The story contest website FieldReport.com draws aspiring writers by the thousands
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But what about the bona fide stories on FieldReport? How good are they? "It's such a combination," Petty said. "Unlike The New Yorker, where you have a certain style and standard, here the judging process is much more emotional. In some cases, the judges respond to the reality of the story; in other cases, they respond to really great writing." The winner of the July grand prize, as well as of category prizes in both July and October, was a letter carrier from Portland, Ore., named Murr Brewster, whose folksy commentary on low-rise jeans and other fashion trends won in "Style+Beauty+Body." (An excerpt: "rolling cumulonimbus mounds of flesh were thundering out of pants all over town. Everywhere I looked, girls were celebrating physiques of the sort that once ignited the muumuu industry.") The announcement of her October win coincided with her retirement from her post-office job. "This has been a very good week," she said. "I'm now writing a book about my life in the postal service, called 'Miss Delivery.'"
Another October prize went to Kris Haines, 24, for his piece "The Obvious Child," in the "Brush With Fame" category. Haines wrote about his childhood obsession with the singer Paul Simon, and the star's enduring influence in his life. When Haines was a young, handicapped boy Simon took an interest in him and helped him find a career.
"Murr Brewster's story is really great writing. The Paul Simon story is raw, amazing life," Petty said. "Either of those can win on this site." The contest's only inflexible condition is that each story must be true; FieldReport checks up on the winners to verify that their narratives aren't fictional. The site's benefit for both writers and readers, according to the founders, is its sense of community. "The blogosphere hasn't given people an effective outlet for publishing this kind of story," Thompson says, "because unless you're really savvy, you're actually just jettisoning your stories into space. FieldReport brings readers together in one place, and allows them to search by content, instead of scavenging through the wilderness of the web."
And what's in it for Petty and Thompson? "For me, it's about storytelling," Petty says. "I have a very deep psychological motivation: I want this site to be an opportunity for people to think more overtly of their life in terms of story." But FieldReport has a business plan as well: it envisions making money from advertising, from albums of story collections that members create on the site and buy for about $10 each, and from a story archive Petty has designed, which asks writers and readers to pay about $20 to include their prose. "Once you've got a million people on a website and 2T are interested in buying an upgrade so they can keep their data in perpetuity," Petty says, "you're making a lot of money,"