Green Stories Competitions/ How to Submit (Prize: £500)

Green Stories competition is looking for stories about the environment.

Green stories Competition sees that most times, when promoting waste reduction and reduction of high-energy activities, such as running hot water, we come up against health and safety issues. Some of these are valid, but many are misinformed.

This is a targeted competition aimed at using an engaging fictional story to help readers understand how over-cleaning and misinformation about bacteria can mean that we can end up killing our bodies ‘good’ bacteria through over-use of harsh cleaning products.

Eligibility For Green Stories Competition

• It’s free to enter.
• It is open to all writers across the globe.
• The theme, this year, is ‘Clean vs. Green’.

Submission Guidelines

• The challenge is to write a short story (between 1000 and 3000 words) that helps to raise awareness and shift attitudes, especially for those people who assume that the more detergent the better.
• We need to know how to keep our environment and bodies free from harmful bacteria, but many beliefs relating to bacteria and cleaning products are misinformed, which has harmful effects on our environment and on our health. Much waste and unnecessary carbon emissions are generated by people’s concerns about hygiene. For example, attempts to get condiments such as tomato ketchup provided in bottles rather than individual plastic sachets are hindered by hygiene concerns. Washing laundry at higher than necessary temperatures increases energy bills and carbon emissions. Over-use of cleaning products in the home and on our bodies leads to chemical waste and health hazards due to toxicity of chemicals etc. Attitudes to hygiene are also a barrier to many sustainable practices. For example buying second hand, borrowing rather than buying etc. These can be affected by people’s level of comfort with pre-used goods. Re-use, sharing, second hand and borrowing can be ways for everyone to access what they need without using any more of the earth’s resources. Green Stories aim to use stories to develop more informed, eco-friendly and healthy practices related to cleaning. The challenge is to do this within an engaging story, with characters that readers can engage with and are not simply vehicles for the message you want to get across.
• Please submit your short story plus around 200 words on your thinking behind your approach and how your story meets the criteria. The title of the document should be the title of your story. No need to have your name/contact details on the document as they take these separately.
• Quality submissions are encouraged, the organizers advise writers to check their stories before submitting using Prowritingaid. They have free and paid versions and are the best writing software we know to help improve grammar, readability and check for repetition, ‘sticky’ sentences and suggest alternatives.
• Submissions should be made to the official site for Submission .
• Deadline for Submission is July 21.

Prize

£500 would be given to the winner.

GoodLuck!