Guest Post by Sara W. McBride: Writing Battles

I’ve invited author Sara W. McBride to join us today to share a really cool new opportunity in the writing community with us. This is for those of you who enjoy a good writing challenge, and it doesn’t hurt that there are cash prizes, large enough to be considered above professional writing minimums. Sara McBride has been participating, and well, I’ll let her tell you all about it.

Please welcome author Sara W. McBride as she offers us a guest post on Writing Battles.

Guest Post: Writing Battles

Hi. I’m Sara Wesley McBride. Kaye asked me to write a post about Writing Battle because I recently won the October FEAR battle. $3400! Amazing, right? Absolutely! I’ve never won anything, or been paid for any of my short story submissions, so I’m currently staining my folder of rejection letters with a muted red wine ring in celebration of getting paid $3.40 per word. (Professional rate is $0.10/word, so I just walloped that.)

If you want to improve your Flash Fiction skills, check out WritingBattle.com.

My story and the new FEAR winners just got posted this week. Go check it out!

What is Writing Battle, you ask? It’s this enthusiastic, supportive community of writers who love to write a story in a short amount of time, based on prompts they didn’t expect. So. Much. FUN!! It’s like improv for writers, but your stories duel each other and you win money.

Yes, it does cost money to enter, usually in the $30 range. But you get tons of feedback, so I think it’s worth it. I refuse to pay for anything, except Writing Battle. And now I’ve won enough to cover writing battles for the next twenty years.

For 2025, each competition had four genres to compete within, thus four 1st place winners.

2026 will have nine genres, thus nine winners. Whoa! 1st place winners earn $2000+ and runner-ups earn $500+. (Varies from battle to battle, but in that zone.) Eight battles scheduled for 2026.

New for 2026, you can choose a “Class.” If you ever played D&D, these will look very familiar. Your chosen class will lead your card draw toward certain genres. This is new. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m excited. I’ve chosen Rogue!

But you don’t get to send in that story that’s been beta read seventeen times. Oh no! That would be way too easy. You are dealt a random genre (within your chosen “Class”), a random character, and a random object to build your story upon. You can redraw your genre once, but only once. And you get a few extra redraws for characters and objects, but not many. Then you have a few days to write your story ranging from 48 hours for micro-fiction (250 words) and 5-7 days for 1000 or 2500-word stories.

Your story has to use the prompts in some way, shape or form, otherwise you might get disqualified. This is to prevent prewritten, perfectly edited stories. My winning story had a typo in it! So embarrassing. Let me know if you find it.

I won for the 1000-word, FEAR, pro-judged competition. There were four genres (Horror, Thriller & Suspense, Dystopian, and Mystery) and I won Mystery. I think there were 1800 stories total and about 300 in Mystery. I’m guessing that lots of people were dealt Mystery and redrew for a different genre. (Horror had about 600 stories.) I’ll admit, Mystery in a thousand words is really bloomin’ difficult! I chucked three stories before I finally got the last one to work.

And it won! Check it out!

There are peer-judged battles and pro-judged battles. Everyone is sorted into houses of about forty stories, all in your genre. The early 5-8 rounds of duels are against your housemates. There is no genre crossover. Genres never compete against each other, which I think is a good thing. Imagine Sword & Sorcery stories going up against Alternative History. Such different mind sets. That would be incredibly weird to judge.

Peer-judged Battles–all writers read ten stories in five duels, give feedback and pick a winner of the five duels. There are two duels for each of the five rounds. Then the final showdown duels go to “Spartan Judging,” where you’re dealt a duel and have to pick a winner, no comments required. You only ever judge stories outside of your genre, so you’re never judging your competition.

Then “Debrief” opens, and you can read everyone’s stories and give & get feedback. You can also check out your house competition. After the results are revealed, you receive all the feedback from your ten judges. And it’s really good feedback!

Pro-judged Battles–professional judges give out trophies and pips during the early dueling rounds, which is fun, and you can read everyone’s stories and give & get feedback. In the first round, my winning story received an “Impact” trophy, meaning of all the stories a judge read in that round, he/she thought mine had the highest “Impact.” It also got a “character” pip, which is a cute little chicken symbol meaning they really liked my main character.

Feedback from the judges is great if you make it to the final showdown. Then you get full paragraphs from 3-5 judges. One judge gave me a full page essay. It was awesome! But otherwise, if you’re in the lower 80-85% of your house, you only get a few phrases from the judges of what they liked and thought could be improved upon. But the feedback from your peers is amazing. And with Debrief open for about a month before the judges’ results, you get a ton of useful feedback on your story and in the forum discussions.

The Forums! The website has forums. My favorite forum is “Hidden Gems.” When you stumble upon a great story, but not many people have commented on it, then you post it in the Hidden Gem forum and people will go check it out and give feedback. Everyone is so supportive. You don’t have to win a big payout to feel like you won. My story got a shout-out on a “Historical Fiction Stories” forum, and I was on cloud nine. For someone to stumble through a forest of 1800 stories, randomly read yours, and then like it enough to take the time to post it to a forum … Whoa! That is huge gratification, validation, and induces a happy dance. And you can offer that amazing gratification to other writers. It’s a giant feedback loop of happiness!

There’s also a friendly etiquette of return reads. If you read a person’s story and leave feedback, there’s a magic “Return Read” button in your comment allowing them to easily flip to your story so they can return the favor. So if you give feedback on 20 stories, you’ll probably get at least 15 or more reads and feedback on your story.

Reading other stories, pondering them, giving feedback, and then reading all the other comments, is so incredibly educational. I’m typically a playwright and novelist, focusing on longer form storytelling. But flash fiction is becoming popular with magazine and journal publications, so I wanted to learn it. Writing a story limited to a thousand words is an immense challenge when you come from the land of eighty-thousand word novels.

My Flash Fiction skills have objectively improved over the past six months.

My first battle, my story won a couple of battles and died. It was a mess of a story and my first attempt at Sci-Fi. But I rewrote it based on feedback and now I’m submitting it around.

My second battle, my story won an honorable mention, meaning it was only one vote shy of moving on to the Final Showdown. I’m also shopping that story.

Finał Showdown–Each genre has a final showdown. The top 5-7 stories in a house move into what looks like basketball brackets. Top 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, Winner!

My third battle, my story made it to the Final Showdown and lost out in the Sensational 64 duel to the full genre winner. The winning story’s name was “Pancakes McBride,” and I’m a McBride, so I did enjoy a bit of humor about that loss. Another story getting shopped.

My fourth battle, my story won first place in the Mystery genre. I received a congratulations message from the author of “Pancakes McBride,” saying, “I’m glad there will be another McBride on the winner’s list!” This story is officially published on the Writing Battle website, so I can only shop it to magazines that accept reprints. But I got paid $3400 for it, so I’m okay with that.

I’m getting better at Flash Fiction because of Writing Battle. And it’s so much fun! It’s nice to finish a polished story within a day or two. My novels and plays take months and always hit “The Messy Middle” slog phase. There’s a happy satisfaction with finishing an entire 1000-word story quickly and sending it into Battle or out for publication. And writing Flash Fiction definitely teaches you to edit.

My winning story started as 1500 words, and I had to whack it down to 1000. It hurt. I bled. But it resulted in judge comments like: “This writer knows how much to give the reader; he trusts us. That’s a really beautiful thing. I see so much overwriting. Not here!”

If you haven’t yet, go check out my story at the Writing Battle winner’s page. And if you’re a writer, consider joining WritingBattle.com. It’s a blast!

About Sara W. McBride

Sara Wesley McBride suffers an unhealthy obsession with the haunted city of Venice and has written a novel and lots of short stories set in Italy’s greatest floating city. She just won first place in the Mystery Genre for Writing Battle’s Fear competition and is currently writing a ghost-filled choose-your-own-path book set in Venice. More info at SaraWesleyMcBride.com.