TROPE STORY FEST

Okay, so I just got this idea of a lil' thing I wanna do. Every Tuesday, I will post 5 tropes, and you all have to PM me a short story using them. I will announce the winner every Friday.

Here are the first 5:

Amnesiac Lover

Chekhov's Gunman

You Are Number 6

Insistent Terminology

Circus of Fear

ummm Ponies

Did you even read the instructions?

No no, I agree about the ponies.

I'm cruping you're wish

Is anyone gonna enter, at least?

Im cut off from proper wrighting sorry

Can someone pass the word?

BUMP BUMP BUMP!!!!

I'd consider doing this, but I'm notorious at picking something up on a whim and getting bored of it quickly unless I really like how it's going.

I might do it, I guess... I'm like that guy, though.

Okay, so I just got this idea of a lil' thing I wanna do. Every Tuesday, I will post 5 tropes, and you all have to PM me a short story using them. I will announce the winner every Friday.

Here are the first 5:

Amnesiac Lover

Chekhov's Gunman

You Are Number Six

Insistent Terminology

Circus Of Fear

You know what? I'm feeling moderately generous, so I'll tell you what you did wrong, and everyone can learn, eh?

First mistake: No one (or very few people) cares enough about your opinions to write you full stories every week, just so you can tell them if you think they're any good. Not that your opinions aren't as valid as anyone else's, but if someone is looking for opinions on their stories, they'd just post them and we all could critique them.

But Earth Sheep, how can I do this better?

If you must do a competition, give more of a deadline, and get more judges. There's only one problem, we already do those competitions. If you just want to judge people, you might be able to inquire in those topics as to whether you could be one, I don't know how that works.

Second: Having five tropes that everyone MUST use would probably lead to very same-y stories, especially when they're short enough to write and edit in a week.

But Earth Sheep, how can I do this better?

Maybe you could use seven tropes, and have everyone choose four they have to use? That way you'd get a lot of variation, but the stories are still vaguely similar. But you still have ^ that problem.

edited 19th Jul '11 7:20:06 PM by TheEarthSheep

Already do these competitions? Where?

Look here (I've handily archived them): TV Tropes Writing Contests

You're giving people a few scant days to do a story—only about half a week between Tuesday and Friday—when experience dictates that you need about six weeks to get a quorum of entries. (I could probably bang out one since I'm a fast writer, but only if absolutely nothing came up—a big if.)

You're holding contests weekly. We've been holding them quarterly. They could be more frequent because they're so popular (but not more than every 2 months, since that's how long they take)—but nobody, not even a pool of people, is going to be able to write a story every week.

You have a lot of criteria to shoehorn in, including some really specific ones (Circus of Fear). Not only will this make all the stories feel the same, but it will cue a lot of complaining and drastically reduce the number of people who can think of a story that fits the criteria (probably to 0). This was discovered in the first contest.

You might consider judging next time we hold one of our regular contests. Heck, you could host it.

edited 19th Jul '11 8:31:29 PM by jewelleddragon