smashcon | Advice for Authors

Remember to check out the competition guidelines here

Here are some tips to help you suggested by our previous years' judges:

Use of prompts:
Writers are encouraged to interpret and incorporate their choice of prompt into their story however they like. Be creative. As long as it is obvious how the prompt relates to your writing and it is incorporated into the story rather than just being an afterthought or just used as a sentence within the story the judges will likely mark this area fairly high.

Fanfic summary:
The summary should be a tag line that entices people to want to read your story. It can be a short quote from the story or a short description that doesn't recount every detail of the story. It must relate to your story. Your summary is generally the thing to encourage readers to want to look at your story so if it isn’t interesting and/or intriguing few people will actually open your story to read.

Formatting:
A large block of text without paragraph spacing is extremely difficult to read. At minimum, capital letters should be used at the beginning of sentences and for names of people and places. Be aware of what you find easy to read and try something similar. Also note that if your word document formats an empty space between paragraphs this will not be displayed when put up on the website so make sure you hit enter twice at the end of a paragraph.

See here or here for examples of readable formatting.

SMASH! displays the stories using simple html tags for formatting, for example:
Example, Example, Example (without the spaces).
The conversion process to put entries online is a lot faster if authors include these html tags within their entries.

Although there is no judging criteria made particularly for a fanfic’s format, the formatting will impact judging of the overall impression of the story and quality of writing.

But most importantly:
Have fun! Be creative!