Open Novella Journal 2024

Introduction

As someone who has participated in ONC every year since its inception, I find the contest a lot of fun. Yet, as I say this, ONC can be stressful as well. It's not just stressful for us writers, though, but also for the ambassadors judging the contest. Please, as you participate, remember that the ambassadors are volunteers on Wattpad. I bring this up, because well--

Some of you may have seen the super long contest disclaimer on various Wattpad contests, but the reason the contest disclaimers become so long compared to how the disclaimer used to be back when I first started participating in Wattpad contests is because of shenanigans pulled by certain participants during ONC every year. Seriously. The disclaimer used to just be about the ambassadors not being affiliated with Wattpad or its staff, although in the early days, there were some Wattpad staff who were ambassadors to help get the ambassador program and profiles up and running. This was always something disclosed to us, though, if the ambassador was on staff back in the day.

Of course, the other stressful thing to do is to overthink ONC, as the instructions are quite straightforward.

Another way writers stress themselves out is by

not succeeding the way they want to. This is particularly true for certain writers who thought they were being very clever with the prompts.

This isn't to say there aren't minor issues, such as the hiccup where one of the contests saw quite a few good writers eliminated because they made the mistake of publishing non-narrative parts, such as character lists, aesthetics, playlists, etc., prior to February 1st. Yes, this does include drafts started prior to that date, hence why this is now clarified under What Do I Write About?

And while it may seem daunting, read everything in the contest book. There is a lot of information there, but where an ambassador is unable to answer a question to maintain being unbiased towards any contestant, other participants like myself are more than willing to answer any question you have, or it might already be answered if you look at the attached comments.

Although, saying this, ONC isn't too complex in that the whole thing can be summed up as writing a 20-40k story within the time frame based on one of the prompts. One of the things I see writers get stuck on every year is basing their story off their prompt, but I'd sum up that particular problem as them having loosely based the story off the prompt and effectively thinking that will fly with the judges, but that is an entire entry of its own.

The other thing I've seen writers get stuck on is not passing a round, in particular the first round, which I'll get into later on, as well as the guidelines as well as anything else I can think of.