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PWA’s 2025 Cash Writing Challenge

PWA’s 2025 Cash Writing Challenge

***Official Guidelines***

Basic Timeline & Eligibility:  

  1. The cash writing challenge is open to all current PWA members(no registration required, and past challenge winners are welcome to enter again).

  2. The competition officially opens on May 1st, 2025.

  3. The duration is May 1st – June 30th, 2025.

  4. Reflection essays are due July 11th, 2025.

  5. Send your finished essay to pwamonthly@awaionline.comby midnight (Eastern) to be considered for prizes.

  6. Winners will be announced via press release and in our News & Notese-letter.

What can I win?

Cash: This year, PWA will be awarding up to Five (5) $200 prizes, for a total of $1,000 in prize money available. Winners can expect their funds to arrive via paper check for our US members and via PayPal for international members.

Recognition: Winners will have their essays published on the PWA site for the community to enjoy, and may be invited to participate in a “Member Spotlight” interview session as scheduling permits. Further, each winner can expect to see their success announced in our News & Notes e-letter as well as in news items and press releases that may appear on the AWAI main site and elsewhere.

What’s the theme?

Our 2025 theme is “Tiny Experiments.”

In May and June, PWA members are invited to do at least one intentional “Tiny Experiment” in their writing business.

We will lean on the framework outlined by Anne-Laure Le Cunff in her book, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World (available from Amazon or via your local library) to create these tiny experiments.

This means setting up a statement that says: I will [action] for [duration].

Your duration should be no more than 10 – 14 days. This keeps the experiment tiny.

For the action, Le Cunff recommends the P.A.C.T. framework to help you pick a simple and repeatable activity that will bring you closer to achieving your ambitions, regardless of the outcome of the activity. P.A.C.T. means the activity should be:

  • Purposeful: Although the outcome doesn’t matter, your action should still feel exciting and interesting, offering you some meaning through the learning journey itself.
  • Actionable: A good experiment is based on actions you can reliably perform with your current resources, so you can take action today rather than overplan for tomorrow.
  • Continuous: To get good data from your experiment, the action should be simple and repeatable. For example, something you do every day, every weekend, or every week.
  • Trackable: You should be able to track your experiment with Yes/No questions. Did you do your action or not?

For example, if your goal is to get more comfortable marketing yourself as a writer, you might make your tiny experiment I will tell one person that I am a writer each day for 10 days.

This experiment is purposeful, because it supports your larger goal. It’s actionable, because you can do it now with the tools you have. It’s continuous, because you do it each day, and trackable because you can say yes or no as to whether or not you told someone you were a writer.

Or, if your big ambition is to improve your ability to use AI tools in your writing, you might make your tiny experiment I will put my daily journaling entries into Grammarly each day for the next two weeks.

Or, you might choose something like I will connect with one prospective client on LinkedIn each business day for 10 days.

What you choose is less important than choosing to take some action! So, you can choose anything you like for your tiny experiment, as long as it has some connection to building your writing skills or expanding your writing business.

How do I get a prize?    

After your experiment, spend some time reflecting on your experience.

Then, create a standalone “tiny” essay of no more than 500 words.

In your essay, share what you chose as your experiment and how it links to your larger ambitions. Talk about the experience of doing the task, and what you’ll do next now that you’ve completed this initial experiment. If there are key insights or bits of advice from your actions that you feel would be useful to other PWA members, include those, too.

Send your tiny essay to me as a document (.doc or .docx) attachment at pwamonthly@awaionline.com by Midnight (Eastern) on Friday, July 11th. Use “Tiny Experiment Competition” as your subject line. Be sure to include your full name and contact information in your email!

All final report essays received on time, in the correct format, will be eligible for challenge awards.

Questions? Reach out to me, PWA Director Jen Adams, directly at pwamonthly@awaionline.com for the fastest answer to your question. You can also post questions in the LinkedIn community throughout the challenge period.