The Naked Convos Presents The Writer Competition 2016

The Writer Competition is an online ‘reality’ writing competition created by TheNakedConvos which has been run for 3 successful editions, where contestants are given a topic or theme to write on each week and you, the public, as well as our judges, assess them and vote to keep the best writers in the game until we have one writer left standing, our winner – The Writer. The online reality aspect of the competition stems from the fact that evictions are done live online via social media platforms. Over the last three editions, we have had great competitions and this year it promises to be more exciting with higher quality writing, more drama and more at stake.

The Process

12 Finalists will be shortlisted from the qualification entry submissions based on the quality of their flash fiction. These writers will be mentored by our judges and will contest in four rounds of the online writing competition where we will evict three contestants every week.

The competition will require all writers to send in their short, themed stories weekly by a fixed deadline. The stories from contestants will be put up for members of the public to read and vote for.

At the end of the voting period, the panel of judges will evaluate the stories and score them using pre-communicated criteria.

The public votes from the audience (50%) and the votes from the judges (50%) will be combined into a single score and based on this contestants with the lowest scores will be eliminated weekly until there is only one left standing – THE WRITER.

Who is it for?

The competition is for all Africans who love to write. There is no age, nationality or location restriction. All African citizens are encouraged to send in pre-qualification entries to be considered.

How to qualify?

To stand a chance to qualify for the competition, simply write and send in a piece of flash fiction that is not more than 300 words long (it can be less than this but definitely not more). Please submit as an attachment in Microsoft Word format.

There is no theme for the pre-qualification entry. Send us your shortest and best piece. It can be flash fiction about anything. Set anywhere. Any genre. Any style — you get the picture. Be creative – the more creative and well written, the better your chances of qualifying.

Send your entry to thewriter@thenakedconvos.com on or before Midnight, West Africa Time March 31, 2016. The competition itself will run for 4 weeks in May 2016. 

Submissions must be Flash FICTION stories. Poetry and Opinion pieces will NOT be considered.

Only shortlisted writers will be contacted. Writers will be contacted only by e-mail. Please include your full name, phone number and a valid e-mail address in your submission which we will use for continued correspondence, even if it is the same email address you use to send in the entry.

Only one entry is allowed per writer. The work must be the work of the person whose name is stated in the email.

The Prizes

At the end of The Writer competition, there will be three winners,

First Place            – N200,000

Second Place     – N150,000

Third Place          – N100,000 

All 12 shortlisted Writers will also be invited specially to have their stories published in an Anthology and will be paid professional rates.

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That’s it people.

Get excited. Get ready to write. Get ready to read. Get ready to judge. Get ready to vote.

THE WRITER SEASON FOUR BEGINS NOW!

Culled from http://thenakedconvos.com/22943-2/?utm_campaign=TNC_Socialshare&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork

“The Fishermen” by Chigozie Obioma; reviewed by Joseph Omotayo

Two things upset life for the Agwu’s family: the temporary absence of the “Guerdon” man and a superstitious anxiety. The Fishermen is a witty book, it makes sorrow almost a pleasurable thing to read. This novel is a receptacle of the gnashing ruins that nearly wipe out a family. The tragedy here is a bleeding one. Pages gush with unimaginable sorrows. With an elegant simplicity, Chigozie Obioma narrates a woe all at once terrible and vivid. With vivacious expressions sharply fleshing out images, the reader is inured to misfortunes. You are pulled into a participatory reading of the text. The Fishermen’s chic use of words entices the reader. In a way that smacks of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chigozie Obioma creates beauty and shreds it. This book elaborates a quotidian family life interspersed with the fragile political tensions of the 1990’s. This is majorly the story of four brothers soused in fleeting joys and suffusive griefs. 

In a clearly portrayed 1990s, Ikenna, Boja, Obembe and Benjamin, all brothers, turn fishermen of fishes, hope, and disaster. Their childhood is battered repeatedly and adulthood soon steals on them. At Omi-Ala, they draw evil home. The turbulence that wracks their household creates a million stories for the reader’s delight. Flashbacks and foretelling chapter titles mix well in this book. Chapter titles like Fishermen, Sparrow, Locusts, and Fungus are suggestive of impending issues. The Fishermen blends the superstitious with the cultural. Everything you take away from the book is subjected to your belief. Life’s checkered nature is wicked as it bites hard on these brothers. This book is a quiver of memories, if you witnessed the full cycle of the ‘90s, memories of those times will flush you as you read. The Fishermen packs enough of infantile gimmickries and mischiefs to double you up. I could see bits of myself in the childhood of these fishermen; in their pranks and wits. My mother would never know (except she read this) why money charged for grinding pepper kept soaring each time she sent me and my sibling to the grinder. The surcharge paid for our stay at game houses. If you never played SEGA game console, your childhood needs to be reconstructed. Trust me. Your childhood is bland. This sent me chortling silly:

“After this fight, we got tired of going outdoors. At my suggestions, we begged Mother to convince Father to release the console game set to play Mortal Kombat, which he seized and hid somewhere the previous year after Boja – who was known for his usual first person in his class – came home with 14^th scribbled in red ink on his report card and the warning Likely to repeat. Ikenna did not fare any better; his was sixteenth out of forty and it came with a personal letter to Father from his teacher, Mrs Bukky. Father read out the letter in such a fit of anger that the only words I heard were ‘Gracious me! Gracious me!’… He would confiscate the games and forever cut off from the moments that often sent us swirling with excitement, screaming and howling when the invisible commentator in the game ordered, ‘Finish him’, and the conquering sprite would inflict serious blows on the vanquished sprite by either kicking it up to the sky or by slicing it into a grotesque explosion of bones and blood. The screen would then go abuzz with ‘fatality’ inscribed in strobe letters of flame. Once, Obembe – in the midst of reliving himself – ran out of the toilet just to be there so he could join in and cry ‘That is fatal!’ in an American accent that mimicked the console’s voice-over. Mother would punish him later when she discovered he’d unknowingly dropped excreta on the rug.” (pg. 15)

This book could make for a good literary feminist reading. The frail place of women in the society, how they are subalterned, how they are made as the other, is subtly spread across the book. Women characters in the book seem lopsided and almost unintelligent. Things slip off them before they even know. The character of Mother is interesting. For someone who seems to “own copies” of her children’s “minds” (pg. 103), she seems not to be as vigilant as such. She is only fully realized in the presence of Father. Her maternal vigilance falls apart with his momentary absence. There is Iya Iyabo too, a gossip, someone who fits well into your stereotypical construction of a fish wife. This was in the ‘90s. This makes for an interesting study of women and their roles across ages. Was your ‘90s filled with these types of women or not? You could even do a brief study of women in the society from the ‘90s till now, and see if anything has really changed. Doing a literary feminist criticism of this book will then be critically assessing that aspect of feminist theory which Toril Moil calls the ‘feminine’ aspect as opposed to the ‘feminist’ phase of gender criticism. This ‘feminist’ aspect she calls a political position (see Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory, 2^nd ed.). Feminine reading of the text will be exploring “a set of culturally identified characteristics” of women and see if women’s place in the society as portrayed in this novel has not been exaggerated or understated.

In a flush of thick mishaps, events in this book follow after the law of causality. This calls David Hume’s “Necessary Conjunction” to mind, the way minds are copies of experiences (see David Hume’s An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding). Causality says the human minds run in a tight chain of causes and effects. By experience, we habitually give ready conclusions to things. If A happens, then we know B will necessarily follow. This curious case of automatic relation of things and events deepens the tragedy in The Fishermen. People’s experiences with the crazed yammering of Abulu make Abulu a god. Even the supernatural seems to be at a loss on how to deal with Abulu. Ikenna is driven sore and begins providing conclusions to Abulu’s utterings. Even their educated Father falls prey to this automatic relation of events. It is just human to necessarily conjunct related events. This is the way our society is built. Chigozie Obioma takes us to that tender territory of our psyche and how it affects our lives and communities.

I love this book! Editors of this book did something sterling. I could not find a sentence out of place. The use of punctuations marvel you. Words jump out of the book and pull you in. You can feel their hands on you. This is editing at its best. I love The Fishermen.

First published by Critical Literature Review