Hello and greetings! Welcome to the TV Tropes Writing Contest page! What's this all about? Well, Website/TvTropes has periodically held writing contests organized and judged by its own about once every quarter year. These are contests for original short stories written with a general theme in mind which they all must adhere to. Beyond that that theme idea the stories are free to be written in whatever perspective or genre the authors choose. The writing period last for approximately a month after which the stories are submitted anonymously for reviewing by a panel of judges. The judges give each story a score and at the end of it all the numbers are tallied up and whoever scored the most points in that contest's winner!

The first and second contest were posted in the Literature sub-forum with all subsequent contests being posted in Writer's Block. Recurring minor difficulties include endless debate about what the next contest's theme should be, the disproportionate ratio of entrants to judges, the preponderance of dropouts, frequent failure of entrants (and, to a lesser extent, judges) to meet the deadline, and the tendency of some judges to award a broader range of scores than others and thus have a larger weight on the result. Despite all the the contests continue to be a fun opportunity for authors and judges alike to show their stuff and flex their writing muscles.

Entries must be 2000-5000 words, original work written for the contest. Judging is out of 25 points:
* 5 points for conventions (spelling, grammar, capitalization)
* 5 points for theme (and staying within the word limit)
* 15 points for general critique (plot, characters, setting, writing style, etc)

Entrants usually have about 4-6 weeks to submit an entry; after the deadline, judges have 1 week to post their scores. Judging is anonymous. Each contestant posts his or her story on Free Text Host, then sends the URL to the anonymizer, who may be one of the contestants, via Private Messaging. The anonymizer then [=PMs=] the judge all the entries. The identities of the contestants are revealed after the judges have all posted their scores.

For organization's sake, the contests and their results are divided into groups of four and placed on separate pages. So far we have Writing Contests:

[[WritingContest/OneFour One-Four]], [[WritingContest/FiveEight Five-Eight]], and [[WritingContest/NineTwelve Nine-Twelve]].

!!Provides Examples Of:

* CosmeticAward: Prizes were offered during the Second Website/TvTropes Writing Contest, but dropped afterwards. Your reward henceforth is knowing you did a good job.
* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: Lets just say the first contest was a product of much looser days. It was an erotic writing event that probably wouldn't even be allowed in more current times and has no real connection to the rest of the contests. It did, however, serve as the inspiration for the next, more official contest and thus has the distinction of being counted as the first.
* SciFiGhetto: An inversion of this is actually the trend [[invoked]] as far as these contests go since many writers are avid sci-fi and fantasy fans. It got to the point where there was a long discussion on possibly discouraging stories of the speculative fiction variety.