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While clearing out the basement, attic, wardrobe or drawers, or re-organising your bookcase (alphabetical, genre or colour?) perhaps you come across that forgotten first draft of a novel or script, or some early or abandoned poems or short stories.
Don’t be persuaded by Marie Kondo or any of those books extolling decluttering and biff them out.
Because they could still bring you joy, especially during this period of enforced time at home.
If you need an extra incentive, there are heaps of writing competitions and grants open at the moment – perfect timing and it’s always good to have a deadline to work to. There are also opportunities for younger members of the household to get creative.
Just something to bear in mind – quite a few of these have a small fee to enter. Not so much for the children and youth competitions though, fortunately,
And, yes, I’m working on a short story in the evenings, an idea that’s been swirling around my head for almost two decades. It feels great to get it out! If this lockdown continues much beyond the four weeks I’ll start on a short work of non-fiction about a famous forebear, famous in sporting circles at least.
That’s me – what about you? Here are a few I found to get you started.
NATIONAL FLASH FICTION DAY including a Youth Competition
The deadline is 30 April. Plenty of time to write a short short story in 300 words or fewer (excluding the title).
Not that it’s easy when every word counts, but somehow it feels achievable.
Here’s an interview from the last Standing Room Only until RNZ is in post-COVID-19 mode:
For the adult section, there is a fee $10.00 per story or $24.00 for 3 stories (3 stories max per entrant).
The youth competition is free and is now open internationally.
By the way, the organisers are also hosting a series of free online workshops and discussions this month.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
- Submissions open 15 February – 15 April 2020
- Competition open to all NZ citizens and residents
- Open competition; no theme or prompt
- Only previously unpublished work will be considered
- Deadline for submissions: 15 April 2020 (midnight)
- Word limit for all submissions (all categories): 300 excluding title
- 1.5 or double spaced, please
- No font requirements, but make it clean – no fancy fonts!
- Maximum 3 stories per entrant; please include your submissions in one document
- Electronic submissions only, emailed to nationalflash@gmail.com
- Submissions must be sent as attachments (not in the body of the email)
- Send one of the following formats: .doc, .docx, .rtf; please, no pdfs
- Please, no pdfs!
- Submissions must be received no later than midnight, 15 April 2020
- Your name may be in the email and any enquiries made to NFFD in the Gmail account, but do not include your name or contact info on the attachments. Any submissions with author name on the attachment with the story text will be disqualified.
- Judges’ decisions are final. No feedback will be offered on an individual basis.
- Winners will be announced on National Flash Fiction Day, June 22.
- Winners and shortlisted work will be published in a special winter edition of Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction.
Sargeson prize
Applications have just opened for the biggest prize in Aotearoa New Zealand for short story writers.
This is just the second year of the competition, organised through the University of Waikato and devised by novelist and now also children’s writer, Catherine Chidgey.
This year’s judge is short story supremo Owen Marshall. He’s in for a busy time. 2019 saw more than 800 entries.
The overall winner receives a $5,000 cash prize and there are two divisions: Open and Secondary Schools.
As well as receiving the cash prize, the winner of the Open Division will be published in the NZ literary journal Landfall, and the runners up will be published in Mayhem.
The winner of the Secondary Schools Division will receive a $500 cash prize and the opportunity to take up a one-week summer residency at the University of Waikato, along with mentorship from postgraduate writing students. The winning story will also be published in Mayhem.
And here’s an interview with Catherine Chidgey when she announced the Sargeson Prize on Standing Room Only:
Poetry competition
The New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition has been running since 1987 and is open to all members and non-members, worldwide, with members receiving an entry fee discount.
There are cash prizes to be won in each category, and all entries are eligible to be published in our anthology. Our annual anthology includes all placed and commended poems, as well as a selection of other favourite poems from the competition.
Poets can enter one of these four sections:
- Open verse for adults (18 years and over)
- Open verse for juniors (17 years or younger)
- Haiku for adults (18 years and over)
- Haiku for juniors (17 years or younger)
Submission guidelines and entry forms for each category must be received by 31 May 2020.
Essay Competition
Otago University Press has extended the deadline for the 2020 Charles Brasch Young Writers' Essay Competition, anticipating how tough and confusing life is at the moment for our young writers.
The new deadline is April 30, 2020.
About the competition
In 2017 Landfall celebrated its 70th birthday. To mark the occasion, we launched the Charles Brasch Young Writers' Essay Competition, an annual award open to writers aged 16 to 21.
- Essays should not exceed 1500 words.
- The competition is judged by the editor of Landfall.
- The winner will be announced and published in each May issue of Landfall.
- The winner receives $500 and a year’s subscription to Landfall.
More information and how to enter the competition here.
FAB
FAB is a free writing contest for kids aged 13 and under. It runs throughout the year and the current competition closes 8pm Fri April 10. But if that’s too soon for your budding writer just make a note of the webpage for the next one.
It’s open to NZ and Australian children.
Here’s how it works - children are given the beginning of the story, the current one is by Melinda Syzmanik and they write what happens next!
Instructions
1. Read the story starter and continue the story.
2. Your story should be no more than 500 words.
3. You have two weeks to write your story, so there’s no need to rush! Take your time and send us the best story you can write.
4. Send your story to by 8pm Friday April 10th.
5. The winner of the competition will be announced on this website a few days after the competition closes.
6. Every fortnight there will be a new competition and a children’s author will post a new story starter for you.
7. The competition is open to kids aged 13 and under who live in New Zealand or Australia.
And here’s Melinda’s story:
Melinda’s Story Starter: A Very Unexpected Experiment
Oliver Jamie had been keen on cooking from an early age. Perhaps it was the fun of making Yuck Soup as a toddler, with water from the hose, dirt from the garden, daisies plucked from the lawn, and all kinds of date-expired pantry items provided by his mother.
Now he loved to experiment, and unusual ingredients were his specialty.
‘What’s on the menu today?’ Mrs. Jamie asked her son as she padded into the kitchen, wearing bed hair and her fluorescent pink dressing gown. It was the first day of the school holidays and yet Oliver had been up since the crack of dawn. In the kitchen. Measuring, sifting, and mixing.
‘It’s a secret,’ he said. ‘But it’s nearly done. And you can be the first person to taste it.’
His right arm was a blur as he whisked a thick, orange fluid in the mixing bowl.
‘It’s an interesting … colour,’ Mum said. She didn’t comment on the smell. Partly because she had no words to describe it.
Oliver bustled around the kitchen. Pinching spices and chopping herbs his mum didn’t recognize. Stirring and straining. Opening and closing the oven door. Mrs. Jamie poured herself a coffee.
The oven timer went ding.
‘Voila,’ Oliver said, handing his mum a plate filled with knobbly orange blobs, flecked with green. He handed her a fork. ‘I’ll be back in a jiffy,’ he said. ‘Start without me.’
Mrs Jamie scooped some of the food with her fork, and pinching her nose closed, opened her mouth and took a bite.
Oliver didn’t notice the flash of white light in the kitchen behind him as he dried his hands in the bathroom. He didn’t notice the deep silence as he made his way back to his favourite room in the house. And nothing could have prepared him for what he found sitting where his mum had sat only a few minutes earlier.
‘Mum,’ he croaked, trembling. ‘Is that you?’ …
Now You Finish The Story…
Shake up a Sonnet
The Shakespeare Globe Centre NZ is inviting young writers to try their hand at writing a sonnet. In their own way. Shakespeare wrote 154 of them. About love. But in this competition, Shake Up a Sonnet, anything goes.
But time is fleeting as the first Round is due by 5pm Thursday 9 April 2020.
There are several categories.
Category 1 - A Sonnet based on a Character from a Shakespeare play or poem.
Category 2 - A Sonnet based on a Shakespeare play or poem
Age groups:
a) Under 12 years old
b) 12 - 24 years old
c) 25 years and over
Rules:
Shakespeare Sonnet form
Send in low resolution – disqualified if over 500 kb
No fancy images – create them with your words! E-mail it to: sgcnz@sgcnz.org.nz
In the subject line write Shake Up Sonnet and the Category No and Age letter
In the body of the e-mail, at the top write your: Name: E-mail: Mobile: Postal address with postcode:
Category 1: Sonnet based on a Character – State the Character or Category 2: Sonnet based on a Shakespeare Play or Poem – State the Play or Poem Age Range:
a) Under 12 years
b) 12 – 24 years
c) Over 24 years Sonnet with Title:
If you are willing to have it published, please state that you give permission for this.
By the way, the SCGNZ is also running competitions for young people in these other areas:
Costume design, Music Composition, Static Image, Poster and Video Title Card Designs and Essay Competitions. These entries are currently due by 11 May, though this will no doubt also be pushed out to when couriers can practically catch up. Meanwhile, they are perfect activities to undertake whilst in enforced isolation. Multiple entries in several categories are encouraged!
Contact: dawn@sgcnz.org.nz If you wish to find out more about SGCNZ
Playwrights B4 25
Playmarket encourages writers under 25 to write for the stage with this annual competition. It's identified many cracking writers over the years and helped them to fulfill their dream of getting their plays performed.
Because our theatres will come to life again and we’ll experience the visceral thrill of being part of an audience experiencing something unique and remarkable together.
Submissions are open until 30 April 2020.
Handy information:
There are no restrictions on style, content or cast size. Write about anything you like, in any way you like, for any kind of audience you like.
Submissions can only be entered into this competition once and you may enter a maximum of three scripts. Plays entered under this competition may have been previously produced.
All submissions are read blind by the judges.
For general information about this competition and others in the Playmarket stable go to:
And if there’s a script ready to submit:
Sci-fi Fantasy convention now online
Bigger than the Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones combined -this was to have been Aotearoa NZ’s big year on the world science fiction calendar, as host of the 2020 World Science Fiction Convention. In fact, Weta Workshop and George R R Martin were among the many guests of honour in the line-up.
It's for creators and lovers of traditional sci-fi, fantasy, horror, speculative fiction and all the other sub-genres of fiction unhindered by time and space.
While the week-long in-the-flesh convention is now cancelled because of the pandemic – ironically the favourite subject of many a sci-fi story over the decades – it will go ahead online.
Among the silver linings suggested by the organisers:
It could serve as a role model for other conventions and conferences to move online - not just to help protect us against novel diseases, but to reduce emissions and increase inclusion.
The Convention (CoNZealand to the fans) is where the prestigious Hugo Awards for sci-fi and fantasy are given out, as well as the award for best New Zealand speculative fiction, the Sir Julius Vogel Awards.
Here’s a story pre-Covid 19 about the big plans:
