The Shorter The Better-San Francisco Writing Contest
Short pieces of prose are both playgrounds and workshops and I have a habit of writing at least a single page of polished prose of precisely 336 words every day. Concise compositions are the connective tissue of the writer’s craft—a chapter, a page, a paragraph, and a sentence, tell a tale that connects to a larger narrative. Short stories, essays, scenes, flash fiction are laser beams of focused prose. And, when they are structured with word count limits, short prose encourages us to become better writers as we revise, rewrite, and edit our writing.
Ernest Hemingway famously wrote that writing is rewriting and that all you have to do is write one true sentence and Lorrie Moore likens a short story to a love affair or a photograph, whereas a novel is a marriage or a film. Neil Gaiman tells us that short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.
As a fellow writer that cannot resist a love affair of literature I encourage you take the plunge and enter the San Francisco Writing Contest. Write true sentences into paragraphs with a passion to hone your craft and throw open those tiny windows and invite readers into your worlds and dreams. Take that journey to the far side of the universe and bring back a small piece of prose to share at the dinner table of the world.
In the San Francisco Writing Contest, you can enter the first scene of a novel, an essay, an article, the introduction to a nonfiction book…in short, the first 1500 words of anything you’ve written. Our panel of anonymous professional judges will select the best of the best to win and be runners up in three categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Childrens/YA. The cost to enter is $35 and the prizes range from a certificate to hang on your wall and brag about on your writer’s resume to cash and time with an agent who represents work in the area you write.
You can find out all the details about the contest here, but hurry. The deadline for us to receive entries is Friday, January 11th at 5 p.m. Pacific time. So polish those short pieces of powerful prose and submit your words to us. The winners will be announced at the San Francisco Writers Conference, but you don’t have to be an attendee of the conference to enter or win.
Good luck.
Richard La Rosa
San Francisco Writing Contest Coordinator
