100-Word Stories Monthly Writing Contest Submission Guidelines

Listen to these submission guidelines via text-to-speech for the visually impaired.

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Each month, The Coil hosts a flash contest for a 100-Word Story. Winner receives $25.

Every month, The Coil hosts a contest to find the best 100-Word Story. There is no theme or set style guidelines, and the pieces can range from prose poems to hybrid to microfiction and all the experimental spaces in between. The only catch? The story has to be exactly 100 words. Flex your editing muscle and write your way out of writers’ block with this monthly exercise. The best response(s) will be published on The Coil after each monthly contest ends.

You can read past 100-Word Stories here.

Submission Guidelines:

1. Write a story that is exactly 100 words, not including the title as part of the word count. We use Microsoft Word’s word-count tools to determine the count, so if you have hyphens and punctuation and can’t decide how it’s counted, go with whatever the automatic word count says within your document tools.
2. The piece can be any style or genre, but it should have some elements of a story: beginning, middle, end, conflict, understood desires, etc. Challenge yourself to do more than navel-gaze. (Need help with an idea? Check out our weekly writing prompts.)
3. There is a $3.50 fee that we have to charge to use the Submittable platform, but you may submit as many pieces as you’d like in one file under one submission. The fee helps us with needed administration and journal costs, and we pay our readers for their time and effort, but it’s not meant to be too inhibitive. If you are unable to pay, please email us for an alternative submission method.
4. If we like your piece, it will be printed on The Coil. The winning piece will receive $25, paid out via PayPal after publication.
5. We reserve the right not to pick any winner and not to print any pieces if there aren’t any that grab us; likewise, we may also choose more than one.
6. Being familiar with what we publish increases your chances of winning. You can read past 100-Word Stories here, you can read all of our published fiction, of any length, here.
7. If you love this monthly prompt and our journal, please share on social media! Word-of-mouth helps us tremendously. Use the hashtags #100WordStory and #CoilMag.
8. The contest starts fresh every month and runs from the 1st of each month to the last day of each month. Next Deadline: June 30, 2025.
9. Submit your piece(s) on Submittable here.
10. We acknowledge that we are headquartered on what should be Arapaho land with a warehouse on a street that is instead named for a dead white male president who owned enslaved people and severed Native American Nations apart irrevocably, and an office on a street named after the very People whose land was stolen. To honor the reparations that this entire country needs to make, Black writers and Native American Indigenous (United States and Canada) writers may submit for free to this contest. Please note that if the portal is not open, then we have reached our free-submission monthly cap until the beginning of the next month.

For the visually impaired or those using TTS reading aids: this is the end of the guidelines.

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