How to enter our summer writing competition #CBCSummerStory26
BY Maya Fernandes
30th Jul 2026
Write a flash fiction story inspired by one of our prompts to be in with a chance of winning a writing course place. Our #CBCSummerStory26 writing competition is now open for entries. We're hosting this competition over on Instagram (@curtisbrowncreative) from Thurs 30 July to Mon 7 September.
Use one of the three writing prompts set by our brilliant tutors Abi Daré, Abbie Greaves and Ali Shaw as the first line of an original flash fiction story or opening scene. Post your response to your Instagram page to be in with a chance of winning one of three places on one of our short online courses.
Keep reading for prize details and information on how to enter.
Prizes:
Three winners will be awarded a free place on the online writing course of their choice (courses run for four, five or six weeks and are valued between £135 and £250). Winners can join one course only from the courses listed on this webpage.
Prize may not be exchanged directly for cash. Prize must be redeemed by 31 July 2027.
Winners must email help@curtisbrowncreative.co.uk to claim their prizes.
How to enter:
To enter the #CBCSummerStory26 competition on Instagram we want you to write an original flash fiction story or opening scene that continues from one of three prompts set by our tutors Abi Daré, Abbie Greaves and Ali Shaw. Feel free to adapt or swap the pronouns if that better suits your story:
1. The first time I saw the sea, I became someone else.
2. The smell of sunscreen turned my stomach.
3. What no one else knew about that summer . . .
Post your chosen prompt’s image graphic to your Instagram grid either on its own or as part of a carousel post. You can download the graphics by clicking the buttons below.
Then use the prompt as the first line to write your mini story or opening scene in the caption of your Instagram post (up to a maximum of 300 words).
Remember to tag @curtisbrowncreative in the post and use #CBCSummerStory26 in your caption to enter. Please note that we will only be able to read entries posted to public Instagram accounts.
Other rules:
- Please follow the instructions found in the ‘How to enter’ section above.
- Follow us on Instagram (@curtisbrowncreative).
- Like this competition post.
- Winners can redeem their free place for use on any of the short online courses listed on this page. Prizes are not eligible for use on courses that are not found on that web page. Prize must be redeemed by 31 July 2027. Prize may not be exchanged directly for cash.
- You must be 18+ to enter. One entry per person. Public accounts only please. This competition is not affiliated with Instagram.
- Competition starts Thurs 30 July at 11am. Competition closes for entries Mon 7 September at 11am (UK time) and the winner will be announced in our stories and on our blog at 11am Thurs 10 September (UK time).
We will update this blog by posting the three winning stories on Thurs 10 September.
Helpful writing tips from our prompt makers:
Here are some top tips for writing an opening scene or flash fiction story from the very writers that gave us these brilliant prompts . . .
Abi Daré
Abi Daré is an award-winning novelist, international keynote speaker, writing coach and educator. Her debut novel The Girl with the Louding Voice was shortlisted for several awards including the Desmond Elliott Prize and The British Book Awards (Debut). The novel was a New York Times bestseller, A Today Show Book Club pick, a BBC Radio 4 Book Club Pick and has been translated into well over a dozen languages. Her latest novel And So I Roar was published in August 2024 and won the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize. Abi is the tutor of our upcoming Novel-Writing Intensive.
- Write. I have never seen an unfinished novel on the shelf of a bookshop.
- Be humble and fearless enough to cut what isn't working.
Abbie Greaves
Abbie Greaves is the author of The Silent Treatment (2020) and The Ends of the Earth (2021/2022). She lives and writes in Cambridge, UK. Her novels have been translated into over a dozen languages, selected for the Radio 2 Book Club, shortlisted for the RNA Debut Novel of the Year Award and featured in the Independent, The Sun, Woman & Home, PopSugar, Cosmopolitan, and more. Abbie worked in publishing for three years, including at Curtis Brown as a literary agent’s assistant, before leaving to write full time. She is the tutor of our Edit & Pitch Your Novel – Advanced course.
- Get in late, get out early.
This is a classic piece of writing advice and one of my all-time favourites. Try arriving into your scene at the latest possible moment before the action/conflict happens and leaving as soon as that drama has played out. It keeps your writing tight and, crucially, avoids the 'throat-clearing' that so often afflicts us as writers, especially when we feel nervous approaching a scene and end up over-relying on description. - Find a fun way in.
It can be hard to continue with your writing routine when paddling pools and pina coladas are calling! So, try bringing a little of the summer spirit to your desk. Maybe you could start a writing session off by writing a lonely hearts ad for your main character, or a passive aggressive post-it note argument between your romantic leads. It doesn't need to make it into your manuscript, but you may be surprised by what it inspires.
Ali Shaw
Ali Shaw is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and creative writing teacher. His novels are The Trees, The Man who Rained, and The Girl with Glass Feet, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His books have been translated into fifteen different languages, and his short fiction has appeared in multiple newspapers, magazines, and on BBC Radio 4. Ali is the tutor of our London Writing Your Novel – Six Months course.
- Embody Your Writing.
Don’t think of your writing as something entirely cerebral and desk-bound, some kind of private communion between your mind and your notepad or screen. There is so much more to good writing than that. Carry your writing around in your body. Try to feel in your own skin and bones what your characters are feeling in theirs. Move around the room like they might move, work out their rhythms, if they are hot-headed feel the hotness of your own head, if they are cold-hearted look for the iciest part inside yourself (harder, perhaps, in the height of the summer).
Speaking of bodies, try not to conceive of your writing time as solely those occasions when you sit down with your manuscript. Writing work can be done whenever and wherever your imagination has the space to fire. Many writers report having their best ideas away from the desk, out for a walk or under the shower. Because these activities use different mental processes – different bodily processes – they can have markedly different results. Claim those for your writing and use them. Treat your daydreaming – on the bus, in the checkout queue, doing the washing up – as a special kind of drafting. What shows up on the page is just the fruiting body of something that threads out far wider, into the rest of your life and your physical experience. - Where Are Your Characters’ Bodies?
When trying to feel what your characters are feeling, don’t forget about the impact of place. If you think about a character’s body in isolation, you may be able to make some observations about internal sensations, what their heart is doing, what their stomach feels like, and you may be able to figure out some useful material about body language and gesture, but in English there is actually quite a limited vocabulary for describing these things. Characters can only clench their fists, grind their teeth or hear their pulse hammering in their ears so many times before such descriptions become cliché.
The good news is that characters never exist in isolation. Place is all around them, just as it is all around you. Place is your characters’ reality, and reality, as I’m sure we can all agree, has a tendency to affect us. Where are your characters’ bodies? What is it like in the places where they find themselves? What is the temperature, what is the weather doing, what time of year is it, what time of day? Look around whatever place you are currently in and ask yourself what is your character’s equivalent? And crucially: how do any of these things impact their state of mind, how do they speak to the way this person feels about whatever scene you’ve put them in? Is there something in their setting that amplifies their internal experience? Can you make use of that on the page?
If you need help posting your competition entry to Instagram, email help@curtisbrowncreative.co.uk
We can’t wait to read your stories!
Congratulations to our competition winners @drkirstenriley, @storiesbylulu and @shorterpoems!
Read the winning entries below:
- @drkirstenriley
The smell of sunscreen turned my stomach. That was the reason I gave for my bad behaviour. ‘I won’t wear it,’ I shouted. ‘You can’t make me.’
Still, they persisted.
Today, two women stand at the back of a white room, arms folded, faces blank. The doctor nods in my direction.
They hold me down while he slaps the milky substance all over my goose-bumped skin. I close my eyes and dream of Rapunzel.
Every day the nurses tell me I’m making things worse for myself. ‘Why can’t you be like Brigette or Amy? Why can’t you just be a good girl?’
In the early days I’d call my father and ask him to rescue me. He’d sigh over the phone and say ‘I love you’, before hanging up.
First the ocean currents changed. Then the plants died. Next was the animals. And now it was us. I listed the catastrophes one by one on my fingers in the day room that never saw daylight. No one believed me. Someone told me to shut up.
They called it sunscreen. They even made it smell like sunscreen. But I knew what it really was.
Every morning after breakfast they’d slather it on against our will then hand us white paper dresses to wear until it dried.
It never dried.
Today I say to Ali: ‘It’s time.’
She shakes her head. ‘The doctor said only when the sun gets better can we go outside again.’
‘He’s lying.’ I say, watching her face melt.
‘Well, that’s what he said,’ she shrugs. ‘It’s not time yet.’
‘It is for me. I’m leaving tonight. I have a plan.’
‘You can’t,’ she says, lowering her voice to a whisper. ‘You’ll…burn out there.’
‘There’s only one way to find out.’
- @storiesbylulu
The first time Samira saw the sea, she thought it was only here in Tobruk that the water belonged. Her tiny fingers gripped her brother’s hand, while her other hand remained outstretched beckoning the velvet waves to come closer.
At the age of twelve, she no longer needs to grip her brother’s hand. But as she stands by the shore, she extends her arm, squinting to make the boats dotted along the horizon tiny enough that she can pinch them between her thumb and pointer finger.
Hamoudi is on a boat. At first, she thought it would be one of those big boats, with mouths as wide as a whale; a beast coasting along the pockmarked waters of the Mediterranean Sea, but Hamoudi tells her he will be on a smaller boat.
“Fast enough to take me from this end of Tobruk to anywhere I want to go.” Hamoudi would tell her as they foraged for shells and rocks to cast out into the water, the salt of the sea clinging to the hem of their pants.
“Can I come with you?” she would ask, handing him the prettiest shell she could find, a pearlescent piece of armor.
He’d always turn her down; explain to her that she deserved to cross the ocean in a proper boat like a cruise ship or- he’d point up towards the laundry blue sky – and tell her she would come visit him on a plane.
Samira picks up a chalky white shell rubbing her thumb across the boney ridges. The sea exhales tendrils of water that tickle her bare toes. She wonders if Hamoudi has reached the shore yet. Winding her arm back she tosses the shell into the hungry belly of the sea. The sea swallows everything.
- @shorterpoems
What no one else knew about that summer was the reason for her sudden disappearance. One day, she had been a functioning member of society: getting into the office for a quarter to nine, eating lunch out of blue-trim Tupperware, laugh-reacting to messages on three separate group chats.
The next, she was simply gone.
When, after two weeks, she returned with as little fanfare as she had vanished, her friends and associates were naturally curious. “Where have 𝑦𝑜𝑢 been?” they asked, over coffee and cocktails and cold lunches. Her answers were always vague and elusive. She hinted sometimes at an unexpected illness, perhaps a complete psychological breakdown. People became too embarrassed to probe further. HR chalked it up to an Exceptional Leave of Absence (non-disciplinary) and asked that she be more communicative in future. Soon enough, the matter was forgotten entirely.
Forgotten, that is, by everyone except her. She would never forget. As much as she tried to rationalise those two weeks in summer, to convince herself it was all a trick of the mind, a prolonged hallucinogenic phenomenon, she couldn’t shake loose the material reality.
It had started with a voice. Not her voice, but one that had wormed its way into the false haven of her thoughts. It whispered her name, phonetically, again and again, like a child struggling to read. She knew without being told where the voice wanted her to go, and she obeyed it without question.
Out of her apartment, into the night, back alleys and ill-lit streets, the nearways she might never else have walked. Three industrial bins behind a chain-link fence, their colours meaningless in the dark. Then the dark obliterated by a beam so blue all she could think was: 𝑐𝑜𝑏𝑎𝑙𝑡. Upwards now, upwards to her home for the next two weeks.
Congratulations! To redeem your prizes, please email help@curtisbrowncreative.co.uk