Narrative’s Third-Person Story Contest is open to all writers. For this contest we will be accepting short shorts, short stories, essays, memoirs, all forms of literary nonfiction, and excerpts from longer works of both fiction and nonfiction. Entries must be previously unpublished, no longer than 10,000 words, and must not have been previously chosen as a winner, finalist, or honorable mention in another contest.

We are looking for works written either from a limited third-person or from an omniscient perspective. In either case, we are particularly interested in the distinction and tension that exist between the narrator’s perspective and that of the characters.

The term perspective connotes an awareness of the true relationship that one thing bears to another; as a facet of point of view, perspective indicates a recognition of the cause-and-effect basis of human interactions and of the ways in which character influences fate. An accurate and nuanced use of point of view creates the illumination and drama that readers experience as pleasure, without the reader necessarily observing and thinking at all about the writer’s use of point of view. To use Virginia Woolf’s phrase, a central transparency is created.

We welcome and look forward to reading your pages.

Visit narrativemagazine.com for entry instructions (online entry only).