Introduction

The questions I get asked most often, as current Coordinating Judge for the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, are: “What exactly are you looking for? What kind of story has the best chance to win?”

The answer is that we’re looking for a particular kind of person, not a particular sort of story. L.Ron Hubbard designed the Contest, back when he founded it in 1983, to seek out and showcase new science fiction and fantasy authors who were just on the edge of breaking out into a professional writing career. These are the people we are trying to find.

Typically, they are individuals who have already done their best to educate themselves on proper manuscript format, appropriate markets for their work and the elements of effective fiction. They are reading widely to learn from the words of others, as well as putting in the time necessary to learn their craft and produce a body of work, but, without credits, when they submit a story or novel to a publisher, they are competing with seasoned pros like Larry Niven, Tim Powers, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, Robert Sawyer, Jerry Pournelle, Robert Silverberg, Eric Flint and Frederik Pohl (all Writers of the Future judges, by the way). To advance to the next level, our new writers need a chance to be read. The Contest was created to make that happen.

Achieving a career in writing is a vastly different process than becoming a doctor, lawyer, teacher, dentist or nurse. To learn those professions, you take classes, then prove yourself through rigorous testing, being observed by instructors and interning. If you pass with satisfactory marks, you are allowed to work in your chosen career.

Writing on the other hand is largely an act of faith. There are no guarantees, no matter how long or how hard you work, that you will ever publish a single word. And, if you do make that first sale, you have no guarantee that you will ever make a second, or a third. There is a saying that being a success as a writer is fifty percent talent and fifty percent simply not giving up. Who knows how many promising new voices did give up before they achieved success, thereby depriving us all of the wonderful stories only they could have told?

When he started the Contest, L. Ron Hubbard said, “A culture is as rich and capable of surviving as it has imaginative artists. . . . It was with this in mind that I initiated a means for new and budding writers to have a chance for their creative efforts to be seen and acknowledged.” He knew that, if we do not provide a forum for new writers’ work, many of them will not come into their full talent and then we will all lose.

To help develop this talent, along with the Contest’s substantial quarterly monetary prize for winning, comes something even more valuable: a trip to the annual WotF workshop, taught primarily by Tim Powers and me, using a curriculum based on L.RonHubbard essays, but also instructed by many of our well-known and highly respected judges.

I attended this workshop myself back in 1989 when it was taught by founding WotF judge Algis Budrys and Tim Powers. The first story I sold after winning in WotF was the first story I wrote after I got home from the workshop so obviously the material worked for me. More than twenty years later, I find that I still use what Algis, Tim and L. Ron Hubbard taught me during that week every day when I sit down to write.

Each year, when we welcome the winners to the workshop, I tell them that their monetary prize is nice, of course, but they’ll soon spend it. The lasting prizes are publication in the anthology, which will be widely read for years to come, and what they will learn during their week of instruction.

The workshop provides information on how to be a working writer: where ideas and inspiration for your fiction can be found when you think you’ve run dry, how to access your creativity and mine the stories that only you can tell, how to avoid many of the business pitfalls waiting for new writers, and how to take the skills you’ve already learned on your own and convert them into a professional career.

In 1988, the L. Ron Hubbard Illustrators of the Future Contest was created as a companion to Writers of the Future. Again, the purpose is to find talented artists just on the edge of breaking out, recognize and commend their abilities, publish their creative efforts and instruct them on how to move up to the next level in their career.

Quarterly winners are given the opportunity to illustrate one of the anthology’s stories, then transported to the annual illustrators’ workshop taught by seasoned professionals Ron Lindahn and Val Lakey Lindahn. They dispense invaluable advice about how to develop and manage a career as an artist and keep inspiration coming. Unfortunately, as rare as it is, it is not enough to just have talent. Emerging artists must learn how to develop a portfolio and professional contacts, market their work and make it pay.

So, what are we looking for? The writer and artist toiling in obscurity, working and working, honing his or her craft, but unable to break out and achieve professional success. We’re looking for the story that only you can write, the picture that only you can draw. We’re looking for, as L. Ron Hubbard intended, the dreams that will shape tomorrow.

Send them in! We’re saving your seat at the workshop.