Help, please!

Need more help?

Get feedback on your writing.
Get assistance with finding literary agents.
Get help writing for children.
Sign up for one of our online creative writing courses
Get free advice on How to Write a Book.
Find out How To Get Published.
Explore the best book on Getting Published.
Don't miss our Festival of Writing.
If you're still stuck, then contact us.

The Writers' Workshop is run by writers for writers. We're here to help.

Published by: Skylark on 21st Jan 2012 | View all blogs by Skylark

Our local book group are planning a mini Book Festival to coincide with World Book Night in April. I've somehow, accidentally, volunteered to devise and run a series of competitions on the day. It all started with me saying that I could re-produce a couple of children's competitions that we'd done at previous World Book Days at school and before I knew it, I was agreeing to sort out the adult competitions too - eek! I'm not very good at this sort of thing so hoping that there might be some Cloud brains I can tap in to for ideas and inspiration. There will be four age categories and this is what I've come up with so far....

Children Preschool-Year 2 (ages 4-7): Traditional Tales Treasure Hunt - objects relating to well-known traditional tales are hidden around the community centre with numbers next to them - children (with their adult's help) write down the story that they belong to.

Children Year 3-6 (ages 7-11): Mystery Recipes - Dotted around the centre will be "recipes" that describe in terms of "ingredients" well-known children's novels and the children have to identify what the novel is.

Young Adults (High School age): Struggling with this one - maybe first line quotes from well-known YA novels and they have to guess the novel? Or anagrams of novel titles? ????

Adults: Not A Clue!! Though maybe something along the YA lines might work here too.

Appreciate all suggestions and ideas - and if you have any particular ideas for the Children's comps, feel free to share too as they may be better than the ones I've already thought of. The more brains on this one the better!

Thanks in advance for any help!

Oh, and if there are any authors/agents/publishers out there who fancy giving their time for free (?!) we're also looking for people in the book industry to come and do talks/workshops during the day. Ask me for more details if you're interested - it'll all be happening in North Derbyshire within easy reach of Manchester/Sheffield.

Thanks everyone!

Comments

16 Comments

by Autumn 4 months ago

For the adults maybe a book covers quiz? Am sure there was one on the cloud last year you might be able to use.

YA: could use quotes from e.g. twilight and say what order they come in...? Or anagrams of all the Jacqueline Wilson books?

Good on you for doing it Skylark, and it sounds like it's going to be a fab day!
by Caducean Whisks 4 months ago

Famous book covers with the titles and authors photoshopped out? Barb ran a comp like this on the Cloud a while ago and it was great fun.
A list of famous books and you have to put them in the right date order of writing?
Give them song lyrics - have them identify the song? / band? / singer associated with them?
Pairs of lovers - identify the book and author who created them? Thinking of teenagers here - all into lerve.
Photos of authors - guess the name?
Literary Quiz?

The first lines (or last lines) is a good suggestion, as is the anagrams. If you need help with the anagrams, I'm happy to do them. I like anagrams.
by Caducean Whisks 4 months ago

Oops! Crossed with you Autumn. That'll teach me to go feed the chickens mid-post!
by MinxieAD 4 months ago

Another idea could be films which are based on well known books? It's an obvious one but the Warhorse or The Kite Flyer.

Or, you could give the description and they could guess the book?
by MarkR 4 months ago

I'm thinking on the same lines as Whisks - without the mid-sentence chicken run.

Could you have a list of characters, and ask which book they were in. Maybe have 20 of each and ask for them to be paired up.

In similar vein, could you have a list of famous books and ask for them to be ranked in sales order. So how did One Day fare against Pride and Prejudice v Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone v Of Mice and Men. Variants here could be best selling book of the last 10 years or matching sales figures to the books.

Sounds like good fun, good luck with it.
by Caducean Whisks 4 months ago

If you have some kind of publicity machine running in advance, and if you think you've the time to administer it, you could even found your own writing competition as a fund-raiser and charge a fee (not that comps are on my mind, or anything). Give a theme if you wish, a word count, a few standard rules; line up willing sifters from your writing group - and invite the short-listers to read their stories at the event and dish out prizes. Attract a 'head judge' who will decide on from the final 10, 20, whatever, from - oh, I dunno - some writing forum or other? Or just have them judged by your writing group if you're not sure of covering costs?
by Caducean Whisks 4 months ago

Or you could recruit sifters here? I wouldn't mind having a go?
by Old Fat Prop 4 months ago

GD ran a monthly cloudie comp wherein two stories were 'blended' together. It was great fun trying to work out which two they were. Perhaps a variation of that on posters with people entering their answers for a prize.
by Gerilyn 4 months ago

I was going to suggest the book cover game too- I really enjoyed that. I think it could work for YA's and A's dependin on what covers you choose. I'll be happy to photoshop some covers for you if you need me to.
by John Taylor 4 months ago

If you followed CW's competition idea, Alan's 'Inter-city challenge' was a very easy recipe to follow, and could be tweaked (town/village/locality etc).
by Skylark 4 months ago

See, I knew you lot would help me out :-D Thanks for some fab ideas - I'm only just popping in just now so no time to properly respond except to say THANK YOU!! Will be back online tonight to sort through the ideas..... :-D
by AlanP 4 months ago

I'm not sure if you need a competition that involves the entrants creating something themselves or them knowing something about books in general. Certainly for an "on the day" competiton you will need to consider how you will judge winners and something that is factual, such as first lines or identify the authors from titles will be easier to do than say a flash 250 words on Jezebel McFarty, the last witch burned at the stake in the county, for example.

For ease of management and lack of controversy factual must be preferable, but less fun than getting them to write something. Do you know which flavour you prefer?
by Skylark 4 months ago

As I said earlier, thank you all for fantastic suggestions. Those that don't end up being used this year, I will be tucking away for use another time :-) I think, because this is our first attempt at this kind of event, the idea was to keep it all as simple as possible so I think probably a creative writing competition is probably stretching us too far this year. We are planning some 'just-for-fun' creative writing activities on the day (e.g. an add your own line poem on a big bit of paper stuck to one of the own walls - a bit like what I8 did in aspiring writers a while back) but I think trying to organise any competition where entries have to be collated in advance and then judged is possibly beyond us this year. But if this year is an overwhelming success, it may well be an idea to consider if we repeat the event next year.

So, to decide on the competitions for the four categories....I love the book cover idea (and Geri, I'd love to take you up on the offer to photoshop the pictures for me - I'd be sooooo grateful as my technical expertise doesn't stretch that far - will message you about it when I've figured out which books to use.) And I also love the idea of matching the pairs of lovers to a book. What do people think about about replacing my recipe idea for the 7-11 year old section with a 'match the hero/villain pair' comp? Then could do either a match the lovers or book cover comp (with anagrams for extra clues?) for the YA and either match the lovers/book cover (or come kind of combo?) for the adults? Sorry this is a bit of a ramble as I'm typing as I think - probably not a good idea! Any further thoughts or help greatly appreciated and thanks all for the time you've given it so far. OFP, I really like the book mash idea but couldn't work out whether the comp would be to ask the participants to come up with their own ones (and best one wins) or give them created ones and they have to identify the two books involved? Like the idea but a lot of creative energy would have to go into that one!
by Barb 4 months ago

Let know if you want the covers I put together for the quiz on here.

Good luck with it all.
by Skylark 4 months ago

Thank you, Barb, that would be fantastic :-) Yes please!
by Barb 4 months ago

If you drop me a message with an email to send them to, that would be easiest.