit down at the keyboard I get jammed up. It's like 3 people trying to get through the same doorway all at once. All of those ideas pushing to get out of my head and onto the screen paralyse my fingers (sidenote: just found out I  can spell paralyse w/o spellcheck!!!) and I just freeze up.

It's the reason I have so many great story ideas that ultimately sit in intro paragraph purgatory.