Novellas & New Roast: Tips from an ONC Winner

Advice from 2022 Winner @exequinne

Hey there! This is the fifth mini-interview in a series with past ONC winners who have volunteered to reveal what they wish they knew before they started on their award-winning novella as well as their pro-tip about writing novella-length fiction in general.

In this installment, Exequinne, Top 5 Winner of the 2022 ONC, tells all. Please consider checking out Caeran's work, especially if you're a high fantasy/dark dystopia fan!

Question One: What is one thing you wish you knew about the Open Novella Contest before you starting writing for it?

There are quite a lot! I wish I knew how interesting the prompts are going to be and how much they will shoot off a bunch of ideas in my head. Funny story about that, when I was planning for ONC, I originally have a total of eight ideas made from combining the prompts and the old ideas in my archive. I had to manually chop it down to four. All went on to Longlist but only Kolibrie made it to the end.

I wish I knew how much work it will actually take by entering more than one entry, all the while juggling a pure maths semester in uni. I had to speed-run through everything, including planning, worldbuilding, research, and making the covers (still quite amazed at how those turned out. Most of them are still my all-time favorites.)

I wish I knew how to actually write a novella prior to the contest. For the past years, I have only focused on long-form fiction, with word-count ranges like 90,000-150,000 I had no idea how to condense a story under 40,000, so entering has proven to be a total challenge for me.

Lastly, I wish I knew how many works this contest will sprout. I'm not kidding when I say that I'm still mopping up the mess ONC 2022 has made to my writing queue. Now, Piper: The Gods of Dansarun has sprouted two more sequels and has become part of a trilogy. The second book Piper: The Spirits of Shaoryeong has been updating daily in my profile as of writing this interview, and the final installment will be written in the first quarter of 2023.

My most recent standalone novels, Scapegoat and Libelle are both based on ONC prompts and are actually part of the ideas I chopped down at the start of planning for the contest. I spent the last four months of 2022 powering through these novels amidst university rage.

Finally, I'm proud to announce that the winning novella, Kolibrie, will finally be expanded into a full-length novel that will be written on the second quarter of the year. And like I said, I'm still mopping up ONC 2022 mess before I go to work on my real, major project for this year. And now, the ONC 2023 is starting soon and I'm actually excited about what mess I'll be mopping up in 2024!

Question Two: What's your best piece of advice or your favorite writing tip when it comes to working on novellas or entering your work into a contest?

Can I at least give three?

First: keep track of the time zones. The guidebook just says the time zone that's convenient for them, so it's actually your job to translate it to wherever you are in this world. Avoid waiting until the last moment to submit. Allow yourself to have some hours extra before the form closes. When I entered, I at least entered a day early (since I'm like 12 hours ahead). A lot of the promising works get razed early this way.

Second: finishing is better than winning. I've noticed a lot of users pouring all of their energy into the start of the story, editing and editing until it's perfect, and at the end of the contest, they won't get to advance through the next stages because they aren't able to finish. The ONC is a marathon. You'd only ever survive if you focus on finishing with a coherent story more than putting up a near-perfect upper half for the sake of winning in the first rounds. You are doing this for experience and fun. Aiming to win every time will just kill the joy for you.

Third: schedule, schedule, schedule. As a plotter and a massive sheets nerd, writing for the ONC is a bit of a wildcard moment because the prompts only ever get released on the 1st of February, so I can't plan it in advance, during the time I usually do the planning for the rest of the year. The case for most of you will be that you will have to write this work alongside your other, ongoing projects. Then again, even if you only ever write for the ONC, you'd still find this advice useful. Keep track of your writing time and the time you have left until the submission for the next round. Coordinate your life outside Wattpad and writing, and plan accordingly. Project. Analyze. Predict when and where you'd be writing your entry. That's the only way you'd be able to keep track of the contest and your other projects from February to May.

Okay, I said three, but here's two more for y'all.

Fourth: be patient and decent. The ONC is run by a team of volunteers who are doing this for their love of stories and for engaging the community. Avoid going into the profile's wall and demanding them to release the winners and stuff. They're all trying their best behind the scenes and they all have a life too.

Fifth: write a novella with a concrete ending. This is the most important piece of advice, I think. I don't know why I put it in the very last spot. lol. Part of the reason why some stories do not advance to the Shortlist is that the endings are, forgive the lack of euphemism, whack. Some endings are rushed, tied off with some neat deus ex machina or something that's just slapped on like a band-aid plot device. Others have an ending, sure, but it all felt lackluster and underwhelming. Remember the advice about scheduling? Do that to avoid running out of time and being forced to make an ending papier-mâché.

Get feedback about your character arcs and ending if you're unsure about what you did. Look at past winners and see how they tied off their entries. That's actually one of the hardest things about writing short-form prose. It's easy to go all out with the introduction, but since it's got such little word count, most rush to the ending just to get it done.