How I Did It

Ever since I was announced as the third quarter First Place winner in Writers of the Future last year, I’ve been asked the same, obvious question:

How did I do it?

Needless to say, that question has come up more and more since I won the Golden Pen last month (the Grand Prize of each annual competition). How did I write a winning story? One that beat out thousands of entries to become one of four first place stories in 2025, and then beat out the other three to take the ultimate prize? I’ve seen plenty of blog posts by past winners on how they won. I’d been told I should write one myself. So, I figured it was high time I did so. I’m not sure my approach will work for anyone else. I’m still not fully clear on how it worked for me. But if it can help just one struggling genre fic writer jump-start their career, I think it’s worth a shot.

First, a little about the contest itself:

L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future

Writers of the Future is a quarterly contest seeking the best speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, and horror) short stories from emerging spec fic writers each year. The word emerging is critical here: this contest is open only to writers who have not previously been professionally published.

But I self-published a book!

Unless your self-pub work was a runaway bestseller, it doesn’t matter. And let’s face it: if you’re trying to elevate your career by entering a short fiction contest, it probably wasn’t.

But I’ve had a short story published in a literary magazine!

Were you paid the industry-standard professional rate of eight cents per word?

Actually, yes.

Have you had at least three stories published at that pay rate?

Well…no.

Then guess what? You can still enter Writers of the Future!

I could go into detail about the rules of the contest, but you can find them all here. What’s important for any struggling spec fic writer to know is this: Writers of the Future is, to my knowledge, the only contest that meets all of the following criteria:

1) It’s only open to writers who have never been professionally published.

2) It’s only open to writers of speculative fiction.

3) It requires no entry fee.

4) It’s contested year-round.

5) Entrants retain the full rights to their story.

What’s more, it’s judged anonymously: entrants are required to remove their name, contact info, and all identifying information from their manuscripts. That means judges won’t be stalking your social media, or scanning your back catalog for mounds of unsuccessful self-pub attempts. They won’t know where you’re from, your gender, or even your name.

All of this means that, if you’re an unpublished genre fic writer, there is no good reason for you not to enter this contest every chance you get.

Now that that’s out of the way, it’s time to answer the all-important question as best I can.

How I Won Writers of the Future

For starters, it wasn’t until I learned I was a finalist that I realized I hadn’t taken the prescribed path to victory in the contest. I’d never taken the online workshop (which is billed as essentially a how-to guide on winning the contest). Their website hosts an online forum community, which I hadn’t even known about until I began searching for clues on my chances of placing as a finalist (because that’s the kind of person I am). I hadn’t entered the contest dozens of times: I entered exactly five times. The first was on a lark in 2021. Then, I entered four times in 2025. The final entry was withdrawn after I won first place in the third quarter.

When you fail to place, the contest will allow you to resubmit a piece after editing. Several of my fellow 2025 winners placed on a previously-submitted piece, but I did not. I never submitted the same story twice, because (and this is important): you will not receive feedback on a story. As such, I saw no value in trying to resubmit something, because frankly I didn’t know what, exactly, was wrong with it. I also didn’t know who the judges were (their identities are kept secret until the annual anthology is released). So it was impossible to figure out what the judges reading my stories might be looking for. This, obviously, is the point of anonymous judging.

Looking at the stories that won last year, two of them were fantasy (both involving dragons), while the rest (including mine) were sci-fi. Cyberpunk did well last year, and two of the first-place stories (including mine) were speculative noir. But remember: not only are the judges anonymous, but their judging, as with the literary industry itself, is subjective. And whoever this year’s judges are, you can bet that the vast majority of them won’t be literary agents or editors: they’ll be authors. Established, bestselling authors. Which means they’re unlikely to be swayed by current market trends.

So all of that seems to point to one, inescapable conclusion, right? You can’t expect to win the way I did. So, how can you win Writers of the Future? Well, I’ve got a few ideas:

1. Write

It may seem self-explanatory, but if you want to win Writers of the Future, or go anywhere with your writing career, you need to write. Write every day. It doesn’t have to be a lot. I write 1,000 words a day. Other successful writers write far less. But it’s crucial to develop a clear writing routine with a daily word goal. Make writing a privilege, rather than an obligation: in other words, rather than feeling guilty when you fail to meet your daily goal, find ways to reward yourself when you succeed.

I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that my best stories come from periods when I’m writing consistently. Usually it only takes a few days of meeting my goal before I hit upon a story that really takes off, and by the end of the week I’m writing “The End”. Remember: writing is a skill, not an ability. That means anyone can learn to do it. It also means it requires practice. Everything you write will advance your writing. It might only be a little bit at a time, but incremental progress is progress nonetheless.

2. Shake Things Up

As a writer, you must always be pushing the envelope. When I write my daily sketches (what I call my morning freewriting), I always try to do things I haven’t done before, using the sketches as my test kitchen. Over the years I’ve written historical fiction and romance. I’ve written from the POV of young women, children, even animals. I’ve written police procedurals. I’ve written multiple sketches in which all the dialogue was in a different language.

I call this “Being the Scarecrow”, which is a reference to an episode of Star Trek: Voyager where a member of the Q Continuum said he’d spent time as a scarecrow once simply because he hadn’t done it before. Intentionally moving beyond your comfort zone advances your writing, even within your chosen genre. And it can have unintended benefits. The story I’ll have appearing in Analog this summer, “Casual Brutality”, is cerebral hard sci-fi, which is very much in my wheelhouse. But “In Living Color”, the story that won the Golden Pen, was unlike anything I’d written before.

Since then, I’ve written several more stories in a similar vein. Turns out I have a talent for it. You might be surprised at the types of stories you’re good at writing. You just don’t know it yet.

3. Be Prolific

“Well begun is half done”, as they say, and that goes double for writing. You see a lot of jokes in the Writing Community on Twitter about how many unfinished projects writers have. At any given time, I have very few. That’s partly because I periodically comb through my extant projects and kill off the ones I’ve lost interest in.

But it’s mostly because I tend to finish what I start.

If you’ve put in the time and effort to write a thousand or two words of a story, you owe it to your story, the world, and most importantly yourself to finish it. So stick with it and hammer it out. You might end up with a story that doesn’t feel very marketable, or even good. But you’ll still have a story. Yes, the vast majority of short fiction submissions (even for successful authors) end in rejection. But with enough stories, it becomes a numbers game.

At the moment, I have eight short fiction manuscripts ready to be submitted. Another two are currently undergoing critique, and will be ready to submit after they’ve passed through my critique group and my beta group. And another four have been set aside for more editing or partial rewrites, and could be ready to go with some work. Having that many stories ready to go means I can have multiple stories out on sub and still have a good chance of filling a promising submission call that pops up.

4. Trust Your Readers

And perhaps I should start with 4a: find your readers. Read this carefully: if you want to make a career out of writing, you must put your work in front of readers. Period. I’m sure you have at least a few trusted friends, hopefully at least one who’s an avid reader, who’d be happy to read what you write. So let them. Maybe you’re worried they won’t like it. But ask yourself this: if your friends can’t find something nice to say about your writing, what chance do you have with a reader who doesn’t even know you?

Listen to what they have to say. I learned this the hard way thanks to Writers of the Future. The first two stories I submitted last year (one of which will be published in Analog this summer) didn’t go over well with some of my beta readers, but I truly believed they were some of my best work. I was far less enthusiastic about the third story, but all of my betas adored it.

In April, I stood onstage in Hollywood and received the Golden Pen Award for that very story, “In Living Color”.

5. Pursue Every Opportunity Available

As an aspiring writer seeking to launch a career, it’s incumbent upon you to take every possible chance to advance. Don’t just submit to the big lit mags, like Asimov’s, Analog, or Clarkesworld. If you sub to them and get rejected, look for other markets to submit to. Sub to anthologies. Enter contests (like Writers of the Future). Over the past few years, I’ve looked into every platform and medium that could possibly pay for my work and improve my visibility. I used to post short fiction, and later flash fiction, here on this site. I’ve joined Substack. I’ve looked into Wattpad, Inkspired, Patreon, and Ko-Fi. I’ve researched self-publishing. I’m always knocking on doors, looking for one I can kick down.

And don’t just look at opportunities. Take them. I’m constantly looking for new markets to submit my work to, and as soon as I find one I submit something. Maybe you’re thinking you don’t have anything good enough to submit to a magazine, or Writers of the Future. Submit anyway. Unless you’re using AI (and if you are, stop), there’s zero chance you’ll submit something so bad they’ll tell you not to submit again. Trust me; if it were possible, it would’ve happened to me years ago. You miss all the shots you don’t take, and don’t forget what I said before about getting your work in front of people.

And lastly, most importantly…

6. Don’t Give Up

Remember the words of Bo Schembechler: “Those who stay will be champions.”

I know it’s hard. Trust me, I do. You write a story that’s really good, leaps and bounds better than anything you’ve written before, and you send it out into the world and watch the rejections pile up. You feel deflated. You wonder if you’re doing it all wrong. And you tell yourself you’ll never write anything that good again.

Well, you’re wrong.

Over the years of struggling through the “invisible work”, I’ve found writing is a constant cycle of writing a story and thinking, “I’ll never write anything better than this,” then looking back several stories later and thinking, “How did I ever think this was the best I could do?”

With the benefit of hindsight, I’ve come to feel “In Living Color” really was the best story I’d written when I submitted it to Writers of the Future.

Looking back one year later, I’m confident that’s no longer the case.

The one thing that separates writers who succeed from those who fail is that the successful ones never gave up. Writing is about growth. Learn something from every rejection. Edit your story every time it gets a “no”. Keep showing your work to people until they’re sick of seeing it (if you’re showing it to good friends, they’ll never get sick of it). Reach out and connect with other writers. Celebrate their successes the way you want them to celebrate yours when the time comes.

And your time will come. I know you can do it, because I did. Look again at that picture at the top of this post. That could be you next year. Or the year after. I had no formal training in writing. No degree in literature. I didn’t take the online workshop, or attend any workshop of any kind until I won the contest. I started this whole process one chilly evening in 2013 with a Google search and a wild idea. I made a lot of mistakes. Life got in the way. But I made it.

Stick with it, and you will too. I promise. – MK