Last Writer Standing Challenge

[donutsweeper]

What is your opinion on these sort of challenges?  The idea is everyone gets a prompt and the stories are posted anonymously and then people vote on them.  The writer of whoever wrote the lowest scoring story is dropped and the rest continue on to the next round where everyone's given a new prompt and the cycle is repeated until there's only one writer left.

It seems like, as a writer, you'd be setting yourself up for a lot of stress and heartache.  And, the weirdness of not being able to respond to comments or claim your work.  But it would be interesting to see what people say when they don't know who wrote what...

Anyone done one before?  Have thinky thoughts about them?

Comments

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

When it works I think there's a lot of potential for it being useful and interesting, but it could backfire

[dr-is-in.livejournal.com]

The thing was, people were ignoring the first 2 requirements in voting....does the fic sufficiently follow the prompt and does it include the bonus feature. A lot of times, people weren't including the bonus feature and they were supposed to. Then you have the problem with people voting for or against a fic because of a certain character or pairing.

I agree, when it works, it's a brilliant experience. But there is huge potential problems if every single possible detail is not thought of ahead of time and spelled out specifically.

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

that's what I was wondering about. The one I'm looking at is for a gen h/c community so in theory should easily avoid the ship wars, but... the rules aren't terribly spelled out which makes me a bit nervous