Open Novella Journal 2024

Eliminated During the First Round? Why?

So, every year, someone starts this rumor that people get eliminated during the first round because they scored low, yet I've never seen any actual proof of this. I mean, someone can be eliminated simply because they checked their story as being co-written when it wasn't or not following through on submission as they thought.

These, by the way, are mistakes I've made during ONC.

As for why someone got nixed from ONC, I actually took the time to look at the stories I'd read, which got eliminated during the first round. Statistically, what I used was certainly a small sampling, but it's pretty much the pattern I've seen every year, and I'll go through the reasons, starting off with the ones that occurred the least to the ones that occurred the most.

Copyright Issue - This one is super rare. Still, I also had to jog my memory a bit regarding what the specific issue was, and for once, it wasn't, say, a Harry Potter fanfic taking the plot from the original books and making a few minor changes as they added in their OC, or they made Harry female. In this particular case, I found myself doing a double take because of what I read. made me instantly think of a trailer for a specific movie that I've not yet seen, and because of the similarities, I found myself wondering whether or not the story was too similar. (1 of 22 or 4.5%)

Formatting Issue - I can't remember the issue beyond the fact whatever formatting issue they had made the story difficult to read, but to be more specific, we're not talking here say spelling and grammar issues, but more like walls of text, although I don't recollect seeing walls of text since the first two years of ONC. It's also one of those super rare ones because people normally do, in fact, format correctly. (1 of 22 or 4.5%)

Word Count - There are ways to double-check the word count of a Wattpad story that I won't get into, but sometimes it can be plainly obvious, such as when a writer only has a short chapter for their first chapter with a couple of paragraphs that they didn't make 2k for their story. And sometimes it's a story I'm rooting for, that only got the first chapter up which is around 1-1.2k. (1 of 22 or 4.5%)

Trigger Issue - One of these stories was actually one I was rooting for, but I also don't think the trigger was the narrative, particularly since the said story was of the horror genre, but instead, the attached images. The second one was a story that opens up with a PTSD episode from the main character, but as a reader, I was left that the story would jump into an attempted rape scenario, although thankfully, I found myself proved wrong. Which, were this story marked mature this might have flown by the judges, but this was instead a story meant for anybody old enough to have an account on Wattpad to read, so not exactly something I'd see the ambassadors being comfortable putting in one of the ONC lists.  (2 of 22 or 9%)

Fanfic Issue - As a fanfic writer, there are upsides and downsides to writing for both well-known and unknown fandom, but for the better-known fandom such as Harry Potter the ambassadors judging our stories have some level of knowledge regarding the books and/or movies, but even for those who aren't, they can easily check certain facts via fandom wiki, such as how the typical age for a character to have magic manifest is at age seven, but there are also characters like Neville for whom no manifestation of magic was noticed by those around them.

The above fact ties into one of the stories I read where a child was identified as a squib, someone unable to use magic, before the age of six and thus was banished to another world. (I can be more specific as the story in question is deleted, but if the writer sees this they can go - oh, that's what I did wrong.)

Another involved, oh, and boy did I look forward to this one and may eventually do my own thing for this, was a story regarding Ariana Dumbledore being sent to the future, but the major disappointment was how she went from being a special needs character with special needs issues to being a normal girl.

As for the last, I can't remember off the top of my head, but I think I'll keep better notes this year. Basically, this one involves making major flubs with the canon that aren't the direct result of going AU, something which is more noticeable the more well-known a fandom is. But they're also as I noted above something that has a major impact on the story, such as a character being classified as something they shouldn't have been for the story's conflict, or a character's special trait being erased. 

Oh, wait. Found it. The story is still up, so I'll simply say the writer took a character with a specific occupation and then created original fiction they passed off as fanfic, but the characters bore no resemblance outside of jobs while giving other characters jobs they didn't even have which was weird. (3 of 22 or 13.6%)

Representation Issue - This could also be considered a trigger issue, to be honest, but I've separated it out because rep matters and that's why bad rep ends up being triggering. I'll be keeping better notes this year, but doing things like presenting disabled people as evil isn't going to fly unless, of course, the character who acts like disabled people are evil is an antagonist within the story. And before you ask, I think the story that did just that was by someone purposefully trying to troll the ambassadors, although I could be wrong. (3 of 22 or 13.6%)

Deleted - Sometimes  a writer just doesn't feel it for ONC, but of the stories I saw dissapear before the list came out there were four. (4 of 22 or 18.2%)

And now here comes the big one.

Prompt Issue - I'll be going into this later on, but nine of the stories I saw did not make it to the next round definitely had some prompt issues I was able to identify within the first 2k easily. (9 of 22 or 40.9%)

So, that's two-fifths of the stories. Another fifth was because the writer deleted it, and another fifth was because of trigger/rep issues, leaving the other fifth to other minor issues. And if one removes those that were deleted, around 50% was because of a prompt issue, while half of what remained was because of a trigger issue. This matches up with what I've seen in previous years, although--

I do have to admit writers got nixed less for the prompt issue prior to the ambassadors adding to the form. We filled out a question regarding what prompt we were using and how we implemented it in our story. This in turn means more writers are actually rightfully getting nixed for not using a prompt, which does tie to the fact the judges would get to the third round and discover that no, some of the stories didn't actually follow a prompt which in turn meant a writer who did follow a prompt got nixed in an earlier round.