Our Guide to Bennington’s Young Writers Awards by Genre

You have an idea for a story, an image that might become a poem, or an experience you want to write about. How do you turn it into something another person will want to read?

Following up on our previous post, this is a deep dive into writing a short story, poem, or essay that’s ready for submission to Bennington—and beyond. For our a Bennington-specific guide, including how to prepare, check out our previous post, How to Stand Out in the Bennington Young Writers Awards.

Fiction: Give Your Characters Something to Lose

You can put two characters in a room, have them argue for five pages, and still leave a reader wondering why any of it matters. Volume won’t do the work of tension. We need to understand what these people want from each other and why getting it is difficult.

Heather Sellers offers a useful starting point in The Practice of Creative Writing: a person, a desire, stakes, and obstacles. Someone wants something; it matters to them; something gets in the way. That sounds simple until you try to identify all four in your own draft. “She wants to be happy” probably won’t help you write the next scene, but “she wants her brother to leave their mother’s chair where it is” gives her something to do.

Return to the siblings clearing out a bedroom. One wants to finish before the moving truck arrives. The other keeps finding reasons to reopen the boxes. 

Now there’s pressure. 

Packing the room might mean freedom to one sibling and abandonment to the other. Neither has to announce that. Let one of them fold the packing tape over its own end so the other has to spend an exasperating minute finding it. A small action can carry a whole argument.

The first question to ask about this scene is what changes while we’re reading it. Perhaps the delaying sibling gets caught hiding something. Perhaps the efficient one suddenly refuses to throw away an object they’d dismissed as junk. A scene gets interesting when someone’s behavior interferes with the story we thought we understood. If both siblings finish the scene in exactly the positions they occupied at the beginning, look for the moment when one could make a choice that makes the next exchange harder.

Pay attention to whose eyes we’re looking through, too. The sibling desperate to leave might notice the clock, the blocked doorway, the absurd number of boxes. The one desperate to stay might notice a pale rectangle where a poster used to hang. Those selections create a voice before you’ve added a single clever turn of phrase.

Bennington’s first-place fiction winner for 2025–26, Jinx Morrison’s “How to Raise a Baby (How to Ease the Grief),” demonstrates a different way to sustain pressure. The story takes the form of instructions for caring for a child while grieving a partner. Its commands suggest a person trying to manage an experience that keeps exceeding their control. The guitar and bathroom mirror recur, but the character’s relationship to them changes. Repetition lets us measure movement. The unusual structure has a job to do.

You have limited space, so choose the stretch of the story where something is already under pressure. An excerpt still needs to give a new reader enough footing to care about what happens within it. Pages of background before the first consequential exchange can use up the room you need for the exchange itself.

Try this in revision: Beside each scene, write what your character wants at its beginning and what has become possible, impossible, or harder by its end. If you keep writing the same answer, another description of their feelings probably won’t fix it. Give them a decision.

Poetry: Make the Language Change How We See

The word “poetic” can get a young writer into trouble. Suddenly every sky is bruised, every silence is deafening, and every feeling requires a celestial metaphor. You can hear the effort. What you can’t always find is the thing the writer actually noticed.

In Why Poetry, Matthew Zapruder returns to the idea of defamiliarization: language can make something so familiar we’ve stopped seeing it feel strange and present again. This gives you a much more useful ambition than sounding profound. Look closely enough at something that you have to find fresh language for it. A kitchen chair, a loose tooth, or the sound a washing machine makes after everyone else has gone to bed can sustain that attention.

Zapruder’s discussion of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” is especially useful here. Williams splits familiar units of language across lines, including “wheel / barrow” and “rain / water.” The breaks make us take time over a scene we could otherwise glance past. The language is plain. The arrangement changes the experience of reading it.

That is why line breaks deserve more thought than making the right margin look pleasing. A break can hold back a word, expose a second meaning, or let a phrase hang for a moment before the next line changes it. Where you end a line affects what the reader expects. Where you begin the next affects whether that expectation survives.

Read “Our House Forgot Our Names,” part of Hanyi Zhou’s first-place Bennington poetry entry for 2025–26. The poem keeps returning to the house through altered repetitions. “You looked away, so I didn’t cry” becomes “I look away, so you don’t cry.” The words barely change, but the direction of care does. One person’s restraint becomes the other’s. That is a reason to repeat a line: the return lets us feel something the first appearance couldn’t.

Sound deserves the same attention. Read your poem aloud at an ordinary speaking volume, without putting on a dramatic poetry voice. Where does your mouth stumble? Where does a run of similar sounds become pleasurable, insistent, or irritating? If a rhyme forces you to use a word you don’t quite mean, keep working. If you’re writing free verse, listen for the patterns you’ve created through rhythm, repetition, and the lengths of your sentences.

A poem can move by association, too. Zapruder’s reading of John Ashbery shows how a question can hold together a poem that wanders without delivering a tidy answer. You can let an image lead somewhere unexpected. During revision, look for what makes the leap feel possible: a shared sound, an image that returns in another form, a worry the speaker keeps circling. The reader needs something to follow, even if they couldn’t reduce the poem to a single explanation.

Try this in revision: make a copy of your poem and remove the line breaks. Then rebuild it in two different ways and read all three versions aloud. Notice which words acquire weight, where the pace changes, and which version creates the most interesting pressure. If you’ve written a prose poem, experiment with sentence lengths and paragraph breaks instead. You’re testing what your choices actually do to a reader.

Essays: Follow the Question You Haven’t Settled

A personal essay gets interesting when the writer’s first explanation starts to fall apart. You thought you were angry because your friend had changed. Then you remember the moment you wanted her to fail. That detail may be uncomfortable to write. It may also be where the essay finally begins.

For Bennington’s nonfiction category, give yourself room to investigate an experience before deciding what it proves about you. A familiar lesson can close down a draft surprisingly fast. If every paragraph is working toward “I learned to appreciate my family,” you may edit out the resentment, embarrassment, humor, and affection that made the experience worth writing about.

Suppose you’re writing about translating for a parent. A draft might begin with pride in being useful, then encounter the pleasure of controlling what gets said, or the frustration of being needed when you want to leave. Follow whichever tension is actually true. You don’t have to manufacture an ugly confession to make an essay literary. You do need to give the experience enough attention to discover what your first summary left out.

Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” is worth studying for the way its separate concerns gather force. A dying collie, an unraveling marriage, squirrels in an upstairs room, and work among space physicists occupy the same life. The essay eventually reaches a campus shooting. Its domestic scenes establish the attachments that make the violence devastating. Watch how returning to one strand after another changes what we feel about it.

Beard’s essay is much longer than a Bennington entry, so study the relationships among its parts rather than trying to fit that many strands into your own submission. In a shorter essay, two recurring scenes or images may be enough. Put them side by side and ask yourself what, through their proximity, we can start to notice. If the connection needs a paragraph of explanation every time, the arrangement may need more work.

Reflection matters here. Give the reader access to the mind making sense of the experience: what you believed then, what you notice now, and where those versions of you disagree. Sometimes one sentence of present-day reflection can unsettle an entire childhood scene. Sometimes the scene is already doing that work, and the explanation only repeats it. Read for the difference.

Charles Baxter’s “Against Epiphanies,” in Burning Down the House, is a useful companion when you reach the ending. Baxter challenges the expectation that a story must reward its reader with a final burst of insight. Although his subject is fiction, the warning applies beautifully to personal essays. The experience doesn’t have to become a lesson just because you’re running out of pages.

Your ending can register a smaller, more exact change. Perhaps you can finally describe a person without excusing them. Perhaps an object from the opening now carries a feeling you couldn’t name there. You might reach a sharper question. The reader should feel that the essay has traveled somewhere, even if the situation remains unresolved. Try covering your final paragraph: if the piece becomes more moving without its explanation, you may already have written the ending.

One last exercise: privately write down what you most want the reader to understand about you—and what you’d prefer the reader never notice. The distance between those answers may reveal the part of the draft you’re writing around. You decide what belongs on the page. But make that decision after you’ve looked closely enough to know what you’re leaving out.

Final Thoughts

You don’t need to know everything your piece will become before you begin. Start with something that holds your attention long enough to explore: a character’s unreasonable desire, a sound you keep noticing, a memory you understand differently now. Give yourself room to follow it somewhere you hadn’t planned.

As the work develops, return to the questions that matter for your genre. What puts your character under pressure? What does the arrangement of your words make the reader hear or notice? Where does your experience resist the explanation you first gave it? Those questions can help you write the next sentence just as much as revise the last one.

A competition gives you a deadline and a reason to finish, but let your curiosity give you a reason to keep going after you’ve submitted.

If you’d like support exploring your interests as a writer and finding opportunities to pursue them, reach out to Principia to learn more about our advising and writing contest support services.