Fourth Fleet Diplomatic Operations – Fiction Vignette

A fiction vignette is a brief, self-contained written snapshot that captures a moment in time, a mood, a feeling, a sensation, or a specific facet of a character. A good vignette isn’t about moving the plot along; it’s about lingering in tightly-honed prose to describe what a character is seeing, feeling, touching, smelling, or tasting in a particular moment. Literary examples of vignettes include the chapters of Hemingway’s In our time and Anderson’s “The Book of the Grotesque.” As a stand-alone, these pieces are typically no more than 1,200 words long. In writing that short, every word must be chosen thoughtfully.

Vignettes are for world-building, delving into characters’ interiority, looking at your core question from different angles, and providing a thematic and stylistic break between plot-heavy scenes. They are difficult to write well without lapsing into clichés or purple prose. They are your opportunity to let one moment, one metaphor, or one feeling shine.

For this competition, you will write a fiction vignette describing some moment related to diplomacy. That could be a description of an alien world during first contact, a moment at a diplomatic reception, or any other opportunity you can find to showcase your talents as a honed, descriptive writer.

 

Criteria

• Entries should be submitted directly into the competition field; it is acceptable if they are also posted into a story post, but the only thing that should go into the submission field here is the text of your submission.
• Entries must be no longer than 1,200 words.
• Entries will be judged on originality (25%), style and diction (25%), relation to Star Trek canon and diplomacy (25%), and adherence to the genre of vignette as described above (25%).