How To Win A Vocal Challenge

Truth be told, I’m glad I didn’t win my first challenge. Sounds weird, right?

Why am I glad I didn’t win my first challenge?

Because, if I’m being honest, the first story I entered in a Vocal challenge was mediocre. If I had been successful with that attempt, I most likely would have stayed writing in that style, never branching out. I probably wouldn’t have connected to the larger writing community and made friends from Vocal. I wouldn’t have grown as a writer or editor. I definitely wouldn’t be writing a series I’ve fallen in love with, or any of the other positive things that have come from that failure.

The first challenge I entered was the Little Black Book challenge. When I wrote my entry, the only people I had to give me feedback were friends and family. Because of this, most of the feedback was good. I don’t know if this was because they were looking at it with eyes of love(therefore, subconsciously overlooking the faults) or if they wanted to be supportive and not hurt my feelings. But the reality was that what I had was great concepts, with poor execution. Much of the roughness of this story was due to my attempt to curtail the story to the word restrictions of the challenge. In the end, I ended up with half of the story. As silly as that sounds, it turned out to be true.

The original story I submitted was 1,995 words, just under the 2,000-word cap. When compared to the 3,859 of the second version, one can see how I did a better job of flushing out the details. However, it wasn’t this rewrite that got me past the post and was selected as a finalist in the Vocal+ Fiction challenge. That was Part One of the series that the original story inspired.

(If you want to compare, this is the Original, and this is the Rewrite)

How exactly did I land on turning this into a series?

Well, to be frank, I’ve done a lot of learning over the last eight months. I’ve been on Vocal almost a year, but I didn’t get serious until August. I started pulling out some old poems and my history papers from college and publishing those. After seeing how rapidly those gained reads, and feedback, I felt inspired to try something new. It would be my first nonfiction article I write for Vocal not tied to a challenge.

This was my article, Who Created Princess Leia’s Aesthetic? This article came about in part because of the Fan(dom) Favorite Challenge. For this challenge, I wrote an article about the movie Wizards. To prepare for the article, I rewatched Wizards(not a hard thing to do, it’s my favorite movie). However, writing the article reminded me of something in the special features. And that was the remarkable similarity between the character design of Elinore and Princess Leia.

So, after doing some research, and not finding any articles on this connection, I sat down to write my findings on the subject. To my surprise, not only was this article published but it was also selected as a Top Story. Something I never expected, because I thought it was too niche. This experience reinvigorated me to try new things on Vocal.

From there, I started to focus more on writing what I want to write, and if it fits into a challenge, great. If it doesn’t, so be it, I’m going to write it anyway. Since then, I have published more history papers, an article about the first concert I’ve attended, a couple of horror stories, and worked on a series with other Vocal creators. It was this series that was the impetus for me to write the Phantom Shift series. And of the Phantom Shift series, Vocal selected Part One as a finalist in the Vocal+ Fiction challenge.

The series we wrote is called Retreat at the Camel Cove Lodge. Writing this series was a wonderful experience because it let me see what other authors do, and learn how to be a better writer. The other motivator for turning my first story into a series was that I started to track my stats separately from Vocal. I started to do this, because like everyone else, I love to see how I am doing. However, the downside with how stats work on Vocal is that when they update the previous days and months disappear.

So, in October I created several spreadsheets where I track my income, subscribers, reads per month, and reads per story. By tracking and analyzing the data I realized that despite how unpolished it was, the original version of Phantom Shift was one of my top-performing stories. To see this, I had to combine the stats of both times it was published(this happened in the dark days before quick edit).

So, taking a cue from the stats, and what I learned from my friends, I set out to write a series. And because the Vocal+ Fiction challenge was on, I decided I would enter any fiction I wrote from that point until the challenge closed. And since beginning, I have published four parts to the series. Parts 1-3 made it into the challenge, and I am continuing to write the series.

So, how do you get selected as a finalist?

The first is perseverance. If I had stopped after the disappointment of not winning the first challenge, I wouldn’t be here writing this now. I might have given up on writing all together.

The second is self-reflection. Find what you do well, but most importantly, find what you don’t do well. It is by learning from our mistakes that we grow.

Third, get out of your comfort zone. I know many people have certain subjects that they like to write about. I have those too, and I often incorporate them into my work. But sometimes, the only way to grow is to try something new. That’s what the collaboration series was for me. It got me out of my comfort zone and helped me grow.

Fourth, find good people and build a support network. As much as I had to do the work for Phantom Shift-Petrópolis's selection as a finalist, it would not have happened if I did not join the various writing groups I’m in, most especially the Vocal writing groups.

The last key is no expectations. I know this sounds weird. But after being on Vocal for about a year, and not having ever won a challenge, or knowingly been selected as a finalist, I did not expect to be selected for anything in the Vocal+ Fiction challenge. So, I simply wrote the story I wanted to tell, and didn’t worry about the challenge results. I honestly forgot for most of the results day to even check. I also didn’t think I was selected at first, because I didn’t find my story in the list at first. So, in closing, get out there and write what you want to write, and don’t worry about the results.

Thank you for reading my work. If you enjoyed this story, there’s more below. Please hit the like and subscribe button, you can follow me on Twitter @AtomicHistorian, and if you want to help me create more content, please consider leaving a tip or a pledged subscriber.

I would like to send a special thank you to all of the creators that have helped or influenced me in my time on Vocal. Thank you to(in no particular order):

Tom Brad, Mariam Naeem, Pam Reeder, Mike Singleton - Mikeydred, Judey Kalchik, Call Me Les, Yana Aleks, Arpad Nagy, MATTHEW FLICK, Kyla R., Paula Shablo, Rose Leffler, Marti Maley, Angela Nolan, Julie Lacksonen

If I left anyone out, please don't be upset. Know that your presence is felt.

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