Quotes of the Day

When the San Francisco-based entrepreneurs Will Petty and Skye Thompson posted a notice on Craig's List last May announcing their website FieldReport.com, which offers pots of prize money for the best nonfiction stories submitted, they were met with incredulity and even foul language by skeptics who thought they smelled a rat. "They were downright rude to us," Thompson recalled. "We were really shocked." (A typical post: "Yeah right. S--- me.")

But on Oct. 1, when FieldReport's first official monthly contest ended, the skeptics were silenced. A total of $25,000 in checks went out to the authors of the winning stories in each of FieldReport's contest categories (there are 21, from "Animal Beings" to "Life + Me" to "Love + Hate" to "Style+Beauty+Body"). The most highly ranked story on the site for the month won an extra $4,000 prize. In July, $40,000 had gone out to the victors of a trial-run "beta" contest, including a grand prize of $20,000 to the author of the most popular story overall.

If you send a story in now, you have a fair shot at winning one of the $1,000 prizes to awarded next on Nov. 1, and at the end of the year competing for the $250,000 grand prize for best story of 2008. That's less than the Nobel Prize winner for Literature — for which this year's laureate, French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Cl[a {e}]zio, will pick up a little under $1,500,000 — but considerably more than the Pulitzer purse of $10,000. Says Thompson, "We are confident the FieldReport prize for experiential writing is the biggest single-story prize out there." What's more, he says, "It's accessible to everybody. You don't have to submit it to a judge in Stockholm."

There's no fee to enter a story (1500 stories have been submitted so far), but in return each entrant must review at least five other stories to have his or her own considered. "We're getting between 15 and 20 reviews on our site per story, from users who love to review," Petty said. The prize-winning stories receive far more reviews than that, and the number of positive reviews decides each story's ranking. In January, the best-reviewed story of 2008 will claim the $250,000 jackpot.

International contributors are welcome, says Petty — "We have had three winners from England out of the 40, and we'd love to see people from other countries as well" — although the founders are leery of entrants from one foreign country: Nigeria. "The Nigerians were the one group of people who believed us from the first," Thompson said. "One guy immediately jumped on the site and tried to game it. It was either the guy himself posting multiple reviews under different names, or a bunch of his friends." The story, Thompson says, "was execrable, unfortunately."

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,"

• Liesl Schillinger
• Overlooked again by the Nobel committee? Fear not: FieldReport.com has a literary contest for you