Could You Write The Next Big Story?

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of The Next Big Story with a grand prize of $100,000 for the best 3-page entry.

This is your ticket to a life of writing!

Welcome to the wonderful world of your imagination. Now’s the moment to get those wild and wicked thoughts onto a page and enter our prize!

The Next Big Story is part of our mission to bring fresh new voices to the world of storytelling. With the prize, we’re aiming to find the people out there who might self-exclude, or rule themselves out from getting a great idea down on paper. People who believe the risks are too high, the rewards too low, or those who are short on time or confidence. The size of the prize and how little writing is required should be enough to nudge people to give themselves a shot at starting to write a work of fiction, and we’re all for it. Because writing fiction is as much fun as you can have with your clothes on!

Why you should enter

Some of you reading this may have wanted to write a book since you were a kid. Some of you might be readers who think—I could do this. Some of you may be readers who think—how do they do this!  Whoever you are, wherever you are, you were raised on storytelling, you have been telling stories since you were knee-high, and you tell them every day when you get together with friends or colleagues.

Everything, everywhere, is story-shaped. It’s how we learn to make sense of the world. Stories involve change from good to bad or bad to good, and have a sense of innate justice to them that we call The End. In real life things don’t really end, but in fiction, there’s an ending that satisfies our sense of right and wrong.

The size of the prize and how little writing is required should be enough to nudge people to give themselves a shot at starting to write a work of fiction, and we’re all for it.
—Louise Dean

Whether you win or not, spending a few minutes making mischief with your words, hatching a plot, and enjoying some creative playtime could do you a lot of good. Writing fiction is a stay against normal life. For just a little while, we enter the land of imagination and lose our adult selves, letting go of the routine of drudgery and duty. It’s therapeutic to forget our troubles for an hour or so, but more than that, writing a story is a way to connect with a superpower we’re not really supposed to have—our shadow side. In fiction, you get to be the good guy and  the bad guy, which can be quite the release. It’s enormous fun to behave badly in fiction.

Hey, if it turns out that you have a good story, you might be able to sell it—for books, TV, or movies. People do. And while it’s not always a stable way to make a living, there’s a nice alchemy in turning your spare time into gold.

Anyone can write

By the way, it’s not true that you have to be super-smart, educated, or well-connected to get published. All you need is a good story—and the desire to learn. Anyone can learn how to write. At The Novelry, our team of published authors all learned to write.

What do you need? Simply, to want to give it a go, and one important guiding principle: story, story, story. Always put the story first. Forget about you and your life, and think about the kind of story you’d love to read.

That’s why we called this prize The Next Big Story, because a good book is all about the story, and knowing you have a good story is the best way to get your butt in the seat to see it through to ‘The End.’

Don’t rule yourself out of joining in the fun. Just bring the mischief!

Why us, why now?

At The Novelry, we’re all about getting people writing fiction. We help people find their story—and stay with it—all the way through to the end. We can even help you get noticed by agents and publishers. That’s because our team includes the very people who used to be the ‘gatekeepers’ to publishing. We have an in-house squad of former publishing editors from the major Big Five publishers like Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, and more, so we know what it takes to get a manuscript ready for submission and set up for success. While our courses aren’t cheap, we believe our program is good value for your money. If becoming an author is important to you, or you’re looking for an MFA alternative that delivers on a finished, publishing-ready manuscript, we’re here for you.

And there’s more.

Everyone in the publishing industry and beyond, through to TV and film, wants bold and exciting ideas from fresh new voices. They don’t want wordy old wordsmiths or philosophizing poets—they want real people telling edge-of-the-seat stories.

But real people, with day jobs and kids, often can’t afford to invest in a course or take the time to write a damn novel! So the source material in the industry is a small pool when it should be an ocean teeming with pirate boats!

Because we’ve been helping the industry find new authors for a while, we’re well-placed to know what agents and publishers want, but we’ve decided to take to the high seas, casting our net far and wide to bring home the treasure.

‍This is a big cash prize.

We want to be real. Money matters. It can buy you time.

So, for those people who think they don’t have the time to get started, or the money to have the time to see it through, or the support and guidance they need to do so, we’re offering a life-changing sum of money and the support of our famous Finished Novel Course to get that novel done!

Don’t count yourself out

We’re giving you five tips to get started—clues to what we and the industry at large are looking for from a story. Don’t overthink it! Just begin it. Have a few turns at it before you hit submit.

We’ve kept the entry price as low as we can, so you can enter as many times as you want. As we always say to our writer members at The Novelry: be yourself, only more so. Use a natural storytelling voice. You know how to spin a yarn. We’re storytelling animals, and you tell stories every day. Just try to tell a whopper.

Writing fiction is a stay against normal life. For just a little while, we enter the land of imagination and lose our adult selves, letting go of the routine of drudgery and duty. It’s therapeutic to forget our troubles for an hour or so.
—Louise Dean

We’re only asking for the first three pages, but you’re going to want to be able to see this as a book or a movie. It needs to be going somewhere, and of course, it doesn’t need to end! You’ll be writing the first three pages. Leave us wanting more.

Read our top five tips, the Five Ps of Prize Winning, at our prize page and find out who’s on our panel of judges! They’re famous names in the book world!

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It could be you!

You might cook up something magical while you’re defrosting dinner. You might overhear the first line in the supermarket. You might spot a villain in the rearview mirror. The end of your story might come to you while you floss.

Writers can do anything. They can create a circus in the yard, make summer flowers grow in winter, commit crimes that go unpunished, turn enemies into friends, redeem the wicked, and raise the dead!

It’s simpler than you think. Writers paint with words—they bring people to life, they give them problems, then they take them on a journey from what they want to what they need, and they deposit them and their readers back into lives that have ever so slightly changed, bringing them safely home from a life-changing adventure.

So, get that first sentence down, sit with it, then add to it sentence by sentence, word by word, and remember the glorious thing about fiction—anything can happen!

All you need is a maximum of 1,500 words at the beginning of a story to give us a sense of a longer story, a book. Spending time on a strong start is the best use of your time as a writer, so keep playing with it before you submit. (Although you can submit as many times as you like, you can’t edit your entry after submission.)

Generally speaking, 1,500 words is about three pages. You can use an online word counter to check how many there are. (And by the way, this article is just under 1,500 words long, just so you know.)

Please don’t end mid-sentence. Think it through and leave us somewhere that makes sense.

Above all else, leave us wanting to know what happens next! We’re betting many of you will find that the urge to keep writing that story is irresistible. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Enter the prize!

Find out more now at thenovelry.com/prize.

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