TVTropes Writing Contests - Discussion Thread

Looks mostly the same as the old categories, except splitting General Critique into Story Elements and Writing Style. I don't have any objection, but how many points is each category worth now? General Critique had the lions share at 15.

How does this sound?

• Composition: 10

• Story Elements: 15

• Writing Style: 15

• Theme/Match to Writing Prompt: 10

For a total possible of 50.

Edited by DeMarquis on Oct 17th 2020 at 1:25:11 PM

Yeah, that sounds good to me.

Works for me.

Sure.

Alright, so that's worked out. If we can decide on a theme then we'll be set to go.

We have as suggestions:

1.Gender
2. What went bump in the night?
3. Everything went according to plan until...

I am partial to #2 myself, but if the people who suggested them elaborate on what they meant for everybody that'd be great. And if anyone has more suggestions shoot them up!

Oh, my suggestions were just examples of what a good theme could look like. But if you want to run with either them, sure, I'm cool with that.

Personally, I'm not partial to writing prompts which are that specific. I like broader, more thematic prompts that allow me to take the story in almost any direction I want. I liked "gender" because I've never written a story focused on that before, and it would be a challenge. But if more specific is what you all want, then how about "flawed female protagonist"?

Thanks for the invitation, Parable, I will try to participate if I get the time.

The reason that specific writing prompts are better is that it's more of a challenge — which, like, part of any contest is to challenge the participants. It's why NaNoWriMo has the ridiculous goal of writing 50,000 words in a month, and why the 48-Hour Film Project requires teams to use specific story elements in their films and write, shoot, edit, and submit their films within 48 hours.

It also makes judging easier.

So yeah. I'll keep pushing for more specificity. "Flawed female protagonist" is still too broad of a topic.

I'll also add that if a participant doesn't like the chosen theme, they're free to ignore it and forfeit the 10 points (or less if they happen to circle around the theme!)

Edited by AwSamWeston on Oct 20th 2020 at 10:25:16 AM

Oh, hey, I got an invitation to try writing again, if there's still open spots I think it could be nice.

As far as the themes go, I kind of agree with AwSamWeston here, kind of. From experience, I can tell you that at least until a certain point where it's too specific having the theme be somewhat limiting results in more creativity as people try to write something that fits the thing, and that the one problem with it is that some themes simply require being able to write about things that need a specific style to write and this may hit some writers more than it hits other ones.

However, on the other hand, the ability of the writer to limit a broad theme into something of a writing prompt that they will then expand on, write about, is also something of value. So in the end it's really mostly about being able to judge the works more easily ... and that is alright, I think.

Edited by Kazeto on Oct 23rd 2020 at 1:46:38 PM

I would prefer a "writing-prompt"-like theme of the contest, myself. For me, at least, a more narrow theme makes it easier to come up with stuff, unless it's too narrow.

As an alternative, this being a Tv Tropes Writing Contest, we could ask the contestants to base their stories around the usage of some trope (we could even use our Random Trope button for that) or tropes.

Also, I do think that a too wide definition of a contest theme would make judging more difficult, since the judges might have trouble fitting various interpretations of a theme into a singular judging system.

I like where your head's at, Millership, with the Random Trope button.

I'd just throw up the caution sign because you can get some really weird combinations. For example, I just hit the button twice and got Hand Puppet and Nanomachines — which, while you could write an awesome story with those tropes, it does run dangerously close to the "too specific" threshold that Millership and Kazeto brought up.

So if the judges do base it around the Random Trope button, we'd have to hit it like 5 times and let each contestant pick the two (or more?) tropes that speak to them. And that's if we decide to go that route in the first place.

Edited by AwSamWeston on Oct 24th 2020 at 10:51:02 AM

I distinctly remember we had a tool in older versions of the site that generated trope-based writing prompts - a whole batch of tropes divided into categories - the setting, who the protagonist/antagonist is, the basic plot, etc. If that still works, we could use that for our contest.

If we did, I've never seen it in my life.

Ta-da!

So, anyone still in on this?

Yep, still on board.

Sure!