Timewaster's Guide Archive
Local Authors => Brandon Sanderson => Topic started by: EUOL on February 14, 2007, 12:50:06 AM
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Folks,
My wife is an 8th grade English teacher, and she's having her students write stories as part of their homework this year. A lot of them are writing fantasy stories, and she's wondering if anyone knows of any magazines or contests that are 1) Legitimate 2) focus on young adult writing and 3) would consider fantasy. The kids don't have to publish/win, of course--she just wants a place for them to send their stories.
Any ideas? Writers of the Future, of course, is a nice place for amateurs, but it would be nice if there were a young adult only contest.
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I won the NCTE and OCTELA writing awards when I was in 8th grade. Looking at the NCTE page, it seems that it's horribly undernominated, as a third (221) of the people nominated for it last year got the award, and they allow one winner for each U.S. Representative district. The OCTELA was a bigger affair, with only like 20 winners in the state of Ohio, and an awards ceremony in the state capital. I can't find a similar contest for UCTELA; they seem to just default to NCTE.
The story I wrote that won was science fiction and explained why bathtubs drip at night. It was horribly cliched and does so many of the things how-to-write-sf-stories guides tell you to never, never do...
Ohio also has Power of the Pen (http://www.powerofthepen) which is a great writing contest at the local and regional levels but hopelessly political and not at all uncorrupt in scoring at the state level.
Anyway, there seems to be a decent list of contests here (http://www.davidbarrkirtley.com/teenwriter/Contests.html)
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I know Cicada (of the Cricket family) will accept YA written work, but it must be high caliber. After all, the magazine is the top (and almost only) YA literary magazine. But they publish fantasy and everything else. Here are their submission guidelines. (http://www.cricketmag.com/pages_content.asp?page_id=22)
They've started a new thing called The Slam (http://www.cricketmag.com/activity_display.asp?id=207) that apppears to be an online teen writing forum. I just glanced at it, didn't read anything, but it could be a place for her students to check out.
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I've heard a lot of talk on listservs about this sort of thing, but never really paid any attention to it because I never was directly involved. You should tell her to join the YALSA listserv (a listserv for young adult librarians--I'm sure if she googled it she could find it) and post her question there--the librarians are so knowledgeable and welcome anyone involved with young adults to discuss on the list anything to do with young adult lit, including YAs writing it.
And also they should keep an eye out for the HarperTeen fanlit contests, and see if there's anything appealing to her class there. I'm not sure how often they run them.
We've talked about running a contest at some time too, and I'll let you know if we end up doing anything like that. It tends to be high-maintenance for a publisher to do that, though, so at this point it's just an idea that's been floating out there for a while.
There is something else out there that is at the tip of my tongue, but I can't remember what it is. But I think the YALSA librarians would be your best bet at finding a specific wealth of information about that.
Oh, and I got nominated for the NCTE contest as well in high school, and I highly recommend it as a great boost to a kid to be nominated by a teacher. I don't believe I won anything, but the fact that my teacher chose me out of all my classmates to submit my poetry (which, to be honest, sucked, looking back, but at the same time, to be charitable to my 16-year-old self, wasn't that bad for where I was)--anyway, the fact that she specifically took me aside and encouraged me to enter the contest has made a difference to me to this day.
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I remember when I was in school we used to have a thing called the Young Authors competition, but I don't know, since I never entered it myself, if it was a local competition in our area of Washington, or if it was something larger. But it was a great moral boost for the kids who did enter, because I honestly don't remember anything being turned away for any reason. Again though, this was about 20-25 years ago, I am not sure if the competition even still exists.
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I remember when I was in school we used to have a thing called the Young Authors competition, but I don't know, since I never entered it myself, if it was a local competition in our area of Washington, or if it was something larger. But it was a great moral boost for the kids who did enter, because I honestly don't remember anything being turned away for any reason. Again though, this was about 20-25 years ago, I am not sure if the competition even still exists.
I think I may know what you're talking about. I grew up in Woodinville and remember entering a writing contest when I was like in second grade. All the kids in the family did (four of us) and we all won an award. Mine was for "Best Animal Story" (it was about a family who loved their cat and pampered her until they got a kitten and paid attention only to the kitten. So the cat ran away and the family realized she was gone and was upset and started looking for her. When she returned, they were so happy to see her and realized they hadn't been paying attention, so from then on they made sure they gave attention to both cats).
Anyway, seeing as each one in my family who submitted won an award (we even got a trophy with the award on it), I think it was to boost kids' self-esteem, not really a contest. This would have been about 19 years ago.
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I think that you may be right about that, but, I never entered so I didn't really know how it worked. I really don't have a creative bone in my body, much to logical sometimes ;) But I do enjoy a good story, I can visualize what I read so I am always looking for something interesting to occupy myself with.
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It is possible not to win Young Authors. My third-grade entry didn't win, perhaps because it contained an odd conglomeration of My Little Pony and the sci-fi show V.
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A couple of friends referred me to these markets:
http://www.stonesoup.com/send-work/ (Accepts submissions from students through age 13, so some 8th-graders would qualify.)
http://www.theswordreview.com/guidelines.php (Gives special consideration to student submissions.)
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That is a very, ummm, interesting combination of stories Ookla :) Now I have an image in my head of pony-skin wearing reptiles, eating all the small vermin and killing all the humans. Am I even close, or did you go a different way with that? You really have piqued my curiousity with that description.
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I think my pony aliens were non-reptilian, sadly. And they weren't evil.
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Was that the one with Super Rabbit and his invisible roommate Fred? I thought that part was quite original.
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Yes... But anyway, that was third grade, so it's not really within the scope of this thread.