Learning from the NYC Midnight 100-Word Challenge Overall Winners

In preparation for the NYC Midnight 100-word challenge*, which launches on March 20, I've been studying winning stories from recent years and revisiting the judges' comments on my entries from past competitions. 

I'm a sucker for most of the NYC Midnight challenges, but the 100-word competition is my favorite. The judges cut you no slack: they expect to see a distinct beginning, middle and end; a conflict with emotional stakes; and a character who undergoes a change. They expect every word to earn its place (tip: kill all the adverbs). 

Here's what I noted about the winning stories:

They tend to be constructed less like miniature short stories and more like compressed scenes. The writer places the reader right inside a specific moment, uses vivid concrete detail to anchor the scene, allows dialogue or action to imply the larger story, and ends with a line that reveals the emotional meaning of the moment.  

The judges don't like anything that feels forced or contrived. The emotional stakes are often hinted at in the opening lines, and the last line makes sense of it all. The required action and word feel essential to the story rather than forced.

There are often layers of meaning. There's the thing that's happening, the thing it represents, and the emotional load the character or narrator is carrying. Like the "The Perfect Sourdough Loaf” by Christy Hartman, which uses sensory details associated with baking to anchor the narrative in something tangible, but the act of baking bread is a metaphor.

Another consistent feature is strategic omission. The writers leave critical information unstated and trust the reader to infer it. In “Flight,” by Sam Baldassari, the story never explicitly states the narrator's job, what's happening with the girl, or why her plight feels personal to the narrator, but the breadcrumbs are all there. The restraint creates depth without adding words. I also think it's more satisfying for us as readers when the writer trusts us to figure it out or let us  add our own interpretation.

The judges like inventive structures, where the narrative is built around another recognizable form, like a recipe, instructions, or a list. One example is "A Recipe for You in the New World" by Nicholas Marconi. The recipe format does the heavy lifting: each line fulfills the “instruction” format while revealing the emotional story of an immigrant family adapting to life in a new country. 

This story is also a great reminder that the title is free real estate, and we can use it to advance the story. It can reveal a lot. The title, "A Recipe for You in the New World," sets up the whole story so we immediately understand what's going on when we read the first lines.

But perhaps the most striking thing I noticed about the winning stories is the poetry.  Prose is the language of narrative; poetry is the language of distillation. 100-word stories blur the line between the two and force us to apply as much craft as creativity.

*If you're unfamiliar with NYC Midnight, it's an organization that hosts writing competition for storytellers. The focus is mostly on flash and micro fiction, but it also hosts short story and screenwriting challenges. What I love about it is the opportunity to grow as a writer: You write to a prompt in assigned genre, which forces you to experiment with craft; you must adhere to a specific word count with a relatively short deadline, which forces focus and discipline; and, whether you advance or not, you get feedback on your story from three judges on what worked and what didn't. It's a great way to grow as a writer. And so much fun!