How to Tell Your Story For Contests
And prompts to get you started
People often say to me, “I’m not that great at writing personal essays. If I entered a contest, I wouldn’t win.” But as a writing mentor and judge of several international contests, some of the best personal essays I’ve read have been from brand new writers!
At their basic level, personal essays are just writing down one of your stories, and we all know about stories. Storytelling is an ancient art and one you do all the time, even if you don’t realize it.
- You tell a story when you talk about old memories with your friends and family.
- You tell a story when you write in your journal, or in a social media post.
- You tell your partner or best friend a story when you talk about your day.
Written storytelling can be refined — my old ones are embarrassing! But we hear stories all around us from the time we’re born. I don’t think it’s the storytelling that’s the problem.
It’s the writing it down that’s intimidating.
It’s hard to know where to start, where to end, how much to include…and will the readers even care about your story? Hitting publish brings up a whole other level of doubt and fear, right!
Yip, intimidating.
That’s why we’re running a contest
Ash Jurberg and I run Inspired Writer and we create personal essay challenges because we want to encourage writers to give this genre a go. We’re both quite passionate about it.
This year we’re using the challenge as an opportunity to throw $100 cash at our wonderful writing community to show we appreciate you (we know it’s not much, but it’s a start!).
It’s also a chance for writers to learn more about personal essays and how to make an even bigger impact with them. Personal essays are popular with editors and readers, so it’s worthwhile mastering them.
Here’s some quick tips:
- With narrative-based personal essays you need a story! (A true one.) Story is the main thing we want to see.
- Show us. Take us with you on your journey. We’re not so into lectures. Is anyone?
- We’d love to see how you grew or changed from the start to the end, too. How’d this situation make you wiser?
- Have fun and don’t worry about perfection. Although, it’s a good idea to run it through Grammarly or Prowriting Aid. Basic mistakes are distracting!
- Read some of our past winners.
Don’t know where to start?
It’s only 2000 words (max.) so you’ve probably only got space for a single situation — one scene in your life. If you’re the kind of person who likes to work to prompts, here are a few for you:
- Tell me about a time you wish you’d done things differently.
- What keeps you up at night?
- What’s one of your biggest fears?
- What was the last big fork in the road (big decision) you had to take?
- Pick an object in your house, start there.
- Think back two years ago (before the pandemic) — what’s a significant day that stands out?
Try setting a timer and write on one of the prompts for 10 minutes. You might surprise yourself with what emerges. Just like that, you’ll have your first draft. Then all you have to do is build on and refine it.
Update: The Inspired Writer 2022 Personal Essay Challenge is now closed. You can keep up to date with any future challenges here and grab some freebies!
Kelly xx