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WRITING CONTEST

First Line Fiction’s Inaugural Cash Contest

Writers — start your pens! The prompt is here!

Arpad Nagy
First Line Fiction
Published in
3 min readJan 10, 2025

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A small but decadent library room with women and men working over typewriters with rainfall of cash falling from the ceiling.
Image by author using Bing AI Image Creator.

You’ve patiently waited for the prompt since the contest announcement, so without further delay, here it is.

“When she began her search for the truth, she couldn’t have imagined the rabbit hole it would send her down.”

While I would love to keep contest submissions entirely anonymous, that’s just not possible; however, transparency in the scoring process is.

The table below displays how I will evaluate your stories. Contest entries will be listed by title only, with no author attached. I can’t remember what I wrote a week ago or what I went to retrieve from the basement once I got down there, so chances of me recalling who wrote what are slim — it’s as close to a blindfold as we’re going to get.

Table image by author.

Grammar, self-explanatory. Scores 1–5.

Flow. Scores 1–3. This refers to how easy your story reads. Do you have varying paragraph and sentence lengths? Is your dialogue clear as to the…

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First Line Fiction
First Line Fiction

Published in First Line Fiction

Each week, I will give you a new sentence — the first sentence for you to write a piece of short fiction. From drabbles to several-minute reads — let your imagination take you where it will!

Arpad Nagy
Arpad Nagy

Written by Arpad Nagy

Shortlisted for 2024 Northwind Writing Award in NF/Fiction. New owner of First Line Fiction. Editor @ The Memoirist, AoE, Book Cafe, Short Place, Kitchen Tales.

Responses (17)