We have a winner! Plus, free PDF on editing.

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Dear Participants,

Congratulations to everyone who competed in 7 Day Story Writing Challenge #12! Writing and submitting a story in just seven days is no small feat, and everyone who participated should be incredibly proud of what they accomplished.

The competition at the top was incredibly stiff, with 15 stories all vying for the top spot. The quality of submissions sparked much discussion and some truly contentious debates over who should win. In recognition of this exceptional standard, we’ve decided to extend the prizes this time around, awarding prizes to the second and third-place entries as well. This means you’ll also be able to read these stories on our website.

OK, time for a bit of general feedback from the competition as a whole. One thing that became clear as we reviewed the entries is that many of you submitted truly excellent stories. However, a common theme among the submissions was the presence of issues of editing.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that writing and editing are two almost distinct abilities, which is why “editor” exists as a profession. However, self-editing is still an essential skill for all writers to develop, especially when entering writing competitions.

In a writing competition, the judges are going to be looking for well-edited and polished stories—stories that are publication-ready. But even beyond competitions, self-editing is still an important skill because, when a story has significant editing issues, it creates a barrier for the reader, preventing them from fully appreciating the story’s strengths. So, even when submitting to agents and publishers, where perfect editing isn’t actually required, if your writing has considerable editing issues, this could prevent the story’s true potential from shining through.

And this is where many entries for this challenge struggled. While the storytelling was excellent, some entries couldn’t shine the way they deserved to because issues of editing were overshadowing the story.

Now, this feedback isn’t meant to discourage or shame anyone! In fact, we hope it will do the opposite and actually be encouraging. Remember, this isn’t a reflection of your ability as writers—it’s simply a somewhat separate and distinct area to focus on as you continue to grow and develop your craft.

Furthermore, as we mentioned earlier, just completing this challenge is an incredible accomplishment. Crafting a full story in only seven days is no small feat, and it’s absolutely something to celebrate. Editing, however, takes time, and in a fast-paced contest like this, it’s perfectly understandable that many entries might have needed just a bit more time spent on editing to reach their full potential.

We want to emphasise that if your story didn’t make it to the finals, it’s not because it wasn’t a good story. When we submit to writing competitions, it’s easy to imagine judges simply dividing the stories into “good” and “bad.” But that’s not how it works—especially in a challenge like this. Instead, it’s often about distinguishing between good stories that are polished and fully “finished” and good stories that just needed a little more work.

So, to support you in this area, we’re giving everyone reading this email the chance to grab our free PDF on editing at the sentence level. This is Lesson 22 in our upcoming course, How to Write Stories That Win Contests. This lesson provides a comprehensive look at how to self-edit fiction. This PDF is the most updated version of the lesson, so if you received this lesson a few weeks ago, we recommend downloading this newer version. We have made some small changes and added a few additional things.

For most of you who didn’t reach the final round of judging for this contest—and even for some of you who did—it’s very likely there are at least a few things in this lesson that could help you do even better in the next contest you enter. And we definitely recommend paying particular attention to the sections on sticky sentences, redundancies, missing transitions, and temporal misalignments. Those were absolutely the most common editing issues that came up in this contest.

You can download the PDF for free by clicking here: Lesson Twenty-Two: Editing at Sentence Level

We hope this resource will be helpful as you continue to refine your craft. The stories you submitted were genuinely excellent, and even the ones that needed more editing showed so much potential. The judges could clearly see the fantastic stories underneath, so it’s now simply a matter of learning how to clear away the “weeds” to let those stories truly bloom. And, of course, ensuring you give yourself plenty of time during these challenges to focus on the editing process. Now, we do understand that not everyone has a lot of spare time, and that in a challenge like this, inspiration might only strike in the eleventh hour. And so, if you don’t find your name on the winner’s page this time around, please keep in mind that there’s a good chance you have a winning story on your hands, you simply might not have had the opportunity to give it the polish it deserves. That’s the beauty of storytelling—it’s a process, and stories can grow and improve over time. A story that doesn’t win today could go on to be a winner tomorrow, with just a little extra attention.

So, once again, congratulations to everyone who participated. Keep writing, keep editing, and keep pushing your stories towards greatness. We can’t wait to see what you’ll create next!