Standing out in a contest is hard, and it’s harder when you are taking part in a creative writing contest. Your efforts in the story might die down at the introduction part itself, just because you have started with some cliché description. 

If you are looking to establish yourself as a story writer, you might look for the on-going contests that happen online or offline. Taking part in them, you will understand the types of stories that get posted and the ones that are getting chosen as the winner. After attempting in 2 or 3, you will understand the pattern and will start to write accordingly. Here, you can check the below tips to write well for writing contests. 

Skip the weather part

If you just go through some story posting sites, you might get to see, writers have started their stories with the description of the weather. It can be like, ‘In a stormy evening’ or ‘the night was dark’, or maybe the cliché ‘Once upon a time’. These parts do not stand out in creative writing contests. You can always go for the ones that talk about the people and the conflict or situation they are in. This will grab the attention of the readers, as they would want to know more about the problem. 

The first paragraph

You must know that your readers are impatient, so they won’t go for some futile blabbering, they will look for some excitement that uncovers fully at the last. To keep up the suspension, you have to read some books or some other stories and check their styles of building the suspicion. You can jump right into the characters and their conflict in the first paragraph and then start to build the story towards the end. This will get your story approved in the first paragraph. 

Ghost stories

You might oppose but coming up with a horrifying ghost and their ‘cool sweat building’ activities are hard to make other than making it a cliché. Like you, other people also think writing a spooky story is easy also like you, everyone who wants to write a ghost plot wants to stand out. Not everyone can become the winner of the Free Writing Contests, that’s why you have to shed the plot from your mind and come up with something that has humans in it. However, if you already have a ghost in the story, try making the plot a bit mysterious, so that it’s hard to detangle the knots until the end. 

Other things you have to keep in mind while participating in any creative writing contests, you must avoid using the names of celebrities, and write in simple sentences.