{"id":358,"date":"2009-05-29T14:28:08","date_gmt":"2009-05-29T06:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/29\/the-3ds-to-winning-story-competitions-in-singapore\/"},"modified":"2010-08-11T13:06:54","modified_gmt":"2010-08-11T05:06:54","slug":"the-3ds-to-winning-story-competitions-in-singapore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/29\/the-3ds-to-winning-story-competitions-in-singapore\/","title":{"rendered":"The 3Ds to winning story competitions in Singapore"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mind you, a disclaimer, I&#8217;m totally <em>not<\/em> a judge of any official writing events or an award winning writer or some teacher or whatever. Heck, you can even see that I&#8217;m not writing &#8220;proper&#8221; here. I am just <em>me<\/em>. A normal typical person.<\/p>\n<p>Okay, I had to laugh insanely a bit there at the previous line.<\/p>\n<p>ANYWHO! Yes, from my observations, you need the 3Ds to win story competitions in Singapore. Mind you, the 3Ds don&#8217;t count if it has a specific genre like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/16\/asian-chic-lit-competition\/\" target=\"_blank\">chic-lit<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/09\/renaissance-romance-writing-competition\/\" target=\"_blank\">romance<\/a> or science fiction (I forgot the name of that event but yes, there was a sci-fi comp for students last year or so).<\/p>\n<p>You need the 3Ds to win in open story competitions where you&#8217;re allowed to write whatever story you want. Only you know, that&#8217;s not true. You&#8217;re allowed to write whatever story you want but the winners will always be the ones that have the 3Ds. What are they?<\/p>\n<p><strong>The 3Ds by Seriously Sarah: <\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Descriptive<\/li>\n<li>Dramatic<\/li>\n<li><strong>Depressive<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s no way around it. Descriptive is a given, it&#8217;s <strong>good<\/strong> to describe things in a story especially if they&#8217;re in a short story format. It gives vivid imagery of what&#8217;s happening. Though, if you start describing every single thing and in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Purple_prose\" target=\"_blank\">purple prose<\/a>, for example:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><em>Her crystalline tears flowed down like waterfalls upon the surface of her alabaster cheek. A cheek so fair and fine that it blablabla&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>You get the idea&#8230; Too much in the wrong way would be <em>wrong<\/em>. The next bit is to be dramatic. It makes things interesting, non? The story needs to smack you in the face that you&#8217;ll go &#8220;Oh gosh! I need to read more!&#8221;. Well, you might not say &#8220;Oh gosh!&#8221; but something to that point.<\/p>\n<p>The first two points works in any of the fictional story competitions and it <em>would<\/em> be great if you did do that. The third D however works in the others.<\/p>\n<p>The last bit is depressing.<\/p>\n<p>Literally.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, I have noticed and attended award ceremonies for said competitions. Every time the results are revealed and the stories are read, I go &#8220;Oh, good grief&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Yes.<\/p>\n<p>Good grief indeed.<\/p>\n<p>It is depressing like heck. Which is to say the stories <em>are<\/em> good but somehow are always depressing. Someone dies, is dying, dead. Or the characters&#8217; relationship in the story dies, is dying, dead. The world dies, is dying, dead.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s other ways of making a depressing story besides making things dead. As long as you make people sob or think depressive thoughts&#8230; YOU KNOW YOU ARE A WINNER.<\/p>\n<p>Bonus points if you make it about the current trend of whatever bad is happening in the country at the moment or a social issue of sorts. Double bonus points if you can make it nationalistic and of <em>any<\/em> social\/governmental\/educational\/etc system we have.<\/p>\n<p>Like someone falls through the cracks of getting help of a social service and then dies or something. Sprinkle in of the good times the character has had before said tragedy happens and you&#8217;ll get a heart breaker.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, if you can&#8217;t tell by now, I can&#8217;t write depressing things. Unless motivated or PMSing. Usually the latter though. Also my dilemma is that even these things win competitions and get into the book of winners or whatever&#8230; Who buys it? Or if not buy, who reads it?<\/p>\n<p>The world is not made up with just me so I could be <em>wrong<\/em> but&#8230; most of those who&#8217;d buy or read the book of said depressing things are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>school types where they go &#8220;Oooh, our (insert person) has won!&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>school types who analyze said work in lieu of literature\/English class<\/li>\n<li>literary types who go ooh to add to their collection<\/li>\n<li><strong>not the common person off the street<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>people like me who&#8217;d go &#8220;ARRGH, ARRGH?!!?&#8221; and are looking at previous winners&#8217; entry to see what to write<\/li>\n<li>people who actually do like the collection of said stories<\/li>\n<li>depressing people<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Maybe not the last one but in any case, not the common person off the street! Still&#8230; you know even if it&#8217;s no Harry Potter, the prizes for the competitions of open genre-d stories are VERY tempting. So if you want to win them, remember the 3Ds!<\/p>\n<p>Ps. If you&#8217;re a judge or whatever for big open genre-d fictional short stories and want to say, &#8220;No! We <em>do<\/em> have happy entertaining stories too!&#8221; then, yessss please tell us which competitions are these okay?<\/p>\n<p>Pps. If the upcoming competitions ever do <em>have<\/em> a true non-depressing story that makes people want to read it for fun, tell me too because that would be a pretty nice entry to read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mind you, a disclaimer, I&#8217;m totally not a judge of any official writing events or an award winning writer or some teacher or whatever. Heck, you can even see that I&#8217;m not writing &#8220;proper&#8221; here. I am just me. A normal typical person. Okay, I had to laugh insanely a bit there at the previous &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/29\/the-3ds-to-winning-story-competitions-in-singapore\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The 3Ds to winning story competitions in Singapore<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[35,97],"class_list":["post-358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-competition","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pf5tJ-5M","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2331,"href":"https:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions\/2331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seriouslysarah.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}