I haven’t been doing much fiction writing lately, and almost no screenwriting. To combat this non-productivity, at the end of February, I signed up for my first Writing Battle.
Writing Battle works like this: At an appointed day and time, each participant is given a genre, an object and a character — and 72 hours to write a 1000-word story. After three days, writers turns in their stories, and each writer becomes a reader, charged with judging five writing duels over the course of a few weeks. Every few days, the reader is sent two stories and gives feedback to each before selecting a winner.
Somehow, the math works so that each story participates in 10 duels and ends up with a score out of ten—and gets 10 sets of feedback at the end.
The high scorers from the duels are pitted against each other with other judges and eventually there are winners in each genre.
Going into my first Writing Battle, I assumed that genre would mean that I would be asked to write science-fiction, or a romance or a comedy. But it turns out that genre is used to describe various tropes. In this case, the four genres were: False Utopia, Culinary Catastrophe, Buddy Cop, and Enemies to Lovers.
When I was assigned Enemies to Lovers, I re-read the guidelines more closely and saw that the contest describes itself as being a pop-culture contest. This cued me to wonder: Was Enemies to Lovers not just a creation of the contest, but something people knew about? An interwebs perusal informed me that despite the fact I’d never heard the term, many, many people do know about Enemies to Lovers— and have strong opinions about it, as evidenced by numerous Reddit threads like Enemies to Lovers- why is it so popular? and the Enemies to Lovers MegaThread.
I found a GoodReads list of The Best Enemies to Lovers books and downloaded the audio version of number one (The Hating Game) from the library.
I took one day to research. On the second day I wrote a draft I thought wasn’t bad. On day three I realized my draft was closer to 1500 words than 1000. I carved away 500 words and turned in my story minutes before the deadline.
The process of shortening my story by a third, combined with reading a generous selection of other people’s stories gave me a more tangible sense of scope, and what can and can’t be done in a 1000 words.
Reading the feedback on my own and other people’s stories and seeing which ones progressed into the finals allowed me a view into what readers responded to most—which was interesting, because predicting what readers will respond to is the perpetual game of the writing business. There is a balance that must be struck between having a concept that resonates and having the skill to execute it—without confusing, distracting or throwing impediments between readers and their enjoyment of that concept.
A screenwriter friend says, “C-level writing of an A-level concept will beat out A-level writing of a C-level concept.” Execs and agents talk about finding a concept that’s “sticky,” by which they mean it stands out to, and stays with a reader.
Although the hunt is always on for the ideas which will “stick” to the most people, there’s a lot of subjectivity in play. The stories that fared well in Writing Battle weren’t my favorite stories, or the best-written stories…
But the winning stories generally had some strong element—a strongly-drawn character or tragic twist. The writing was good enough to deliver on the premise. On top of this, the subject was one that could be captured within the scope of 1000 words.
In my first Writing Battle, I ended up winning six of my ten writing duels. This placed my story squarely in the middle of the pack. My story didn’t win any prizes, but I feel like I did: I have new knowledge of pop-culture genres, a first draft of a story I can expand upon, and a ten-person focus-group’s worth of feedback on my concept.
And it was fun!