Preface

Welcome to Literative’s official blog! We’re very excited about the upcoming launch of our contests page and we hope you are, too. It’s a great opportunity to create new content and be recognized for that content.

You might be wondering why we decided to create a writing site designed around contests. Well, there are a couple of reasons really. The story of Literative begins with the love of stories themselves. If you’re here, then chances are you love stories, too. But do you really devote enough time to them? Or does life get in the way?

Unless writing fiction is your full-time job, then chances are it’s regulated to the someday-when-you-find-the-time category.

I get it. There are bills to be paid and money to be made. Many people set out to write the great American novel, only to discover that being a starving artist is hard.

Personally, I turned to freelance work. I’ve spent years writing and researching articles for other people. I follow my clients’ guidelines and write about topics that fit the interests of their audiences. I enjoy the work. I’m always learning, but it rarely allows me the opportunity to write fiction. After one particularly hectic year, I started to feel the singe of burnout. I realized I was no longer writing for me. That’s when I decided to enter the WritersWeekly 24 Hour Short Story Contest. It was the first story I had written in over a year, and it felt good to get back to my creative roots. It wasn’t work, it was fun. And that’s what we want to accomplish here. We want writing to be fun.

So why contests?

They motivate. A set deadline forces you to stop procrastinating and finish your work.

They inspire. Sometimes it can be difficult to hit on inspiration when you’re preoccupied with the daily grind. Working with a prompt gives you a starting point and sets limits that exercise your creative problem-solving muscles.

They’re fun. You’re not writing for your job or your boss. You get to choose the prompt and the type of contest that interests you the most.

They help build confidence. It takes an act of courage to send your work out into the world to be judged by strangers. But once you take that first step, it’s easier to take the next one, and the one after that. You realize that the world isn’t going to end if someone doesn’t like your work, or if you don’t win a competition. In fact, the world can get infinitely better as you find the confidence to share even more of your work with a community or writers and readers.

So if you’re searching for a way to put the fun and passion back into the writing process, then we hope you decide to join us!

Thoughts? Opinions? Ideas? We love feedback! Send us a message or add a comment.

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