I Won Writing Battle!

So, um, WOW! I won a Writing Battle. $3400! Amazing, right? Absolutely! I've never won anything, or been paid for any of my short story submissions, so I'm currently staining my folder of rejection letters with a muted red wine ring in celebration of getting paid $3.40 per word. (Professional rate is $0.10/word, so I just walloped that.)

My story and the new FEAR winners just got posted yesterday. Go check it out!

Warning - this is not a happy Christmas story. This was written in October for a "Fear" theme. Keep that in mind. The story is a little creepy. I had a tremendous amount of fun researching it while on vacation in Philadelphia. You know me, I love to write historical fiction. Once I learned about the yellow fever epidemics, I double downed on all the gruesome details. But there's a happy ending, sort of.

What is Writing Battle, you ask? I'm gonna' tell you. It's this enthusiastic, supportive community of writers who love to write a story in a short amount of time, based on prompts they didn't expect. So. Much. FUN!! It's like improv for writers, but your stories duel each other and you win money.

For 2025, each competition had four genres to compete within, thus four winners. 2026 will have nine genres, thus nine winners. Whoa! But you don't get to choose your genre. Oh no! That would be way too easy. You are dealt a random genre, a random character, and a random object to build your story upon. You can redraw your genre once, but only once. And you get a few extra redraws for characters and objects, but not many. Then you have a few days to write your story ranging from 48 hours for micro-fiction (250 words) and a week for 1000 or 2000 word stories.

Your story has to use the prompts in some way, shape or form, otherwise you might get disqualified. This is to prevent prewritten, perfectly edited stories. My winning story had a typo in it! So embarrassing. Let me know if you find it.

Note, for 2026, you can choose a "Class." If you ever played D&D, these will look very familiar. Your chosen class will lead your card draw toward certain genres. This is new. I haven't tried it yet. I'm super excited about it. I've chosen Rogue!

I won for the 1000-word, FEAR, pro-judged competition. There were four genres (Horror, Thriller & Suspense, Dystopian, and Mystery) and I won Mystery. I think there were 1800 stories total and about 300 in Mystery. I'm guessing that lots of people were dealt Mystery and redrew for a different genre. (Horror had about 600 stories.) I'll admit, Mystery in a 1000 words is really bloomin' difficult! I chucked three other stories before I finally got the last one to work.

First attempt: Ben Franklin electrocutes more than just a key and a kite. Benjamin West then commemorated the experiment in a famous painting. Is there something else hiding in the famous painting that had to be erased?

Second attempt: The famous bank vault theft from Carpenter's Hall in 1791, when Carpenter's Hall served as the First Bank of the United States. Ballooned to 2000+ words, but is a fun heist tale that I'm revamping.

Third attempt: Betsy Ross gets frustrated with the founding fathers repeatedly erasing the design of the first flag, leading to body parts being sewn into fancy upholstered furniture. She then acts as the amateur sleuth for her own crime and pins it on a corrupt factory owner, freeing his workers to take over the factory for themselves and creating America's first co-op. This story ballooned to 4000+ words and requires more research. But I'm still working on this one. It's now a comedy.

Fourth attempt: I submitted with three hours to spare. It won! Check it out!

There are peer-judged battles and pro-judged battles. Everyone is sorted into houses of about forty stories, all in your genre. The early eight rounds of duels are against your housemates. There is no genre crossover. Genres never compete against each other, which I think is a good thing.

Peer-judged competitions–all the writers read ten stories in five duels, give feedback and pick a winner of the five duels. Then the final showdown duels go to "Spartan Judging," where you're dealt a duel and have to pick a winner, no comments required. You only ever judge stories outside of your genre, so you're never judging your competition.

Then "Debrief" opens, and you can read everyone's stories and give & get feedback. You can also check out your house competition.

Pro-judged competitions–professional judges give out trophies and pips during the early dueling rounds, which is fun, and you can read everyone's stories and give & get feedback. In the first round, my winning story received an "Impact" trophy, meaning of all the stories a judge read in that round, he/she thought mine had the highest "Impact." It also got a "character" pip, which is a cute little chicken symbol.

The Forums! The website has forums. My favorite forum is "Hidden Gems." When you stumble upon a great story, but not many people have commented on it, then you post it in the Hidden Gem forum and people will go check it out and give feedback. Everyone is so supportive. You don't have to win a big payout to feel like you won. My story got a shout-out on a "Historical Fiction Stories" forum, and I was on cloud nine. For someone to stumble through a forest of 1800 stories, randomly read yours, and then like it enough to take the time to post it to a forum ... Whoa! That is huge gratification. And you can offer that amazing gratification to other writers. It's a giant feedback loop of happiness!

There's also a friendly etiquette of return reads. If you read a person's story and leave feedback, there's a magic "Return Read" button in your comment allowing them to easily flip to your story so they can return the favor. So if you give feedback on 20 stories, you'll probably get at least 15 or more reads and feedback on your story.

Reading other stories, pondering them, giving feedback, and then reading all the other comments, is so incredibly educational. I'm typically a playwright and novelist, focusing on longer form storytelling. But flash fiction is becoming popular with magazine and journal publications, so I wanted to learn it. Writing a story limited to 1000 words is an immense challenge when you come from the land of 80,000 word novels. But reviewing other stories and seeing what other people like or criticize in flash fiction pieces is so illuminating and inspiring.

My first competition, my story won a couple of battles and died. It was a mess of a story and my first attempt at Sci-Fi. But I rewrote it based on feedback and now I'm submitting it around.

My second competition, my story won an honorable mention, meaning it made it to the near top of the house and was only one vote shy of moving on into the Final Showdown.

Finał Showdown–Each genre has a final showdown. The top 5-6 stories in a house move into what look like basketball brackets. Top 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, winner!

My third competition, my story made it to the Final Showdown and lost out in the Sensational 64 duel to the full genre winner. The winning story's name was "Pancakes McBride," and I'm a McBride, so I did enjoy a bit of humor about that loss.

My fourth competition, my story won the entire Final Showdown and came out first place in the Mystery genre. I received a congratulations message from the author of "Pancakes McBride," saying, "I'm glad there will be another McBride on the winner's list!"

Over the year, this is a solid writing trajectory. I'm getting better at Flash Fiction. I definitely enjoy it. It's nice to finish a polished story within a day or two. My novels and plays take months and always hit "The Messy Middle" slog phase. So there's a happy satisfaction with being able to finish an entire 1000 word story quickly and send it out for publication. And it definitely teaches you to edit.

My winning story started as 1500 words, and I had to whack it down to 1000. It hurt. I bled words. But it resulted in judge comments like: "This writer knows how much to give the reader; he trusts us. That's a really beautiful thing. I see so much overwriting. Not here!"

If you haven't yet, go check out my story at the Writing Battle winner's page. And if you're a writer, check out WritingBattle.com. It's a blast!