We are sponsoring the NYC Midnight 2024 Short Story Challenge. This marks our continued partnership with the prestigious literary event.
Since 2002, NYC Midnight has organized each year Inspiring Challenges for Storytellers. Writers receive prompts and must adhere to specific time limits, ranging from 24 hours to 8 days, and word count restrictions. The challenges start and finish at 11:59 PM New York time, aligning with the event’s name.
This year, as the title sponsor, we will provide the top 10 finishers with a copy of iA Writer for iOS, macOS, or Windows.
About the Challenge
The Short Story Challenge (SSC2024) is now in its 18th year. It offers international writers the opportunity to compete with peers, receive professional feedback, and win great prizes.1
How it works
In the challenge, writers are randomly assigned to groups and given a genre, subject, and character to work with. After each round, judges select the top five from each group to move on to the next stage. Below is an overview of the contest:
- In the first round, writers receive a first assignment for a story of a maximum of 2,500 words to finish in eight days.
- In the second round, the selected writers move on to the second round where they receive a new assignment for a short story of 2,000 words in three days.
- In the third round, you’ll get new assignments, and have two days for a short story of 1,500 words. The judges select the finalists.
- The final assignment is for a story no longer than 1,250 words to be written in just 24 hours.
The 2024 challenge will start on January 19th with the 1st round and ends on September 12th with the results of the final round.2
Benefits
Besides helping you keep a regular writing habit, there are other good reasons to participate in NYC Midnight’s SSC2024:
- Receive feedback from the judges for every submission
- Gain access to the NYC Midnight writing community
- Writers retain all the rights to the stories they create
- Winners have their story published on the NYC Website
- Great prizes to win, from thousands of dollars to free writing tools
Registration for this year is open until January 18, 2024. For full details please check out the NYC Midnight website.
How iA Writer helps
In a contest with tight deadlines, it’s important to manage time and focus. Our app is loved by journalists and professional writers for many years because it is an app made for writing and nothing else. Here is how it can help you:
Focus Mode
The signature feature of iA Writer allows you to focus on one sentence or paragraph at a time. How does it work?
Stylecheck
Easily spot fillers, redundancies, or clichés that might be creeping into your text. Cut it down to the essentials. You can also create your custom patterns to highlight expressions that you want to avoid.
Syntax Highlight
Pinpoint awkward verbs, repetitive nouns, or the excessive use of certain parts of speech. How does this help?
Using Markdown, you can keep your hands on the keyboard and quickly format your work as you go. You can speed up your formatting using shortcuts. Word count will come in handy, too.
No AI!
SSC2024 rules ban using Artificial Intelligence (AI). With iA Writer, you can keep track of what is coming from you and what you pasted. Our brand new Authorship feature is available on Writer for macOS and iOS. It will be your most reliable ally in tracking the origin of your text and being sure that you keep and submit your own words.3
Are you ready to jump in the SSC2024? We will keep you motivated and inspired with related content on our Social Media all along the challenge. Good luck!
Download your free iA Writer trial for SSC2024
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The full list of the prizes is available here: SSC Prizes. ↩
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NYC Midnight, just like iA has been among the first to step back and carefully think about the use of AI in writing. They have updated their official rules to restrain the use of AI in their challenges as early as March 2023. ↩
