Open Call for Guest Participants in Blog-Based Reality Show

Constantine Markides — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:57:38 +0000

*Round 1 Challenge: Write the opening sentence of your novella.

I recently announced that Fourth Night will soon host a blog-based literary reality show-- Fourth Fiction--where twelve writers will vie to complete a short novel while readers vote them off, one by one. After the announcement, a number of other writers expressed interest in participating, which has led me to reconsider the format.

The contestants have already been selected. But I will add a page of links that will direct readers to each guest participant’s web page* where his or her Fourth Fiction responses are posted. For those without websites, I could set up a page where they can post their entries directly, you can always set up a free blogging page at WordPress, Blogger, or any other of the free blogging services.

Obviously these guest participants wouldn’t be competing (although I’m considering forms of integration). But there are advantages to non-competition. Unlike all but one of the contestants, they’ll be able to complete all twelve of the literary tasks since they’re not getting voted off.

Why would anyone want to be a guest participant? Here are a few possible reasons:

To draw visitors to your website (if you have a website) and to instantly have readers (if you don’t).
To complete a novel—or, rather, novella—in four months
To be part of a unique literary project
To have fun (insofar as the excruciating demands of fiction writing permit it)

Unlike most reality shows, this one is designed to judge writing rather than image or reputation, so the identities of the contestants will remain anonymous during the competition. A guest participant, on the other hand, can choose to be anonymous or not.

Participation is open to anyone, regardless of writing experience. In fact, some of the contestants have never written any fiction. If you feel intimidated or shy (or plain diabolical), just write under a pseudonym.

Although the twelve contestants will be introduced via Twitter on July 4^th, the competition rounds begin on August 4^th and end on December 4^th. The writing challenges—issued on every 4^th, 14^th, and 24^th—won’t require a major time commitment: they’re 21^st century-friendly. Your completed work—which will be the length of a short novella—will have nothing to do with those 19^th century novels that Henry James disparaged as “large loose baggy monsters.” Even if it is a monster, it will be a little one.

And of course you can always drop out anytime you like. There’s no fee to participate so the only thing you have to lose is your pride, which isn’t all that bad considering it’s the most serious of the seven deadly sins.

If you are interested in participating or have suggestions, please comment below or email me.

See the Outside Participants page here.

ADD A BADGE linking to Fourth Fiction

*Guest writers who are participating through their own websites should link back to the Fourth Fiction homepage with one of the following buttons. Just copy and paste the HTML code below your image of choice at the beginning of your posts or as a widget on the sidebar (if you want to make the image larger or smaller, just change the width and height dimensions):

BADGE 1 (64 by 64 pixels)

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BADGE 2 (128 by 128 pixels)

First Blog-Based Reality Show to Launch

Constantine Markides — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 02:27:46 +0000

Do you wish you spent more time reading books and less online? Do reality shows repulse you and yet, like a dung heap to flies, invariably draw you in? And if you do extricate yourself for a few moments from all devices luminous, does your shoulder devil soon whisper you back to a screen? If so, perhaps it’s time to stop resisting and instead put your reprehensible addictions to the service of your unrealized aspirations.

How? For the last few months I’ve claimed, with scant details, that something novel would soon be underway at Fourth Night. The time has come to announce it: on July 4, the four-year anniversary of Fourth Night, this website will host a blog-based, literary reality show—the first of its kind, as far as I know.

The premise is simple. As in elimination-style reality television, there is a host (me) contestants (twelve writers) and judges (you, the readers). Each of these twelve writers will embark upon a novel that will be published in installments on Fourth Night for as long as that particular contestant remains in the competition. Three times a month—every 4th, 14th, and 24th—I’ll announce the literary guidelines for the next installment, which the writers will all have to complete before the readers vote to eliminate one of them. Every time I announce the next criteria I will also name the newly eliminated contestant. On December 4th, the competition ends, with one writer having survived all twelve rounds and completed a novel.

This blog-based reality show—which will go by the name Fourth Fiction—will launch, as I mentioned, on July 4th. However, the actual competition, with its rounds of literary challenges and elimination voting, will not begin until August 4th. Over July, the twelve contestants will only post on Twitter.

(Anyone who is unfamiliar with Twitter—a free micro-blogging and social networking service that allows users to send and receive text-only updates known as ‘tweets’ of up to 140 characters—can get a sense of it by looking at my Twitter profile page. You don’t need to sign up to access Twitter profiles; you only need to open an account if you want to tweet.)

The twelve contestants will each have an individual Twitter page and will tweet at will for one month. This pre-competition, warm-up month gives readers an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the writers. As a text-only medium amenable to anonymity, Twitter is ideal because, unlike other reality shows, the identity of the contestants (who’ve all pledged secrecy) will remain hidden until the end of the competition. The anonymity is so that they’re judged not on how they look but on what they write.

I’m currently in contact with several independent publishers whom I approached at Book Expo America last weekend. It is my hope that one of these publishers will fund a limited publication run of the winning writer’s novel. Regardless, the contestants have all agreed to participate in the competition with or without a publication contract for the winner. In our viral era, making a media splash is more valuable than publication (after all, with the rise of print on demand, who can’t publish nowadays?).

I won’t pretend at munificence. I struggle enough with supporting my own writing, let alone pitching it, so I’m obviously not hosting this literary competition out of charitable impulses to bring recognition to other writers. I am primarily doing it to drive traffic to my website and elevate my own public profile (and as a side bonus, admittedly, to free me up from Fourth Night essay writing so that I might complete my current novel-in-progress). A former roving luddite, I’ve come to learn the hard way over the past decade that if you are not a reputed writer like Pynchon or Salinger and you shun your inner Paris Hilton, you destine yourself to literary obscurity.

(I recently spoke with Richard Russo at Book Expo America and asked him if he’s ever considered integrating fiction with the Internet and social media platforms. He shook his head and said he’s something of a dinosaur when it comes to these things. “I am too,” I replied. “It’s just that you can afford to be one and I can’t.”)

Finally, I’m also hosting this blog-based reality show because it should be a hell of a time: for the readers, for the writers, and especially for me, since I get to dictate the rules of engagement. I usually play dictator only in my own fiction, so this is a rare opportunity to be totalitarian in real life, assuming of course we aren’t such dogmatic cynics that we refuse to acknowledge there is any reality in reality shows.

The individuals whom I approached online and in-person to compete are a colorful and varying bunch. They were selected not so much for the eloquence or polish of their prose—some of them in fact have never written fiction—as for the idiosyncrasy of their voices, which should be sure to amuse, inspire, disturb and outrage.

By subscribing to the free email updates or the RSS feed (if you use an RSS reader) you can keep informed with the goings on. The more readers who comment and vote, the more successful this literary reality competition will be. So please spread the word to your friends (both in the flesh-and-blood world and the social media world of Facebook & co.), to your followers (whether you are a cult leader or a tweeter) and to your coworkers (after all, how many reality shows do you know that you can follow at work?).

Fourth Fiction should be quite the spectacle. As the host, I don’t intend to be a compassionate softy. The contestants know what they’re getting into. Expect manipulation, voyeurism, backstabbing, exhibitionism, sexual gratuitousness, pettiness and exploitation; in short, the stuff that makes reality shows a beloved staple of 21st century culture.

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