Genius in a Bottle’s Prompted Writing Challenges

Rules and guidelines

If you’re here, you think you might want to take part in Genius in a Bottle’s prompt challenges. Let me clear away any doubts for you. You do!

And what’s more, we really want you to as well. Throwing your brilliant mind behind random thematic prompts and seeing what your soul can churn out makes for great exploration, and we believe the work will make for great reading.

By taking part you will be widening your scope of topics in your writing portfolio. Your readers will have a variety of things to read about and enjoy. The spice of life, if you will.

I’m sure, many of you have participated in prompt challenges before so you know how this works. However, let me go through it for those who are new to the concept.

Every fortnight, on Wednesdays, we will offer a new prompt theme. You are then invited to produce a piece of poetry or prose, fiction or non-fiction, in response to the theme. Simple, right?

There are few things to remember.

Rules for submissions

1) This challenge can only be edited by Victor Sarkin at Genius in a Bottle. We can only offer the rewards and promotions at Genius in a Bottle. We cannot publish pieces or reward writers who self publish or publish at another publication, so those pieces have to remain external to the challenge. Only pieces submitted to Genius in a Bottle will be considered for the challenge. If inviting other writers from outside the publication, please ensure they are aware of this.

2) When choosing tags for your piece, please make one of the tags ‘GiaBprompt’. Please make another, either ‘Poetry’, ‘Fiction’ or ‘Non-fiction’ as appropriate. We may have to exclude entries if not correctly tagged, so please tag this way, for our benefit.

3) Please refer to the prompt in subtitle. Feel free to copy this as a template ‘GiaB prompt # [insert prompt number and theme here]’

Subtitles should be formatted as subtitles, and have only the first word and proper nouns capitalised. Please avoid the usage of punctuation also.

4) Your title can be to your liking, but please format it according to Medium’s guidelines for curation, namely that Titles should have all major words capitalised.

5) Please ensure a graphic follows the subtitle, and is properly attributed.

This means that the name of the artist and the permissions for usage are clearly declared. Stock photo libraries like Unsplash contain royalty-free images so permissions are implied if the image is from these types of databases

If you are unsure about how to attribute images, please just use Unsplash to be on the safe side.

6) We want to maintain strict piece lengths so they don’t run too long. If you could help us by adhering to those, that would be very much appreciated. These limits will not include kickers, titles, subtitles, and graphic attributions.

Poetry: no more than 30 lines.

Fiction/ non-fiction: no more than 750 words.

7) After the piece, GiaB would really love it if you could tag up to ten writers who you feel might enjoy reading your piece and participate in the challenge. Readers are welcomed from all over and are not restricted to existing GiaB writers. We want to have writers who inspire you at GiaB. We want to publish and read their work too. Please provide an invitation to the writers you tag rather than simply list them. It’s more welcoming and Medium-friendly.

In order to tag a person, simply type the ‘@’ symbol and start typing the name. you will be asked to choose the name from a drop-down list.

And that, my dear writers, is all you have to do.

As with all pieces submitted to GiaB, if written with sufficiently good use of written English language, and if bearing literary merit, it will almost certainly be published. Please refer to GiaB’s Submission Guidelines for more information about the drafts we accept.

Rewards and promotions

All published entries to these prompt challenges will be promoted the same as any published piece, on Twitter and social media.

From the entries we receive, we will select five pieces that the editors feel have the strongest merit in three divisions, and additionally promote them. We will select five entries from writers who are:

Established regular writers for GiaB. You know these writers well. They have certainly written something you have enjoyed in the past.

From outside GiaB, who have chosen to participate and become writers for GiaB through the friend tags you have added to your piece.

New to GiaB or submit less regularly. Sometimes writers do not publish much and can seem to blend into the background despite possessing great literary potential. We want to shine a spotlight on these writers too.

In the case where we receive less submissions than we require to promote the five best in each category, we will need to reduce this to the best two.

The more widely the challenge is promoted by each writer and the more people are invited to participate via tags, the more responses we will get and, therefore the more writers we can promote.

Additionally, we will be considering these prompt entries for the special ‘Geniuses of the Month’ promotions.

Thank you for reading these guidelines and rules, and for abiding by them.

We look forward to enjoying your submissions, publishing them, and promoting your work and your successes to all the writers and readers on Medium and further.